I think we are seeing that leaders really make a difference.

Microsoft made some leadership changes - game changing.

Apple - they have done a lot of supply side management (own chips, great supply chain). Has let them continue to pump out insane quantities of cutting edge parts (ie, watch / macbooks / M1 etc) on cutting edge nodes etc at insane margins.

Cook is more of the financial / supply chain guy? So we've seen optimization on that side (vs huge new product catagories). The payoff $ wise is amazing, not sure though if he can do the jobs -> new product catagory type move.

> Microsoft made some leadership changes - game changing.

Microsoft was forced to make a leadership change back in 2000 to avoid being broken up.

Gates had to step down because he was the reason why the DOJ went after Microsoft.

Nadella wouldn't be at the helm if it wasn't for the first forced change from Gates to Ballmer

You’re confirming @slownews45’s post: that they had leadership changes that were very impactful in day to day operations.

What's weird is Balmer was part of MS from the start, yet he managed it so badly.

Well to be fair he had the toughest act to follow, not just at MS but the whole history of corporate America.

Nobody had to come after Rockefeller at Standard Oil, but at MS there was Ballmer after Gates.

That and also Microsoft was priced for perfection, both financially and socially. Once you ship Windows 95 there not much you can do, there will never be a leap as big and so a natural slowdown in the rate of innovation feels like going backwards

There was no reason to slow down. Microsoft was deeply aware of the opportunity in mobile, long before iOS and Android scooped up that market.

But Ballmer and a "Windows everywhere" mentality held them back, with several massive failures and right offs on the orders of billions of dollars.

There was nothing natural about Microsoft's slow down in the OS market while the computing industry was going through profound form factor and OS changes, and rocketing sales, for a decade or so.

> There was no reason to slow down

There was. The DOJ is the reason. A huge part of the setback was the morale hit inside the company.

Kinda like "what's the purpose of all this work? If we are successful in the way we want to be, they'll break us up"

>Less than 0.1%

There were a lot more than 1,000 people involved in creating that new business.

True, but they didn’t all have an equal part to play.

I agree with the logic, but I'd argue that the macro trend and market/brand position vs Tim cook has more to do with that 10x return. That is attributable to Jobs over Cook.

I think that’s easily refuted. Jobs of course had more to do with market and brand than Cook, but Cook was responsible for execution even during Jobs tenure. Without Cooks support even Jobs would have probably failed.

People often talk as if it was Jobs and Jony Ive that made apples reboot successful.

I believe it was Jobs, Cook, and Ive (more or less in that order).

Early on, Cook was the operations person that helped turn Apple back into a functioning business.

Jobs wanted people to be able to accomplish things with as few buttons as possible.

Ive wanted to make perfect shiny pebbles with 0 buttons.

Cook wanted to make functional supply chains and products that didn’t break under warranty or beyond.

It was a triple point for good progress.

(Jobs, Ive, Cook etc did a phenomenal job re-imagining retail also IMHO)

Shouldn’t everyone get 10x then instead of just 1?

They all had the opportunity to buy shares, and most of them did actually receive some in one form or another.

You're entirely right and there's some weird anti-capitalism fringes creeping into HNews... which is a really odd place to entertain anti-capitalist views.