Has Tim Cook become a liability at Apple?

“I fully recognize that, despite all the noise, Apple (AAPL) still dominates. I spend meaty chunks of my day expressing this opinion,” Rocco Pendola writes for TheStreet.

“But that reality means nothing to Wall Street, the financial media and public opinion,” Pendola writes. “Tim Cook has lost control of the conversation. Fair or unfair, it is what it is. Cook needs to reestablish control as soon as possible, assuming he ever had control in the first place and he’s capable of regaining it.”

Pendola writes, “As much as I subscribe to the notion that Tim Cook has a company to run, I also realize he has to play the game. He must, like Steve Jobs did, manage the stock price and public perception while making it appear as if he is not managing the stock price and public perception. Running a company like Apple is as much about participating in the theatre of rhetoric as it is running a company like Apple. If Cook cannot own the debate, he becomes a liability.”

Read more in the full article here.

MacDailyNews Take: As we wrote last Friday:

If this continues, Tim Cook will quickly go from worrying that his seat is getting quite hot to how to keep his head off a stick.

When Tim Cook became Apple CEO on August 24, 2011, AAPL hit a day high of $378.96. AAPL currently stands at $430.53 [$423.63]. That’s a gain of $51.57 [$44.67] or 13.6% [11.8%]. If this thing dips below $400…

Steve Jobs had no leash; Tim Cook’s, while long, grows shorter as shareholders watch the red ink flow. (We get email: a growing number of AAPL shareholders are not happy.)

Apple shareholders should be patient. This swoon is not based on Apple’s fundamentals or performance (save for Cook & Co.’s total mishandling of the new iMac launch, causing Apple to largely miss the entire Christmas sales season and which, it bears mentioning, would have turned last quarter’s “miss” into a “beat,” hence AAPL would likely be closer to knocking on $800 than $400 today. It would have been nice for someone to ask Tim about that little fsck up during the recent shareholders’ meeting. We would’ve liked to hear his answer). That parenthetical item aside, Cook surely has a plan and has already run Apple for years, including for much of the time Steve was sick. No need to even begin thinking of throwing the baby out with the bathwater, yet.

So, patience, patience… but regardless: Cook & Co. need to up their game, not only PR-wise (staunching misguided speculation, blunting rampant fomenting, answering critics, producing better marketing, etc.), but in terms of releasing some meaningful products in a much more timely fashion. The quicker, the better.

Here’s to looking back on all this ASAP as a momentary (albeit nearly half a year now) blip from which many ultimately profited and not the precursor to a stock market crash.

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