“At the moment, I admit, it seems absurd to criticize Apple. I even cringe when I read my own stuff. It’s not easy to go against the grain, particularly when you’re doing so vis-a-vis a company you love, respect and spend a ton of money with while it continues to power ahead as the cheapest stock on the market,” Rocco Pendola writes for TheStreet.
“Because it lacks credible competition, Apple faces few external threats that we know of. Of course, that’s the tricky part about external threats; you do not necessarily see them coming. Great CEOs have to act, in part, like Hollywood producers, dreaming up seemingly unthinkable alternative scenarios to the status quo,” Pendola writes. “They must see the writing on the wall. But, again, the human experience teaches us that when you’re the graffiti artist, you’re often blind to it. Coupled with the task of managing after Steve Jobs, Tim Cook appears to be in an impossible situation.”
Pendola writes, “If you can blame Jobs for anything, it’s that maybe he hired ‘B’ players who he thought were ‘A’ players. When the decision to drop a feature as popular as Google Maps happens too soon, it’s a sure sign that the ‘B’ players have too much power. When this occurs, you worry less about Strategic Inflection Points; instead, Tim Cook needs to be on the lookout for a Bozo Explosion. Without Steve Jobs to consult, Apple has to figure out whether to eat crow and crawl back to Google’s door or take more heat as it attempts to mitigate this not-so-small disaster. Meantime, it furiously works to perfect something that never would have made it past Steve Jobs’s desk in unfinished form.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Rocco is the very definition of “one-note.” Learn a new one, Rocco, you monotonously insufferable bore.
Steve Jobs wasn’t perfect – by a long shot. Who do you think invited Eric Schmidt to sit on Apple Board — and that was after being burned so badly by Bill Gates! Jobs made the same mistake twice.
Tim Cook isn’t perfect, either – nobody is – but Cook’s not killing Apple Inc. because they made a clunker ad campaign and failed to prepare Maps properly (data-wise and PR-wise for the obvious threat of a FUD campaign).
[Thanks to MacDailyNews readers too numerous to mention individually for the heads up.]
