Tim Cook’s defining moment as Apple CEO

“How Mr Cook and his team respond to the iPhone’s current crisis will reveal exactly what kind of business Apple is becoming as it approaches its 43rd birthday,” Tim Bradshaw writes for the Financial Times.
“Is the company that hired the former chiefs of Burberry and Yves Saint Laurent really a fashion brand, selling affordable luxury but subject to the whims of fickle consumers? Can it turn its services business — which generated $10.8bn in revenues in the past quarter — into a new engine of growth, in a transformation similar to the one that propelled Microsoft to supplant Apple as the world’s most valuable company?” Bradshaw asks. “Or is it just another hardware company such as Nokia or BlackBerry, as naysayers have long predicted?”
“‘This is going to be Tim Cook’s defining moment as CEO,’ said Michael Gartenberg, a former director of marketing at Apple who now works as an independent tech analyst. ‘It’s easy being Apple CEO when everything is going right and firing on all cylinders. This is the time we will see Tim Cook really be tested,'” Bradshaw writes. “Seven years into his tenure as chief executive, Mr Cook can claim several meaningful milestones, including briefly turning Apple into the first trillion-dollar company. But he has not succeeded in lessening Apple’s dependence on the iPhone — arguably reflecting a misplaced bet that the smartphone could generate even more revenues through higher prices, even as absolute volume growth slowed… Critics say the current line-up is both expensive and confusing, with too little differentiation between the $750 iPhone XR and $1,000 XS.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Good luck, Tim!
And when your SVP of marketing is naming your most important products after “fast cars,” your SVP of Internet Software and Services is falling asleep in Siri meetings, and your Chief Design Officer (over whom you obviously have no control and who is totally unaccountable) seems more obsessed over Apple Park door handles than designing an Apple TV remote that actually works well for users – or, God forbid, a Mac Pro that actually works for professional Mac users and that isn’t FIVE+ YEARS OLD – you sure as hell are going to need all the luck you can get.
Old, tired, wildly-overpaid, far-too-comfortable blood with misplaced priorities kills companies.
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