Since then, Apple’s revenues and along with
them its share price have risen astronomically, and while Cook occupies a
rather less messianic position in the company’s history, he may nonetheless
feel he’s played a significant part in generating the wealth that now sloshes
around Cupertino. His remuneration would certainly suggest so. At $899,999 more
than Jobs’, his salary is not enormous by US top-flight standards, but it’s
doubled by a bonus and accompanied by a restricted stock allocation that, at
current prices, gives the CEO $376m to collect in two installments, in 2016 and
2012. Of course, if AAPL continues to trend upwards, that amount will follow.
Cook’s one million shares would be worth just under $550m at the time of
writing.
Apple‘s
Revenue by Product until 2011
A clear implication of this ‘golden hand
cuffs’ deal is that the Apple board is keen for Cook to remain with the
company. It certainly makes it very expensive to fire him. The company has said
it also plans to spend billions of dollars on share buy-backs over three years
to counteract dilution from employee equity and purchase programmes, suggesting
that other senior executives can except generous incentives to stay put.
Rob Enderle isn’t convinced that this is
the right strategy. ‘Apple’s executive team represents its greatest short-term
threat, leadership issues because it lacks the unique skills that Steve Jobs
contributed which allowed Apple to dominate’.
Asked about the same issue at a London
appearance in Aril, which MacUser attended, Walter Isaacson – Jobs’ biographer,
and someone keenly aware of his charismatic grip on the company – expressed
more confidence. ‘There’s no one person who can replicate Steve Jobs, but there
is a great team that he left behind. There’s Jony Ive, who’s the great designer
and visionary artist; Tim Cook is great. I think it’s a team that will serve
Apple well’.
Stability
is what the Apple board believes shareholders need at the moment. Against that
background, it’s hard to argue with Cook’s appointment
It’s also the team that brought Apple this
far, and that has to count for something Stability, then, is what the board
believes shareholders need after the much-feared loss of a one-off corporate
genius. And against that background, it’s hard to argue with Cool’s
appointment. If nobody can ignite Apple in quite the way Steve did, he can at
least keep it ticking over reliably.
At some point, though, the only way to keep
going will be to do something new.
The legacy facing Tim cook could hardly be
more different from what Steve Jobs found on taking over the company from Gil
Amelio. Then, there was a jumble of products that were neither selling
particularly well nor making enough money when they did; every plan for the
next generation of hardware and software was in tatters; and the company itself
was a mess, reeling from staff cuts yet still held back by systemic
inefficiencies and structural inertia.
The
legacy facing Tim cook could hardly be more different from what Steve Jobs
found on taking over the company from Gil Amelio.
Today, Apple could hardly be in better
shape. With cash on tap for all the R&D Jobs cared to engage in, it’s
widely assumed that a roster of new products is already lined up on the metal-topped
benches in Jonathan Ive’s secure compound, ready to roll out over the next two
to three years with no more than a satisfied nod from the lucky new CEO.
The reality is unlikely to be so pad.
Despite many elegant instances of Jobsian hindsight, Apple has rarely, if ever,
truly known what it was doing years in advance.
Sure, there’ll be prototypes: several
competing versions of each putative gewgaw, waiting to be winnowed, honed and
guided towards release – a process previously directed by the CEO himself. The
many decisions between mockup and Apple Store won’t make themselves; Apple’s
hardware VPs are more about delivery than decision-making, and as far as we
know Sir Jony remains essentially a designer, not a strategist. The vision
thing must come from the top.
As brilliantly organized as Cook’s Apple
may be, product pipelines are full of twists and turns. The iPhone, for
example, originally came out of the project to create the iPad. At launch, it
supported only built-in apps, and there was no intention to allow third-party
development until it suddenly became clear that that was the right thing to do
– a U-turn that created a new multibillion-dollar industry. When the iPad
finally appeared, it sold orders of magnitude more units than anticipated because
of the decisions that had been made about size, weight, processing power,
battery life, screen quality and user experience – decisions that were almost
certainly evolving until a few short months before launch.
Getting these things right – Apple right
not just good-enough right – is not a matter of pulling an idea out of a file,
doing the numbers and telling the techies to get on with it. There may be a
very short window in which the company can now ‘just keep going’ without
intellectually and creatively substantial direction. Nor will solid iterations
of existing product lines satisfy customers future products at a time when
Apple’s most recent new concept, the iPad, is already into a third and not
universally praised edition. A decade ago, the candy-coloured iMachelped things
along while flat-panel screens became affordable, but the dead-end (if
affectionately remembered) ‘desk lamp’ G4 and while-elephant Cube were to
follow before the PC market in recent years. Even genius makes missteps.
Competence, beware.
It was the iPod, a complete departure for
Apple, that financed its expansion into touchscreen mobile phones and tablets.
Revolution by revolution, the stepping stones must be placed with care, not a
little luck, and a gaze fixed on the horizon. Perhaps another product that
changes everything really is waiting in a manila envelope marked ‘Not to be
opened until 2013’, but recall that Apple is not in the business of creating
technologies from scratch; whatever will enable the next hop is already out there,
just as capacitive touchscreens were in the mid-2000s. It’s clear from current
products, both in Apple’s stable and across the industry, that quantum leaps
are getting harder to come by.
Meanwhile, the iPod – the Buddha’s boat
that brought Apple here – is shedding sales every quarter, and the iPhone, for
all its Chinese ambitions, is jostled in an increasingly crowded market where
nobody has anything really new. Siri is an interesting and potentially
important technology, but was awkwardly rushed out in beta – it remains
officially a project in development, despite being heavily advertised as the
unique selling point of a handset with few other advances in form or function –
and brings no opportunities, so far, for revenue.
