“Tim Cook, Jobs’ successor as CEO, has promised so many times — and, recently, so assertively — that Apple has a new product category hiding up its sleeve. If Cook manages to offer little next week but the tweaks that he has so far passed off as progress, he may officially start being seen as a blowhard, the Chief Executive Overpromiser, the King of Incremental Thinking,” Marek Fuchs writes for MarketWatch. “Ironically, Cook has no one to blame but himself. For all his reputation as an operator, a man with competence but all the excitement of a coin collector, Cook has run surprisingly heavy with promises. When a CEO promises fortune and glory, he eventually has to deliver. A year ago at the D: All Things Digital conference, Cook pounded the table that Apple has ‘several more game changers in us.'”
“You got that? Several. Plural,” Fuchs writes. “Then February came and, though no game changers had come to market, Cook was still tossing around promises, telling the Wall Street Journal: ‘There will be new categories. We’re not ready to talk about it, but we’re working on some really great stuff.'”
“Apple and Cook’s success in China has given a bit more room for his prophesies of ‘several game changers.’ Without at least one, a reckoning for Cook is coming, though the exact timing could depend on the health and welfare of China, which helped Apple’s sales considerably in the latest quarter — and the stock, at least more than financial stunts like buybacks, dividend increases and major splits,” Fuchs writes. “In the end, Cook has been on the make, at least rhetorically, for a year now. If that rhetorical fails to turn into reality next week, Cook may be making himself incrementally expendable.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Marek is jumping the gun.
• iPhone was released 5 years, 7 months, and 19 days after iPod (2057 days).
• iPad was released 2 years, 9 months, and 5 days after iPhone (1009 days).
• The average amount of time between Apple’s last two revolutions: 4 years, 2 months, and 11 days (1533 days).
• Tim Cook has been Apple CEO for 2 years, 9 months, 5 days (1009 days).
• Tim Cook will have been Apple CEO for 4 years, 2 months, and 11 days (1533 days) on Wednesday, November 4, 2015.Those who underestimate Tim Cook’s Apple are in for a rude awakening.