Apple CEO, one generation is not as good as the next?

Snow Leopard Finance Club

2024-05-31 08:57Published in Beijing, creators in the field of science and technology

Apple CEO, one generation is not as good as the next?

Cook can't be Jobs, and no one can be Cook

Author | Hanxing

Cover source | Snow Leopard Finance Club

Tripp Mechael, a longtime Wall Street Journal technology reporter who has followed Apple, published a biography in 2022, "After Steve," about how his successor, Tim Cook, continued to run the company in the 10 years since Jobs' death.

The subtitle of the book is: How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul.

That's Tripp's summary of Apple's last 10 years. Words such as "lack of innovation", "loss of soul" and "eating the old book" are often used to criticize the apples of the Cook era.

But at the same time, under Cook's leadership, Apple became the first company in the United States with a market value of more than $1 trillion, $2 trillion, and even the first company in the world to exceed $3 trillion. Compared to $150 billion when Cook took over in 2011, Apple's market value is now about 20 times higher.

After 13 years at the helm of Apple amid controversy, Cook is also about to have his own handover moment.

Apple's last restricted stock grant to Cook will be fully distributed in 2025, and discussions about who will be Apple's new CEO are starting to surface.

Source: Apple's official website

According to Bloomberg, John Ternus, Apple's current head of hardware engineering, is most likely to become Apple's next CEO. In addition, if Cook leaves office in the near future, Jeff Williams, the current COO, known as "Cook's Cook," could also become his successor.

But no matter who they are, compared to Cook, who kept the company in order during Jobs' serious illness, or Jonathan Ive, the chief designer who worked closely with Jobs, the new potential successors are "unknown".

One generation is not as good as the next, which may have become the fate of the tech giant's helmsman.

Who can take the helm of the $3 trillion ship

Apple Park, Apple's headquarters in Cupertino, California, covers an area of 260,000 square meters. Due to its resemblance to a landed circular spaceship, it is also known as the "Ship Headquarters".

In 2023, more than 2 billion products born from this spaceship will be owned worldwide, helping Apple make a net profit of nearly $100 billion in a year.

But piloting such a spaceship is not easy.

In 2021, as Cook's first ten-year term drew to a close, his first equity incentive expired in the same year. At that time, the outside world began to look forward to the possible candidate for Apple's next CEO. Apple chose to use a $76 million restricted equity incentive to push back this suspense until 2025.

Later, when Cook was asked about the transition of power during a podcast, he said he had decided to look for a successor from within the company and was working to provide the board with several options. "We have very detailed succession plans because something unpredictable happens and tomorrow I'm probably going to go the wrong way," Cook said. Of course, hopefully this won't happen. ”

For a long time, Apple's COO Jeff was considered the most likely candidate to succeed Cook. Because Cook served as Apple's COO during the Steve Jobs era, Jeff is also known as "Cook's Cook".

Jeff Williams (Jeff Williams) Source: Apple's official website

Jeff has a similar background and resume to Cook and has been Cook's deputy for a long time.

When Cook appointed Jeff as COO in 2015, analysts who had been following Apple for a long time said that Cook was grooming him as his successor. As COO, Jeff led the team responsible for the marketing of the Apple Watch, the first new product in the Cook era.

As the top head of Apple's supply chain, Jeff is familiar with the supply chain system of Apple's various hardware products, and took over the work related to software and hardware product design after Apple's former chief designer Ive left in 2019.

But with Cook's term delayed beyond 2025, Jeff, who is only two years younger than Cook, is no longer the No. 1 candidate. According to Bloomberg, Tenus, the younger head of hardware engineering, is most likely to become the next Apple CEO.

John Ternus Source: Apple's official website

Tenus joined Apple in 2001 and has worked on AirPods, iPads, and several generations of Macs and iPhones.

But there are also many doubts about Tenus, such as the fact that he is not deeply involved in the project of Apple's most important new product, the Vision Pro. Bloomberg quoted Apple insiders as saying that Tenus is not respected by top engineers, does not focus on future investments, does not make bold technology acquisitions, and does not pretend to be an innovator.

Cook was also questioned when he took over as Apple's CEO. Commenting on that experience, Cook said, "I can't be Steve, I don't think there's anyone who can replace him. He is a once-in-a-century genius with an ability to innovate that no one can imagine. So, all I can do is be the best version of myself. ”

Now, who will be the next Cook has become another problem.

From not being favored to white moonshine

For Cook, from the inability to replace Jobs's successor to Apple's "white moonlight", there is only one retirement decision in between.

Jobs once commented that Cook "doesn't understand products", but Jobs, who was extremely paranoid about products, still handed over the baton of Apple CEO to Cook.

As it turns out, Cook really didn't launch another hardware product as subversive as the iPhone during his tenure, but he reinvented Apple in his own way.

When Cook joined Apple in 1998 as senior vice president of global operations, the company was on the verge of bankruptcy. After Cook, who has many years of supply chain and procurement background, he first overhauled Apple's operating system.

In half a year, he connected the data of suppliers, assembly plants, retailers and other supply chain links, and used the ERP (enterprise resource planning) system to significantly reduce Apple's inventory cycle from 30 days to 6 days. At the end of 1998, Apple turned a profit, and the supply chain system built by Cook played a key role.

This is also the beginning of Cook's step-by-step journey towards Apple's CEO.

In 2005, Cook was promoted to Apple's COO. Jobs said at the time, "Tim and I have been working together for more than seven years, and I look forward to working even more closely together to help Apple achieve great goals in the years to come." ”

During his tenure as COO, Cook helped build an efficient supply chain system around the world, transforming Apple from a technology innovation company into an efficient money-making machine. "Many people may not realize that for a mature company like Apple, the most important thing is not the product, but the logistics — efficient supply chain, distribution, finance and marketing," Cook's biography says. ”

In January 2009, when Jobs took a six-month sabbatical from a liver transplant, Cook served as Apple's interim CEO for the first time. During Jobs' break, Cook was responsible for the launch of the iPhone 3GS, which sold more than 1 million units in its first weekend, Apple's highest-selling smartphone at the time.

In January 2011, Jobs took another sick leave, and Cook managed Apple for the second time as interim CEO.

But even Cook, who has repeatedly demonstrated his management skills as interim CEO, has been questioned a lot after he took over the CEO of Apple from Steve Jobs in August 2011.

According to the book "After Steve", when Cook was appointed CEO of Apple, doubts were everywhere. Whether it's Wall Street, iPhone-loving customers, friends and colleagues in the tech industry, everyone was nervous when they heard that Cook had taken the job.

Voices of skepticism have accompanied Cook for 13 years.

During this period, Cook launched Apple Watch, Airpods, Vision Pro and other hardware products as CEO, opened up the wearable device market for Apple, and entered the service industry, launching streaming Apple TV+ and music subscription service Apple Music.

Apple's market capitalization has also grown from $150 billion in August 2011 to $3 trillion, and for a long time it became the world's most valuable company.

But for Apple as a company, Cook will always be a shadow under the dazzling halo of Steve Jobs.

It wasn't until the moment he was about to retire that people realized that Apple would not have a second Jobs, and even a second Cook was a luxury.

The fate of the heirs

Every successful company has a soul, just like Steve Jobs is to Apple, Schultz is to Starbucks, Bill Gates is to Microsoft, Bezos is to Amazon.

Being their successor is often a "high-risk" job.

In July 2021, Andy Jassy succeeded Bezos as CEO of Amazon. As the second CEO after the founder, Jassy's journey to the role has not been easy.

When he took over as CEO of Amazon, due to the impact of the new crown epidemic, a large number of offline retail was transferred online, and in Q2 of that year, Amazon achieved a revenue of more than $100 billion in a single quarter, and its market value also stood at a peak of $1.92 trillion.

But then, Amazon's market capitalization and performance went all the way down. In Q1 2022, Amazon announced that the company suffered the weakest single-quarter revenue growth since the dot-com bubble burst in 2001, and suffered its first single-quarter loss since 2015. From July 2021 to January 2023, Amazon's market capitalization has evaporated by more than $1 trillion in a year and a half.

Jassy, who has only been in office for more than a month and faces a "mess", was once questioned. However, some Wall Street analysts pointed out that Amazon's predicament at that time was mainly due to the previous disorderly expansion, and it was not directly related to the new CEO.

In fact, since Q2 2023, Amazon's performance has begun to improve rapidly, and in Q3, it has delivered a financial report with profits far exceeding expectations. Throughout 2023, Amazon's market capitalization has increased by more than 80%.

Bezos founded Amazon, and his "flywheel effect" and Prime membership system are still imitated by many Internet companies today. Jassy has worked at Amazon for a similar number of years to Bezos, and has led Amazon's cloud services business, AWS, to grow rapidly and become a high-margin pillar business in addition to e-commerce. In the latest financial report, AWS has contributed more than half of Amazon's operating profit. But he still lives in the shadows that Bezos's aura does not shine through.

Compared with Jassy, Steve Ballmer, another successor to the CEO of Silicon Valley, is in a "worse" situation, and was once named the worst CEO by Forbes.

In 2000, Ballmer took over from Gates and began a 14-year tenure as CEO. There are two things that Ballmer is most criticized by the outside world: one is that during his tenure at the helm, Microsoft missed the mobile Internet era; The second is that he led the bad deal to buy Nokia.

But also during Ballmer's tenure, even if it fell behind in the mobile Internet era, Microsoft's revenue still nearly quadrupled and its profit more than doubled.

Missing out on the mobile Internet era isn't all Ballmer's responsibility. Gates once recalled that after Microsoft's "trial of the century" in antitrust litigation around 2000, its attitude towards the mobile Internet has always been very conservative.

In addition, Ballmer's emphasis on cloud computing and its advance layout also laid the foundation for Microsoft's cloud service Azure in the future.

As the successors of celebrity CEOs, they will inevitably be observed and compared under a microscope. For most of them, reactive and faultless is the biggest "fault", and a mistake in a decision can be magnified several times.

No celebrity CEO successor has escaped the fate of "one generation is not as good as the next". Perhaps only at the moment of retirement can their merits and demerits be judged fairly.

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