iOS is behind Apple's present riches and Forstall is the hard ass visionary genius that made that happen. Before that, he was a primary architect on OS X before it was even called OS X. He's the single most important engineer at Apple (since Bertrand Serlet was tossed out last year). To pooh pooh this guy's contributions as many are doing, while celebrating Cook as some great visionary genius is totally absurd.
Cook is a bean counter with no vision. He is very good at bean counting and has a lot of success at it. He is not appropriate as anything more than transitionary CEO for a visionary company.
Replace visionaries with bean counters that have allegiance to the established hierarchical order of bean counters? This works well for commodity companies that sell fizzy sugar water. Will it work for Apple this time around? Last time they went this route with Sculley there were some problems.
Do you have any info about just what Forstall did on OS X back in the day? I can't find much beyond some pretty vague statements, and I don't recall hearing his name at all until iOS started getting attention, while names like Tevanian showed up quite a lot back when Mac OS X was first taking shape.
> This works well for commodity companies that sell fizzy sugar water.
Why can't you just say soda, pop or whatever regional dialect you prefer? I don't understand why any time anyone ever says this it has to phrased in the most condescending way possible.
Because it's highly relevant to the story I was discussing. Jobs had asked Sculley, head of PepsiCo at the time, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life? Or do you want to come with me and change the world?" Sculley then ran Apple from the perspective if his experience at a commodity company, driving the company to the edge of bankruptcy and irrelevance. It worked out well for me, I bought a lot of Apple stock at around $5 a share. But it almost destroyed Apple.
This quote has since been simplified to asking people in technical fields if they want to make fizzy sugar water. Familiarity with this story is widespread in the industry and not an obscure reference, and in this case I wanted to discuss both Jobs, Sculley, Apple, and the result of having a bean counter type person who is excellent at reducing manufacturing costs within a commodity company be in charge of a company whose entire value is based on not being a commodity.
Cooks is no Sculley. The latter was very ineffective as CEO and made huge mistakes such as porting Apple's OS to the PowerPC platform. As such, he was ousted by the board. Cooks is far more capable, and has the advantage of being "home-grown" as opposed to coming from another company.
Cook is a bean counter with no vision. He is very good at bean counting and has a lot of success at it. He is not appropriate as anything more than transitionary CEO for a visionary company.
Replace visionaries with bean counters that have allegiance to the established hierarchical order of bean counters? This works well for commodity companies that sell fizzy sugar water. Will it work for Apple this time around? Last time they went this route with Sculley there were some problems.