I don't think anyone other than Tim could have done just as well. If you look at competing tech corps - HP, IBM, Sun, MIPS, SGI, DEC, Nokia, even MS - their run isn't as long, they fail to adapt after a strong start, and the wheels often come off in spectacular ways.

And that's with competent management. (Let's not talk about the multiple management idiocies that happened at HP.)

Apple is now one of the longest lived tech corps. IBM is older but a shadow of its old self. MS is a year or so older, but the rest of FAANG are relatively new.

Cook has kept the plates spinning and turned Apple into a giant revenue machine with a strong R&D back-up. I don't think that's a small achievement, and even if he's helped by the board and senior execs - which of course he is - it's still easy to underestimate the skill that goes into that.

Having said that - he's also turned Apple into a somewhat boring company. The products are nice-looking and usually functional but not particularly thrilling. They feel overpriced. And I suspect some opportunities in home automation, user content creation, and health have been missed.

Cook's Apple is an all-American bureaucratic behemoth - a kind of modern General Electric which keeps churning out high levels of competence, but not much inspiration or excitement, and not a little frustration and irritation over nickel-and-diming of users and developers.

Someone else might not have made Apple as profitable, but personally I wouldn't have minded a friendlier and more inventive and adventurous company.

You sure it wasn't Jobs? Looks to me like Cook just kept things going about the same as Jobs would have (at least the last version of him).

I do wonder how long it's gonna last.

I wouldn't have guessed (/remembered) it had been ten years of Cook, but what I do remember is people saying exactly that when he took over.

I suppose at some point all companies die/fade into obscurity/are different companies in all but name; maybe in 2080 or whatever we'll be able to say - ah, yep, knew it, Apple was for the dogs as soon as Jobs left, was only a matter of time!

Cook came to Apple only a year after Jobs did. Apple bought NeXT in 1997 and Cook joined Apple in 1998 (Jobs recruited him). So it’s hard to untangle their impacts. Apple became so successful in this century because of both great products and great operations.

So the fact that Apple's share price has increased 1,200% since he took over is just a coincidence?

To be fair Apple was already a giant rolling ball of success, and they have historically had an ingrained culture of caring deeply about their products above all else.

Any decisions that would affect their trajectory will get a ton of deliberation from a lot of smart people; i.e. there wouldn't need to be a ton of input or ingenuity from the CEO to see returns like those from Apple, imho.

Not to say that Cook isn't great or that it wouldn't be difficult to achieve that success.

So many companies have flatlined after a new CEO took over, think Microsoft after Ballmer took over. So I think there is some difficulty involve.

I guess my point is that the leadership within Apple is a lot more diffuse than typical;

I believe most of Apple's value is from delivering a high degree of consistency and polish; owing to its culture of relentlessly developing the UX of their products.

Therefore the CEO's primary roles at Apple would be to maintain that culture, steer the ship into new segments, and discern when the public will care about those segments.

I think Cook has done a decent job of that.

Making it all possible with RnD and supply chain is another story, but also where Cook is known to excel so maybe I'm underselling him. Jobs had Cook so presumably Cook would find a Cook if he weren't Cook.

I don't know much about Microsoft but Balmer was definitely taking over a different beast than Cook.

If I let my bias show I'd say Microsoft's value is from developing technology just enough to set up bill gates for customers :p

Apple was a giant rolling ball of success when John Sculley took over, too.

But that sure didn't last.

Were the shares previously nosediving before he took over?

I think it's laughable to assume that it was only Tim Cook who contributed to that. Indeed, where would we be if it wasn't for these handful of superhuman geniuses.

During his tenure the market cap has increased by about $2 trillion. How much of that value has Cook captured? A very small %. Perhaps even smaller than his actual contribution! You could easily make the argument that Cook is being exploited by the shareholders.

What has been the remarkably great move from Apple in the last 10 years? Develop their iTunes store to provide more media and bring in-house productions to have a more of a moat? Develop their own silicon to decrease reliance on others? Develop products that can take advantage of their strengths, a la Tags? Move into services as most of the world is getting more Apple-product saturated? Extend ownership of their product lifecycles, by being hostile towards 3rd party repairs? Offer financial services to allow the less fortunate to obtain your products? I don't want to detract from the respect that's due for these moves, but they are not that far off the beaten path for a market leader looking to solidify it's position in it's place. Most other improvements to their products and services have been incremental. Of course, there is something to be said about not straying from the light, as other companies have done. However, I do think that Apple's valuation is somewhat tied to the buying power of the world, and on the timescale's we're looking at, more and more people are gaining access to Apples products as the world economy improves. All of these are great things, and of course I'm talking with hindsight, but to me these all feel like strategies that seem somewhat obvious and will generally work wonders when executed from the position of a market leader.

Maybe, maybe not, but I think the idea is that it's hard to say with certainty. Apple is large and complex enough that any number of factors could have lead to that share price increase. My personal opinion is that probably yeah he had a good chunk to do with it. But it's hard to say that with certainty, it's certainly worth discussing and not taking for granted.

Apple's share price has increased more than 12,000% since Foxconn received its first order from Apple. Is that just a coincidence?

Well, the same thing has happened for Amazon and Google, so… yes?

Of course you can argue that the wrong leader would have torpedoed the company.

Because it should be about productivity. People are highlighting a moral failing of society.

If we were to live in a world where we are measured by our productivity, we would ALL be treated like the replaceable cogs from the Chinese factory.

If that’s frightening to you, I think you’re seeing the point.

Isn't that frightening to you? What makes you think you would not be living under the whip?

I think parent's point is: why do we think it is ok to treat some people this way and not others?

- Because the people that already found a way to display the scarcity of their talent or abilities don't need to subject themselves to a system that measures them by their productivity.

- Because it is not on "us" to try to change this at an universal scale. I am all for people that believe in communist ideals and go to live on their own with like-minded people. The problem is those that take this to totalitarianism and think something like "communism can only work if it everyone does it"

- Because history has witnessed already many people that tried to change this reality without ignoring scale, and ended up causing more problems that solutions, destroyed more wealth and made the world worse than they started off.

Do you feel that your productivity as a trained professional is the same as anybody else's productivity?

The trick would be to allow workers to capture all of their productivity rather than have a large amount of it syphoned off by owners.

> Do you feel that your productivity as a trained professional is the same as anybody else's productivity?

How would you even compare that? How would you even measure your productivity? Lines of code? Tickets closed?

We can't even compare "productivity" in our own "profession", much less between different ones.

Fuck, even to think in terms of "professions" today seems so anachronistic... some of the best people I worked with were never trained, should we disregard them and go back to a world of credentialism and guilds?

> The trick would be to allow workers to capture all of their productivity rather than have a large amount of it syphoned off by owners.

More likely, entrepreneurs would simply automate the shit of out of their work and outsource what is not automatable to other service providers. And all of the "workers" who can not think for themselves will be left jobless and crying for someone to help them.

> How would you even compare that? How would you even measure your productivity? Lines of code? Tickets closed?

How would you measure your scarcity? It is similarly difficult. "Workers are paid according to their productivity" does not mean "there is a fixed mechanical pay formula based on lines of code or something".

> More likely, entrepreneurs would simply automate the shit of out of their work and outsource what is not automatable to other service providers. And all of the "workers" who can not think for themselves will be left jobless and crying for someone to help them.

If entrepreneurs can already do this, why the fuck are they paying so much money for engineers in the bay area? Wouldn't "can be replaced by machines" be the literal minimum possible scarcity?

> If entrepreneurs can already do this, why the fuck are they paying so much money for engineers in the bay area?

Because these people are scarce and companies can't automate that type of job. Yet.

But, just look at what happened when Facebook decided to not pay SF salaries to those that moved out of the Bay Area. That was just Zuck saying "if you want be anywhere in the world to work here, then I can also look anywhere in the world to hire people", which instantly made them realize that they are not that scarce anymore.

> How would you measure your scarcity?

- My employer finds someone that can do my job for less money than I am asking, so they replace me. I am not as scarce as I thought.

- Some other company will offer more money to do the same job I am doing currently. I am more scarce than I thought.

- I work on new things, show experience or an ability that not everyone in the company can - let's say I am now able to manage a team of developers or I can work on both the backend and do devops. My scarcity increased.

It's not that hard.

> Because these people are scarce and companies can't automate that type of job. Yet.

But you say that if we paid by productivity then entrepreneurs would simply bypass those people. Whether that is possible is independent of how we determine compensation.

> It's not that hard.

You allow yourself to provide a very loose mechanism for roughly determining scarcity but demand a very precise mechanism for determining productivity in the previous post. This is an unfair comparison.

> But you say that if we paid by productivity then entrepreneurs would simply bypass those people.

No. Entrepreneurs will bypass them anyway, whenever possible and whenever profitable. The difference is that your idea of "paying by productivity" would make cheap labour expensive, consequently increasing the profitability of automating work process and accelerating the pace of replacing labour.

> You allow yourself to provide a very loose mechanism for roughly determining scarcity but demand a very precise mechanism for determining productivity in the previous post.

No, I am being descriptive of the current reality. You want to be normative about your idealistic method. So, yes, you have the onus of coming up with a system that could replace the existing one and be at least as effective.

This is a poor take. Productivity is meaningless, leverage and impact is everything.

Tim Cook working for one day could easily have a larger impact than most people will have in their entire lives because he has extremely high leverage.

Is it fair? Absolutely not, but life is not fair. I don't understand what moral obligation society should have to base compensation on productivity.

PS: you could argue that Tim Cook is far more productive than everyone else because he produces far more results than everyone else.

> PS: you could argue that Tim Cook is far more productive than everyone else because he produces far more results than everyone else.

Of course. "Pay by productivity" does not mean "pay everybody the same per hour of labor". Cook's output has greater influence on the company than any (or perhaps almost any) other employee at Apple. He should be paid commensurate to that output.

Oh, how do you think of productivity then? (E.g stock price, revenue growth, etc?)

I assumed you meant something along the lines "pay everybody the same per hour of labor" since that seems to be how most people describe productivity.

The company produces some amount of economic output in a year. This can be stuff or it can be innovation. That is the total productivity of the company. The sum of all productivity of its employees adds up to that value. Right now, people are paid less than the value of their productivity so there is money leftover for the company to either stick in the bank (profit) or reinvest in other things.

Not everybody is equally productive. Somebody who has more skill or knowledge in a profession like software engineering will be considerably more productive than a less skilled engineer. Among leftist circles, I think you'd be very hard pressed to find people who describe productivity as literally just "number of hours worked".

What about companies that produce negative value (say, an oil company that caused an environmental disaster)? Are the workers going to return part of their salaries back?

How many software companies got off the ground, hired people, PAID SALARIES, yet never got to see themselves become profitable?

How many companies would not even have existed if there was no risk investment done?

Is that moral failing related to jealously about how others choose to spend money that isn't theirs?

Money is not gifted to people by God. It is allocated to people by systems that society chooses. The idea of the specific "rightful" ownership of money we have today is not universal throughout history and can change.

> It is allocated to people by systems that society chooses

Exactly. And history is pretty clear that nearly everyone is worse off when society decides how to spend money instead of letting owners decide how to spend money. It's why every first world economy has a massive dose of capitalism and a tiny dose of socialism in their GDP. And why a significant part of the worst economies of the world don't.

>The idea of the specific "rightful" ownership of money we have today is not universal throughout history

Yet the poor (and pretty much everybody else too) in most of the world, if not all, today are vastly richer than the poor of the past.... Maybe there's a reason the world has moved away from the economic systems of the past?

I'm from former USSR and I can hardly stand this commie foolishness. Go to some socialist country like Cuba, Venezuela that have eliminated the inequality (like the USSR did before), then talk about 'moral failings of the society'.

Go to some country like the United States, where we have nice things like weekends and 40-hour work weeks because we had a rather successful labor movement in the early 20th century because of discussions like this. We used to have children working in coal mines, and now we don't largely because people spoke out. Thank god for them.

I think that the conditions of workers impoved in some countries after WWI because of Russia: politicians and entrepreneurs looked at what happened in Russia and decided to make the proletariat a bit less unhappy, because the alternative looked very very very bad

Imagine a world where we didn't have to choose exclusively between dictatorial communism and unfettered capitalism.

So sad that any other system is completely impossible

Our world is unfair only when the corruption interferes, that lets you receive more money than you are actually worth. But in case of foxconn workers and Cook, everything is fair. Foxconn workers are not chained to the benches, that simply don't know any other place where they can earn more. And I think Cook doesn't bribe anyone to achieve such payouts. If anything, he's doing a great job developing a business.

> Our world is unfair only when the corruption interferes, that lets you receive more money than you are actually worth.

What is corruption?

A software engineer doing the same work gets paid way more in SF than in London. State policies prevent free movement of labor between London and SF. State policies do not prevent free movement of capital across nations, as clearly seen by the number of megacorporations actually owned by weird subsidiaries in strange locations for tax purposes.

Corruption is profiteering from occupying position of power, or from having ties with people in power. For example, getting a well paid job without necessary skills, because you are a nephew of a company vice president.

As for software engineers, recently so many people here are up in arms against the return to the office... But still want to get paid 3x the guy from Indonesia. I'm looking for them replaced with cheaper developers, and what they'll think then about the remote work.

The USSR was an authoritarian hellscape. Most states in history have been that way. I am not convinced that deregulated capitalism is the only way to achieve non-authoritarian rule.

At the end of it's life, USSR wasn't a hellscape. It was a land of bored disillusioned people who knew the futility of trying, because the outcome was always fixed

Chances are anyone other than Tim could have done just as well?

Did you see what happened to Apple after Steve Jobs got fired? Have you seen what has happened to great civilizations after the roll of monarchical dice or even a democratic election?

Have you ever met a bozo? They exist and there's more of them than there are sane people.

Do we have numbers on how often that happens?

I think it’s generally just fine unless the incoming new CEO is determined to suddenly do everything different.

> Chances are that anyone other than Tim could have done just as well.

The history of Apple CEOs indicates otherwise.

Yeah, well, boards of directors don't take "chances" like that on 2.5 trillion dollar companies, and when they do, the shareholders start machinating replacements, like Scott Galloway attempted when Jack Dorsey started getting a lot of eye-raising ideas.

It's been 10 years since Jobs died and I'm yet to see anyone even speculate any other name that would've been better than Cook.

Your comment is typical from someone who thinks themselves to be smarter than the whole board. Or the investors that never challenged Tim's management, Or all of Apple's upper management who would love to find a way to take his spot and wouldn't care about exploiting some of Tim's weaknesses to dethrone the king...