With Jeff Williams overtaking product deign following Jony Ive’s announced departure from Apple, it’s safe to assume that Williams is not only Apple’s second in command now, but also the CEO-in-waiting. If Tim Cook wants Williams to lead the company one day, this day should be not too far ahead, considering that Williams is about the same age as Cook. Regardless, Ive’s departure marks the end of an era at Apple — or rather, it highlights that the new Apple has emerged.
Over the last years (Cook has been officially the company’s CEO since August 2011), Apple has grown multiple times, reached $1T market cap, is now shipping more products across different product lines (operating systems included), pushing into services, and software is more important than ever for the company’s future. Navigating this remarkable growth and strategy shift while preserving Apple’s culture has been one of the most challenging jobs, and yet Tim Cook so far has been mostly successful.
From hardware to software and services
Classic Apple we remember has been thriving on the idea of computers being friendly and accessible to everyone. Even before Jony Ive’s tenure, groundbreaking products such as Apple II or the original Macintosh redefined what computers could be. With Jobs’ return to the company in 1997, his partnership with Ive resulted in the clearest expressions of this friendly, evoking emotions design across the 1998’s colorful translucent iMac, 1999’s iBook G3 with the carrying handle, and then iPod, iPhone and iPad.
However, we are moving from the era of adorable industrial design as the selling point of a computer, to the era of computers being sheets of glass, or even invisible chips all around us. As software, services, and voice interfaces increasingly define user experience, the role of industrial design becomes less profound.
It feels that software is getting more power at Apple. Each year WWDC — the software-focused Apple’s event — becomes ever more impressive in turns of what Apple announces, and how it pushes forward all its platforms. While the future of design at Apple is now being questioned by critics, software is firing on all cylinders. This year, Apple significantly advanced all its platforms, while introducing a new one (iPadOS), as well as premiering major new initiatives such as Project Catalyst and SwiftUI. It’s never felt more obvious that software is key to Apple’s future.
And then there are services. Low level technologies and R&D, such as AI and machine learning, are recognized as a strategic direction (hence not only hiring John Giannandrea from Google, but promoting him to SVP shortly after). Media services are officially Apple’s core business as well, between Apple Music, Apple TV+, Apple Arcade, Apple Card and others. Apple wants to participate in our lives and to be a part of global cultural conversation with their services, and it seems that this area is where Tim Cook is personally very invested in.
In the last several years, Tim Cook has lead Apple’s slow and remarkably smooth transition from the company primarilly defined by hardware design, to the company defined by software ecosystem and services, thus making it well positioned for the long term and for the competition with software giants such as Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and Amazon. Hardware, of course, didn’t go anywhere (wearables is a huge bet!) — it has just become one piece of the puzzle, not the bulk of the picture.
Scale
Hardware not only didn’t go anywhere — Apple is now shipping more hardware than ever before. Something that is often missed in the conversation about today’s Apple is what a behemoth scale-wise the company has become compared just to 10–15 years ago.
One of the key criticisms of the Jony Ive’s departure story is that Jeff Williams, the COO (e.g. “the operations guy” as many people think of him), now oversees the design — there are some hot takes about operations overtaking Apple. Indeed, Tim Cook himself used to run Apple’s operations, and there are more people with operations background in Apple’s executive team (for example, Dierdre O’Brien, Retail+People chief, also comes from operations).
But look at numbers. In its fiscal 2007 fourth quarter, Apple shipped 2,16M Macs, 10,2M iPods, and 1,1M iPhones. In the same quarter in 2018 (for YoY comparison fairness), Apple shipped 5,2M Macs, 46,8M iPhones, 9,7M iPads, a few million Watches, and you can add many more accessories to this list. It’s about 5x more units shipped than 11 years ago. Today, Apple maintains 5 primary software platforms, and has a growing roster of globally functioning services. In just 10 years, Apple hired 100,000 full-time employees. The reality is that no company, no matter how brilliant design and product people are, can operate at such an unprecedented scale, while growing so fast, without stellar operations, powerful inside the organization.
As Ben Bajarin noted in his recent piece at Techpinions, while Apple’s scale grew massively over the years, its hardware and industrial design hasn’t become more compromising to accommodate it. Apple is creating as innovative and cutting edge products, using little to zero off-the-shelf components, as ever, but now at a significantly larger scale than a decade ago. This poses massive design and operations challenges, and the only way for any company to succeed at such a level is to fuse design and operations more than ever before.
Looks like appointing Jeff Williams to oversee design is a sign that Tim Cook understands this better than anyone. Cook so far has been massively successful in managing Apple’s breakneck-speed growth and scaling. This is a company existing in a different universe, footprint-wise, compared to Apple of Steve Jobs’ era.
Culture beyond Steve Jobs
One of the most impressive qualities of Cook as a leader is his willingness to trust people, but also to make corrections if some of the bets his people make turn to be miscalculated.
According to the WSJ article, Cook fully supported Jony Ive during the Apple Watch development and went all-in with the fashion angle (including hiring another famed designer Marc Newson, and Angela Ahrendts from Burberry to run retail). It didn’t stop him, however, from letting Jeff Williams course correct and refocus Watch on accessibility and health when $17K Apple Watch Edition made of pure gold didn’t set the world on fire. (I wonder if Ahrendts leaving Apple just before Ive is a coincidence?)
Cook apparently listened to people on the exec team who kept telling him that voice-first interface hype was overblown, and that Siri progressed at exactly the right pace, for years. Cook clearly changed his mind recently, and hiring of John Giannandrea and a major reshuffle of the entire Siri team at Apple is the clear indication.
Tim Cook is very agile, trusts but keeps in check, and is never married to the past dogmas that no longer work for Apple. Giving more power to software and services, as well as to operations, might have made some people unhappy, but this is the only way to stay ahead of the curve. But what is perhaps the most impressive is that Cook introduces all these changes in a way that not only doesn’t break Apple’s culture, but reinforces it.
According to some anecdotes, when Steve Jobs returned to Apple, he decided to transform the company so that it would be able to outlive him and endure for hundreds of years. The only way to do it is to sustain culture that would carry the company through difficult times and paradigm shifts. I believe, the core reason why Jobs left the CEO position to Cook was his belief that Tim understood the role of culture better than anyone.
Tim Cook understands that he is no Jobs — and no person at Apple is Jobs. How does a company that was founded by, lead by, and depended on one genius person, survive after that person is gone? The answer is preservation of the culture of innovation, focus on quality and customer experience, and very high standards throughout all parts of the organization, all while focusing on collaboration and team work. People who didn’t align with this vision — like Scott Forstall — didn’t find their place in Tim Cook’s Apple. Cook’s primary role is in maintaining the structure that would make Apple as little reliant as possible on one single person, be it Jobs, Forstall, or Ive, and critically reliant on collaboration and culture.
Many people doubt that Apple has indeed kept their innovative, brilliant edge under Cook. I’d suggest you look at current products. There have been missteps for sure, but Apple today produces record number of products, most (if not all) of which lead their respective categories, and some of them (iPad, Apple Watch, AirPods) simply have no competition in sight. Company that has lost its design-focused culture can’t be making such products. I think Apple’s mostly great products they make today prove that the culture is still intact, and the fact that it outlived Steve Jobs is one of the greatest achievements of Tim Cook.
