I don't think there is a more hallmark visionary CEO than Jobs, and Apple isn't exactly doing poorly today.

Maybe the veneer isn't there, but it's very hard to make the case that Apple has in any way failed following the loss of him. Cook was pretty mediocre, and it shows that when you have a strong ship sailing, you just need a "not total idiot" to keep it going.

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linguae 13 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The counterpart is the state of Apple after Steve Jobs left in 1985. Apple was in dire straits when Steve Jobs returned in December 1996. Granted, Jobs wasn't CEO in 1985, but as co-founder, he had tremendous influence over Apple, though he didn't have absolute power; he left due to losing a power struggle against John Sculley and Apple's board.

I'm also reminded about the state of HP once the founders retired. My understanding is that John Young and Lewis Platt preserved the HP Way. However, Platt's successor, Carly Fiorina, moved the company far away from the HP Way, and HP hasn't been the same since.

This is a sad time for NVIDIA. I hope NVIDIA is blessed to get a Platt and not a Fiorina.

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saturn8601 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I think you are not giving enough credit to Cook. He trained under Jobs and is a world titan when it comes to supply chain. He is not some mumbo jumbo marketing/sales guy. Yes under his leadership Apple released some bad bets but he deliberately invested in a vision that Jobs created and spent years teaching him. This couldn't have been sustained post Jobs death unless Cook continued to instill the culture Jobs had created. Else you wouldn't attract the people needed to create marvels like their CPUs.

If someone else that wasn't directly trained by Jobs for years was hired, i'd argue that the culture would start to falter because one thing slides somewhere, then another, then another an soon enough 'A players' don't want to sacrifice their core years at a company that isn't instilling the values they want to work under. Cook himself almost went down that path with his budding career at Compaq. His family thought he was nuts to leave the growing company for Apple of all places. They didn't see the values that Cook saw in Jobs.

	▲	WarmWash 10 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Cook was a good CEO. Definitely A tier. I don't think that Nvidias board will have any problem though finding an A tier CEO to run the company. They probably will not get an S-tier visionary, but mature companies with deeply established roots don't necessarily need that like nascent companies do.

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linuxftw 14 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Hard disagree. Jobs polished things that already existed. They were never on the bleeding edge of hardware design and manufacturing when it comes to actual performance and capability.

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WarmWash 13 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Right, and he had the knowledge to know that consumers don't care about that stuff. So we got iPhones with excellent usability instead of windows phones with HD displays.

	▲	linuxftw 13 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Building products for consumers and building products for engineers are seemingly not the same endeavor. I loved having physical buttons and a keyboard on the early smart phones. They were proper communication devices. Now they are consumer devices.

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kridsdale1 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Hard disagree with your disagree.

Apple was saved because it abandoned all its pre-1997 software and adopted NEXTSTEP, which Jobs created.

	▲	linuxftw 9 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Jobs used Free software to build NEXTSTEP.

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lavp 13 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Tim Cook was a lot more than just “not a total idiot”