There may be disagreement over whether Tim Cook’s Apple is a more predictable, less interesting one than Steve Jobs’ Apple, but one thing that’s for certain is that Cook has enjoyed a heckuva rise to power.
In a new video created by the U.K.’s Telegraph newspaper, a 90-second recap of Cook’s career so far shows how he went from a kid growing up in Alabama to the head of the world’s most valuable tech company, with a net worth of $785 million.
Check it out below.
The operations wizard
To my mind, Tim Cook has always closest resembled John Sculley, the CEO who ran Apple for a ten-year stretch from 1983 to 1993.
In late 1992, when Sculley was nearing the end of his time at Apple, he had greatly increased profitability and sales volume — giving Apple then-enormous cash reserves of $2 billion. Cook, too, has overseen a period of great growth for Apple’s top product: in this case the iPhone.
Like Sculley, he also came from a world of more establishment big business: in Sculley’s case, Pepsi-Cola and IBM for Tim Cook.
Neither had Steve Jobs’ product vision, but Sculley’s Newton MessagePad and Tim Cook’s Apple Watch were promising new form factors, which initially struggled to match up to the revolutionary products that had come before. (Although the Newton ultimately became one of my favorite Apple products in history.)
Finally, both were far more involved with politics than Steve Jobs. In fact, through a quirk of fate, both Sculley and Cook were considered as potential vice-presidents for possible Clinton administrations: Bill for Sculley and Cook for Hillary.
Do you think Tim Cook has been a good CEO for Apple? Leave your comments below.
Source: Telegraph
