Despite his quote referencing IBM & Xerox, I believe there's a good chance that quote was self-reflective, a call back to past decisions. Jobs was a "sales" man himself despite his technical understandings though he had the awareness to realize where it was and had been leading to.

His wisdom here rings of experience. It was probably meant to be as much a warning as it is informative.

This quote was from a 1995 interview, so two years before Apple bought out Steve's NeXT and made him the CEO.

It's probably partly aimed at Xerox.

They basically invented the GUI and because they were a monopoly in other areas, they didn't have people in place to recognize what an amazing thing they had.

Sounds like the basis/reason from which Joe McMillan left IBM in the amazing AMC series "Halt and Catch Fire".

Halt and Catch Fire was a really fun watch! And I love these type of storylines though offhand I can only think of this and Pirates of Silicon Valley. I was wondering if you knew of other similar shows/movies? I'm highly interested.

Funny that the current Apple CEO is more of a "sales" than a creative guy.

My understanding is that Tim Cook’s expertise and experience lies in operations/logistics

I don’t think it’s accurate to call him “more of a sales guy”

I don't think operations/logistics is a creative type role. It's striking deals with manufacturing companies and optimising costs (of course very simplified for a company the size of Apple). To me that sounds like sales.

Agreed that it's not necessarily a creative type role, though I don't think it's a stretch to say that creativity would help find new methods of optimising costs.

My mental model of TC is based on a not-very-recent reading of Steve Jobs' bio but it did not leave me with the impression that he was a dealmaker, more of a behind-the-scenes director coming up with innovative ways for Apple to optimise time/costs. I may be wrong though.

In any case, I think the actual rub is that sales vs creative is a false dichotomy; operations/logistics may not be a creative role but it also doesn't fit the sales profile in that dichotomy (imho).

I think it's a mistake to think that sales & marketing can't be a creative role. There are bean counters in every department, including engineering.

Probably helps that Tim Cook was mentored by Jobs himself for more than a decade and personally saw the rot set in at IBM first hand.

I don't see why that is relevant. The point was that if companies have a monopoly in a product category, improving the product doesn't make the company more successful. Since macOS and iOS do not have a worldwide monopoly, Apple (and thus Tim Cook) have to improve the product for the customer to gain more marketshare.

I think Apple's problem was that one designer that was a fan of excessive minimalism wasn't matched enough by a counterforce. Now that Ive is gone, Apple takes a more functional approach to product design. E.g. the MacBook Pro has useful ports again.

Certainly it's tempting to call Cook "the Ballmer of Apple" but things are far more complicated than that. For instance, all the Jony Ive focus on purity of product design over actual end-user marketability in the MacBook line happened under Cook

I thought Jobs was the sales guy and Cook was the logistics bean counter.

Not so much funny as inevitable.

Beware the survivability bias: Maybe big companies can be destroyed by sales and marketing is just the observation resulting from small companies never getting to become big ones due to lack of good sales and marketing.

Both, you can't make it long term without both.

I think the important question is what high customer value projects are dying in the brainstorming phase because the incumbent/monopoly has limited ability to capture business value.

As long as you're including engineers as "creatives". I agree. Too many only think that artsy/UX people are creative.