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Comment by nodesocket | Hacker News Reader

As a shareholder, I have to admit I've lost a little confidence in Tim Cook. He's a fantastic operations guy, but lacks a founder's vision, drive and risk-taking mentality. I also think companies, unlike governments, are best run by dictators. With Tim, it seems like decisions are community (in terms of employee) driven instead of coming from his vision.

With that said, I'm still a huge Apple fan boy. The stock's fundamentals are off the charts, look at P/E, solid dividend, and huge piles of cash on hand. Not sold on the 1 billion investment in Chinese ride-sharing service Didi Chuxing (I can't connect the dots right now).

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>He's a fantastic operations guy, but lacks a founder's vision, drive and risk-taking mentality.

If there's one thing I've learned in my corporate serfdom is that primadonnas can't handle other primadonnas. Do you think Steve Jobs would be able to work with another Steve Jobs? Jobs picked Cook because Cook wasn't Jobs, so Jobs was able to tolerate him. The problem is a company like Apple probably needs a Jobs-like character.

I see this all the time in the workplace. The difficult higher-ups always hire fairly milquetoast personalities they can easily control but when they leave, we now have a department of largely unmotivated 'yes men,' unable to do anything but take orders.

> The problem is a company like Apple probably needs a Jobs-like character.

I have been, idly, placing bets with myself on an Apple buy-out of Tesla, shades of Apple's buy-out of NeXT -- not merely to get a lead on the auto industry, but to get a new visionary leader on board in the shape of Musk.

(But I don't think Musk wants to lead a company he didn't build for himself: he doesn't want to just eat his cake, he wants to bake it from scratch.)

I suspect Musk is too busy with sexy technology like rockets and electric and self-driving cars to be bothered with agonizing over what Walmart moms think is a good phone. Apple isn't this hot sexy thing anymore, its the standard bearer of the mobile revolution which has become a fairly boring part of everyone's lives. I can't imagine a personality like Musk doing that job. It would seem like a caretaker job I imagine.

Couldn't you have said that Apple pre-Jobs, or pre-iPhone?

FIY Musk is not founder of tesla.

>As a shareholder, I have to admit I've lost a little confidence in Tim Cook. He's a fantastic operations guy, but lacks a founder's vision, drive and risk-taking mentality.

The same guy who's (from all we know) pivoting Apple into car making?

Dictators can run governments the best. too. The problem is they can be also the worst. And the whole inheritance thing.

Apple's problem right now is not so much Cook's objective qualities, but perception. And perception leads to positive feedback loops and self fulfilling prophecies.

If the market sees Apple as company in trouble, some part of it will also start seeing themselves that way. And the company will start behaving appropriately.

Perception has been a huge part to Apple's success. Steve could bend perception by force of will. Watching his old keynotes, the reality he creates around the products becomes a part of them. Real or not. An Ive video just doesn't replace that, and Cook can't even approach it.

So exactly what consumer electronic market should Apple get into that's even 20% the size of the phone market?

Even before the iPhone was introduced, the phone market was huge by volume if not revenue.

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