“For this week’s cover story on Apple (AAPL) and its future, I spent some time with Tim Cook, who said far more than was ever going to make it into the stor,” Sam Grobart reports for Bloomberg Businessweek. “Or even the outtakes from the story. So for even more Tim Cook, here’s the transcript of the entire interview, edited only for clarity.”
“To set the scene: We met late on a Thursday morning, two days after Cook stood onstage at Apple’s Town Hall auditorium in Cupertino, Calif.,” Grobart reports. “We sat in a not-huge conference room adjacent to Cook’s office. Cook entered, wearing a navy polo shirt and dark trousers.”
Grobart reports, “Here’s something about Cook that may tell you something: Some executives, when you go to interview them, kind of walk into the room, say ‘Hi,’ and look to you to get things going. Not Cook. He strides in with a warm smile and firm handshake and immediately starts asking questions: What did you think of Tuesday’s event? Tell me what you think about the new phones—have you had a chance to use them? That’s why this interview starts somewhat abruptly: We had already been kibitzing a bit before we actually ‘began’ the interview.”
MacDailyNews Take: Tim Cook grew up in the American South (Robertsdale, Alabama). If you’ve lived and worked in the South you know, before you start talking business, you first have an informal chat, some southern hospitality, etc. It’s a way to get to know each other and feel out possibilities for business or even personal relationships beyond the meeting at hand. This is different than many other regions of the U.S., where usually y’all’d just dive straight into the business meeting.
Some Tim Cook quotes from the interview:
• Some people see innovation as change, but we have never really seen it like that. It’s making things better. iOS 7 is a great example of that. It’s significantly better than 6 or any of those that came before it, and obviously significantly better than the other OS out there.
• You know, the first time that you buy something with your finger, it’s pretty profound. It’s one thing to use it as security. This is really cool, and a lot of people will love it, because they open their phone multiple times a day. But the buying is even a more startling experience, in a way.
• I think that Android is more fragmented than ever and, as a result, when you look at things like customer satisfaction and usage, you see the gap between Android and iOS being huge. There is a huge difference between market share of units and usage share. And it shouldn’t surprise anybody that it’s like that. Anybody that’s used both should not be surprised that that is the natural result. And that’s really important to us because we have never been about selling the most. We’re about selling the best and having the best experience and having the happiest customers. Happy generally means using more. You know, you find something you like. You do it more. And so I think that has become even more the case over the last year.
• The truth is that there are more people using iOS 6 than there is any version of Android. And in days from now, iOS 7 will be the most popular mobile operating system. And so what does it really mean at the end of the day to show these share numbers and combine all of these disparate things as if they’re one thing? I’m not so sure it has a great meaning to it at the end of the day… I don’t measure our success in unit market share. So if there are a lot of $69 tablets sold that you’re just pounding on to get something to work and get some responsiveness, and it’s thick and fat and just a terrible experience, I don’t really weigh that unit of share like I do a different unit of share. I don’t weigh them to be equivalent. [Hee Haw demographic. – MDN Ed.]
• [In the tablet market] you’ve got the players down here that would say — you know, your kid is tugging at you saying, ‘Daddy, I got to have a tablet.’ And you just want to shut them up and buy something cheap. That’s not a market I’m crazy about. I’d like to convince you that the iPad is a better experience and that your kid’s going to learn a lot from using it. And the experience they’re going to have talking to their grandmother across FaceTime is unbelievable, and it’s going to change your life by doing that. I’m not trying to say “Pick me” to shut up your kid.
• [A low-end segment] happens in every market that I’ve seen. Every single market. It happens in cars. It happens in all consumer electronics, from cameras to PCs to tablets to phones to—in the old world—VCRs and DVDs. I can’t think of a single consumer electronics market it doesn’t happen in. And so for companies that want to chase that, that’s fine. I’m not criticizing it, actually. I call it junk. I don’t do that in a mean way. It’s just my label for it, right? But it’s just not who we are. I refuse to be driven by a blind ambition of unit share.
Tons more in the full article – highly recommended – here.
Related article:
Apple CEO Tim Cook: ‘We’re not in the junk business’ – September 19, 2013