Apple shows its ‘massive battleship’ is getting tougher to move::Apple’s $89.5 billion in quarterly revenue is nothing to sneeze at, but it also illustrates some of the challenges of being a mature company.
I think this could have been smelled in the water for a long while. Tim Cook was trusted to steer the rudder but his specialty is supply chain management, and I don’t think anyone can say he’s done a bad job.
But. On the R&D side I don’t think people could say he’s done a great job.
The ideas have dried up. When you go “safe” at CEO you make money, but you limit your ceiling, which, once again, with Apple is already breaking the mold.
Consumer electronics is saturated. There is little to no breakthrough there anymore.
Evolution is outside that, but outside that might not be in Tim Cook or Apple’s executive suite’s realm anymore.
Tim Cook is the perfect captain to keep the ship on a steady course and not rock the boat, but I’m not convinced he is an innovator. I sometimes wonder if Jobs selected Cook as his successor, because Jobs expected to overcome his health problems and return, and wanted Apple in safe pair of hands during his cancer battle.
That said, Apple only appears to be “failing” from the angle of the stock markets obsession with infinite growth. They are still an enormous company with high brand strength and large cash reserves.
Laying it safe on the tried and true products for sure, but there has been a lot of innovation in the Immersive Computing space which really is the next computing platform. We will see when the Vision Pro really comes out as it is far from perfect, but it does seem to innovate in a bunch of ways that are surely to become the industry standard.
