You’d think that Apple CEO Tim Cook is the enemy based on some of the comments spewed forth in recent weeks from so-called tech and financial journalists,” Gene Steinberg writes for TechNightOwl. “I suppose part of it is that he’s a numbers and inventory person. He even has an M.B.A., which means he’s just a professional manager, right? Isn’t that what’s wrong with all those other companies?”
“Against this skeptical backdrop, Cook clearly has to work that much harder to prove his mettle. Every single product introduction so far has been viewed with disbelief,” Steinberg writes. “It wasn’t changed enough, it’s too expensive, Apple has lost its flair for innovation. Might as well give up on them now before it’s too late.”
MacDailyNews Take: Virtually every product Steve Jobs ever released was greeted with disbelief. Initially.
Steinberg writes, “The financial community ought to be looking not just at Apple’s quarterly sales figures, which will be released later this month, but at the product intros as they happen throughout 2013. Will it all just be iterative, as some suggest, or is there some more revolutionary gear in Apple’s test labs that will see the light of day in the months to come? Apple has confounded the critics before, and they are fully capable of doing again.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Tim Cook has a thankless task, but he deserves much credit for accepting the challenge and doing as well as he has while following an act the likes of which we’ll never see again.
MDN take= No doubt
That Take gave me chills. The love for Steve is still strong more than a year after his passing. I hope it never fades. There was a magic about him that people really resonate with, at least those that appreciate true vision and leadership.
I hope it fades and does so quickly. The ‘Steve is Apple’ BS has become a convenient way for haters to dismiss today’s Apple.
I hope it stops because he’s dead. It’s simply time to move on. He wouldn’t want all this attention. It would piss him off! He would want attention on the company where it should be. Quit it. Just fucking quit. Enough is enough. Take a pity party somewhere else. This is more about the people posting them about Steve Jobs. They truly have problems.
Tim is certainly doing a Hell of a lot better than the gang, who took over, the first time Steve left Apple.
damn right!
well, if they get the iClone up and running maybe there will be a third coming of Jobs at Apple.
Apple bashing has become a “hobby” on Wall Street and it’s getting pretty annoying. It’s a successful American company they’re deliberately trying to screw up for their own greed.
Wall Street Apple-bashers don’t care about anything but getting attention for themselves… but neither does Gene Steinberg, whose relevance faded long ago.
Tim Cook has a tough act to follow. Luckily, he worked with Steve Jobs long enough that he knows how Steve would handle Apple.
I’ll give an “Amen!” to that take MDN.
Ditto
The maestro on the stand must still have the virtuosos throughout.
Apple has the prestige to hire the best and give them a chance to make a difference.
“…Every single product introduction so far has been viewed with disbelief…”
wow … Where has this guy been since 1984? Where was he when the floppy was removed, or the mouse or USB was added?
Meanwhile, I’m still waiting for Balmer to succeed and I think he’s doing a heckofa job!
Just like ‘Blackie” in New Orleans after Katrina.
The jury is still out for a very long lunch on Cook’s CEO performance to date. Part of AAPL swoon reflects market’s deep skepticism of his ability to successfully reverse the multiple earnings misses, serious margins erosion, chronic product shortages, and lack of meaningful product improvements / innovations.
I see an old, dull, slow, timid, conventional, script bound, and play-it-safe guy. I have little doubt he would have crumbled and issued a groveling apology for the iPhone antenna attenuation problem, asking customers to use Android and other phones as stopgap alternatives.
Thankless task? The guy is obscenely compensated with the most expensive compensation package in the industry. We should all have such thankless jobs.
Your comment would be interesting if any of it were true.
The jury is, in fact, out to lunch
Apple has had no “earnings misses,” “margins erosion,” “chronic product shortages,” or “lack of meaningful product improvements / innovations.”
Why make things up, “winchester?” Your gullibility, delusions, and wishful thinking are not reality. Get help.
Hey winchester, with such pervasive cluelessness, you would have to be a Wall Street analyst…!
Winchester’s take is dead center on target. The fact that we keep seeing these kinds of stories about the hapless, uninspiring Mr. Cook means only one thing – he’s not the man. Wall Street has checked him off along with the future of AAPL. It will not see $700 again until something dramatic happens such as bringing in a CEO who can restart (if that is even possible) the stalled company.
…and we all know how accurate Wall Street is, of course…
You’re right, ppeterson. I vote we bring Steve back!
Hey, wait a minute…isn’t Steve the one who picked Tim? WTF?
Ah ppeterson, bit of a logic fail there… or have you forgotten about the kind of stories we used to see about Steve Jobs too? Since when did “stories”, coming as they do from idiot journos, have anything to do with reality?
There are many “failure snobs” in the world. These are the people that, bereft of any original thought themselves, think that being wildly successful and satisfying customers, changing people’s lives for the better without bankrupting them or without voodoo (Windows, Android) should be snubbed as just not cool. Read anything at Zdnet and you will see mediocrity praised and the extraordinary so misunderstood that they write pages about how questionable technology that works is. I’m buying AAPL.
“Far better is it to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure… than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much, because they live in a gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat.”
Theodore Roosevelt.
Don’t worry about Tim Cook. He and his team will keep Apple number 1. If the legal
System will keep people from stealing Apple’s technology. Apple has products that they will introduce this year that will blow away the competition. It’s the Eco System stupid. Sit back and watch.
I am sure Cook and Jobs had many conversations about the road ahead and by now the Apple Way has deeply infused itself not only in Cook but in all of the formidable staff. The Apple infrastructure is in place the way Jobs envisioned and Cook has incredible help in steering the company forward.
Nothing has changed.
Media/Wall Street slime said the same thing about Jobs, and worse, while he was still healthy. Only shedding crocodile tears when he passed away. Same shit, same shittheads. Apple has killed a lot of Wall Street sacred cows, and the slime cannot have that.
The Slime’s new love affair is Google, and by extension, Samsung. Balmer, the Dancing Ape, is all but forgotten, except when one of the Slime ventures out with bs about “sleeping giant” and similar nauseating leg humping.
Guys, I love Apple, but why does Tim Cook get so much credit? He’s riding on the fumes of Jobs’s vision. The first 2 quarters he was at the helm after Jobs died Apple missed earnings expectations.
Then there’s Maps. Then there’s the crap Podcasts App getting 1.5 star ratings. Then there’s the spec bump iPad 4 that made no sense. Then there’s the new iMacs that don’t have Retina screens. That also makes no sense. And please stop with your armchair engineering comments about technical difficulties. It is easily achievable with current graphics chips and processors.
Then there’s the Apple TV that likely would have launched with Jobs around but because Tim is a creepy socially inept wack job… getting deals done with third parties isn’t Apple’s strong point anymore.
I’m sorry I don’t see Tim Cook leading Apple into the future. You’re simply seeing what’s leftover from Jobs.
Please, I do hope I’m proven wrong on this and that Apple’s “deep bench” will prevail. However, without an ultimate visionary at a company history has demonstrated many, many times that companies come completely undone. Tim Cook is simply not a visionary.
@sdfg: “The first 2 quarters he was at the helm after Jobs died Apple missed earnings expectations.”
No, it did not. Analysts don’t get to blame their bad estimates on Apple.
“Then there’s the spec bump iPad 4 that made no sense.”
Then there’s saying that something makes no sense because you don’t understand it.
“Then there’s the new iMacs that don’t have Retina screens.”
Yes, it’s pretty ridiculous that Apple didn’t provide the new 27″ iMac with a 5120 x 2880 pixel display. Who cares if such a display doesn’t exist yet nor does the GPU to drive such a display at acceptable performance levels. Just get ‘er done, right, “sdfg?” All it takes is a snap o’ the fingers!
“…getting deals done with third parties isn’t Apple’s strong point anymore.”
It never was, sdfg. Deals are hard and getting harder for Apple. Did you ever ask yourself why–even in the Jobs era–Apple could never get an arrangement with the video industry like it had with the music industry?
“I do hope I’m proven wrong on this.”
Considering how wrong you’ve been with everything else, I’d say there’s a good chance of that…
So the stock at $700 about a year after Steve died means nothing to you?
In our economy at the moment any company is lucky to have their stock go up. Things look bleak and more taxes from shrinking paychecks are already sucking our spare cash out of our wallets. Taxes lowered my paycheck an I’m not even close to making $75,000 so you don’t have to be rich to have less money to spend from more taxes. We’ll be lucky if it the whole stock market doesn’t crash completely in the next 4 years.