Hacker News Reader

Comment by quizzas | Hacker News Reader

Tim Cook has always been an efficiency expert. He is the master of supply chain management and logistics. He is perfect for operations and everything related to cost management. However, do his skills translate to the visionary tasks expected of the CEO? I understand he's delegated these tasks to others, but ultimately, these delegates have failed. Either Cook needs to find better visionaries, or step down, because Apple is completely rudderless as a purveyor of EXCITING consumer products. It's becoming more like LG, Samsung and Lenovo - a boring derivative consumer electronics product company.

View on HN

The problem is that it's almost impossible to hire a Steve Jobs-level visionary. Those people won't usually work for anyone but themselves (note that working for themselves may or may not result in actual success -- that's an orthogonal axis).

> do his skills translate to the visionary tasks expected of the CEO

So this is a real question, why does the CEO have to be the visionary? Why can't the product visionary role be supplied by Ive? According to Jobs himself, he 'set things up at Apple so that no one can tell Jony what to do'. It seems like Ive could have taken the CEO desk after Steve passed if that's what he wanted but because he isn't interested in doing the dog and pony stuff instead they came up with this dual split where Jony focuses on Products and Tim does all the stuff Tim did as COO and temp CEO when Steve was sick and it just so happens that Tim's nameplate says CEO and Jony's says CDO.

I think the problem is that Tim is too focused on cost effectiveness and hasn't learned to reign in Jony and company which seem to not give a flip about UI and software. To them it seems software should "just work" without any effort on quality assurance. Seriously, either Jony needs to step down from being the big boss on the whole visionary stuff or pushed out. I love his hardware design but I really am hating his software decisions and choices.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com