Al Gore: Steve Didn’t Want Apple Asking ‘What Would Jobs Do?’

Questions asking whether Tim Cook could mimic the late CEO Steve Jobs was exactly what the Apple co-founder wanted to avoid, former vice President Al Gore now says. Gore, an Apple board member, said Jobs urged executives: “Don’t ask what Steve would have done.” Instead, the iconic Apple leader said: “Follow your own voice,” Gore recalls.

Instead, Jobs promoted “cultivating a team” able to cooperate and continue operating Apple after he left, according to Gore. “Everyone on that management team could be CEO of a world-class corporation,” Gore told an audience at the Wall Street Journal’s AsiaD technology conference.

On other matters, Gore has little confidence AT&T’s proposed acquisition of T-Mobile USA will survive Justice Department objections. “My guess is that the Justice Department so rarely undertakes an initiative like the one they took against that merger. I think it’ll be hard to overturn that measure. Both companies will try to put it back together, but they’d be well advised to start looking at other strategies, Gore commented.”

The U.S. Justice Department argues the $39 billion proposed purchase of one carrier by another would “substantially lessen competition” and violates antitrust law.

Ed Sutherland

Ed Sutherland is a veteran technology journalist who first heard of Apple when they grew on trees, Yahoo was run out of a Stanford dorm and Google was an unknown upstart. Since then, Sutherland has covered the whole technology landscape, concentrating on tracking the trends and figuring out the finances of large (and small) technology companies.