TIME Magazine has come out with their annual Person of the Year for 2012 [Barack Obama], a rather diminished title after many dubious choices in recent years (some of them not even a person at all) and named Apple CEO Tim Cook among the many several “Runner-Ups” — #3 on the POTY list, to be exact — including Malala Yousafzai, Mohamed Morsi, and Fabiola Gianotti.
Lev Grossman writes, “Tim Cook has the decidedly nontrivial distinction of being the first CEO of Apple since the very first to come to power without blood on his hands. For most of its history, Apple has had a succession problem: it had no internal mechanism for transferring power from one CEO to the next without descending into civil war in between. ‘Each time,’ Cook says, ‘the way that the CEO was named was when somebody got fired and a new one came in.'”
“This clearly bothered Steve Jobs, because he spoke to Cook about it shortly before he died. ‘Steve wanted the CEO transition to be professional,’ Cook says. ‘That was his top thing when he decided to become chairman. I had every reason to believe, and I think he thought, that that was going to be in a long time.’ As we now know, it wasn’t,” Grossman writes. “As long as he was handpicking his successor, you’d think Jobs would have chosen someone in his own image, but he and Cook, who was Jobs’ COO at Apple, are in a lot of ways diametrical opposites. Jobs was loud, brash, unpredictable, uninhibited and very often unshaven. Cook isn’t. He doesn’t look like the CEO of Apple, he looks more like an Apple product: quiet, tidy, carefully curated, meticulously tooled and at the same time strangely warm and inviting. He doesn’t look like Jobs, he looks like something Jobs would have made. Cook’s flawless cap of white hair could have been designed by Jony Ive and fabricated in China out of brushed aluminum.”
Much more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: It’s ridiculous that Steve Jobs was never named TIME Magazine‘s “Man of the Year,” especially back when it mattered.