As long as stock profit is the only goal then Tim Cook is the correct CEO for Apple. Bribing the president publicly and doing what ever is required to keep the cash flowing in the short term is what share holders want.
Unfortunately. Once the money does run out, and they do get someone with Vision, then that Vision takes years to realize, so there would be a big slump in products/money where they could just collapse.
Usually it is a competitor that comes up with the new vision.
Maybe Apple is so big it just buys other people vision.
Are there any great examples where having a non-product-focused CEO has left the company in a good competitive position after 10-15 years?
IBM is now notorious for having over invested in services in the 90s/00s and thus ceded their previous technical/product expertise.
Similarly, HP bifurcated itself into product and not-product divisions.
DEC is a weird case. Both Olsen and Palmer were arguably product people, but also missed major shift in the market (personal computing and x86 ISA consolidation, respectively).