How Tim Cook and Jony Ive Allowed Apple to Survive Steve Jobs but Lost the Company’s Soul.
Apple is no longer the innovative company it was in Steve Jobs' day.
American journalist Tripp Mickle, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, has just published a fascinating essay dedicated to the duo in charge of running Apple after the death of Steve Jobs in October 2011. Entitled “After Steve. How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul”, this book could very well have been called: working in tandem.
Because the prodigious decade that followed the death of Steve Jobs, and that saw Apple become the world's largest company with a record capitalization of 3,000 billion dollars, is to the credit of two men: the CEO, Tim Cook, and the chief designer, Jony Ive.
The first chapters of Tripp Mickle's book, titled The Operator and the Artist, show how much the two successors of Steve Jobs are at odds with each other. The first, Tim Cook, the operator, is a man of figures, an expert in supply chain management. He is also a discreet, rather shy, workaholic, and solitary man. The second, Jony Ive, is the Chief Creative Officer, responsible for the design of the iPod and the iPhone, but he is also a regular on red carpets, close to fashion and rock stars.
The book follows them from the last days of Steve Jobs to the separation of the tandem, in 2019, materialized by the departure of Jony Ive to open his design agency. Over 400 pages, ‘After Steve’ tells in detail the backstage of a group known for its obsession with secrecy, and the challenge of succeeding an outstanding creator.
At first, combining the complementary profiles of Jobs' two most fervent followers might have seemed like a good idea. But for Tripp Mickle, the differences were too great to make for harmonious governance:
“The dissolution of their partnership was inevitable. The two men shared a love for Apple, and not much else.”
Jony Ive, the artist
Of the two, Jony Ive was probably the closest to Jobs. Joining Apple at the age of 25, this son of a suburban London handicraft and design teacher has spent almost half his life (he's fifty-five) at the Cupertino-based company. He designed most of the brand's products over two decades, from the first translucent blue iMac in 1998 to the Apple Watch, released in 2015.
Deeply affected by the death of his boss and mentor, “lost in a desert of grief,” Jony Ive is described as obsessed with preserving his legacy. At first, he will strengthen his power over the company by taking the position of Chief Design Officer, overseeing both hardware and software aspects with an incredible sense of detail. But after the success of the Apple Watch and the failure of the Apple car project (codename: Titan), he will decide to move away, to the point of only coming to the design studio occasionally ... before leaving the group.
On the other hand, Tim Cook, sixty-one years old, is now the undisputed leader. However, when Steve Jobs died, this Alabama-born engineer who had worked for IBM and Compaq seemed far too dull to take on the role of leader, as the book explains:
“While Steve Jobs made instant decisions on instinct, Cook moved slowly and preferred analysis. Some team members found him incapable of making a decision. Others appreciated that he set the course only after gathering information.”
Tim Cook, the operator
Not very comfortable on stage or in public, Cook is unparalleled in his ability to understand how a factory works, orchestrate subcontractors, and cut costs - including practicing tax optimization at a high level. The main architect of Apple's expansion in China, first to manufacture and then to sell iPhones to local consumers, Cook has also profoundly transformed the company, with a strategy that emphasizes services as a source of revenue as strong as products.
Financially, Tim Cook's success is undeniable: even though Apple's capitalization has fallen in recent months to $2.2 trillion, the company continues to post strong results quarter after quarter. But for Tripp Mickle, this has come at the expense of innovation and creativity.
The spirit of Jobs, symbolized by the formula “Be insatiable. Be crazy”, launched to the students of Stanford in 2005, would have disappeared little by little, taking with it, undoubtedly, some of the motivation and “love for Apple” of Jony Ive.
If he often seems to side with Ive and is more critical of Cook, Tripp Mickle's book is paradoxically more like the latter. In the end, Tripp Mickle's book gives the feeling that the two successors of Steve Jobs at the head of Apple missed a chance to create a worthy successor to the iPhone.
The attention to detail and the will to analyze the smallest parts of Apple will certainly delight the fans of the brand, but we can regret that the book doesn't show more craziness... An interesting and well-done book, but not always exciting, a bit like what Apple has become under the Tim Cook era.
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