Apple's chief executive officer Tim Cook has done a very revealing interview with Bloomberg Businessweek in which he discussed a wide range of topics. Tim spoke about his love for Apple, the departure of Scott Forstall and manufacturing products in the US.
Here is some of what he had to say:
Tim Cook on Life after Steve at Apple
[quote] Bloomberg Businessweek: How has Apple changed since Oct. 5, 2011?
The first thing to realize is that all the things that have made Apple (AAPL) so special are the same as they have always been. That doesn’t mean that Apple is the same. Apple has changed every day since I have been here. But the DNA of the company, the thing that makes our heart beat, is a maniacal focus on making the best products in the world. Not good products, or a lot of products, but the absolute best products in the world.
In creating these great products we focus on enriching people’s lives—a higher cause for the product. These are the macro things that drive the company. They haven’t changed. They’re not changing. I will not witness or permit those changes because that’s what makes the company so special.[/quote]
Tim Cook on fame:
[quote] I don’t feel famous. You know, I lead a simple life. My life is incredibly simple. But what’s changed is that, yeah, people recognize me. They may think, “I have seen him before. You know, the CEO of Apple” or whatever. And so it has been a bit of adjustment for me, because for years I had the privilege of being anonymous. There is a great privilege in that if you’re a private person. So it’s a bit different. I love Apple deeply, and I’m having the time of my life. Obviously, if I could rewind the clock, Steve would still be here. He was a dear friend—much more than a boss. But I love being CEO of Apple. I love it. It’s just something I have to, and continue to, adjust to. If you have some ideas there of how I can do it better, I would love to hear it.[/quote]
Tim Cook on Customers' passion for the company:
[quote] Is there another company in the world where their customers care so much they do this? I don’t think there is. Other companies I’ve worked at, you might get a letter every six months, and it was, you know, “I want my money back,” or something sort of terse. There was no emotion in it. So I think this is really something incredible.
It’s one of the things that I knew about Apple even back 15 years ago when I was in the interview process with Steve. Apple was this company going through all of these hard times. Customers got angry with Apple and would yell and scream—but they would keep buying. If they got mad at Compaq they would just buy from Dell (DELL). There was no emotion there. It was a transaction.
With Apple, my first day at work I crossed a picket line to get in the building! There was a picket line of customers who were protesting, because Steve had decided to kill the Newton device. And it was because they cared so deeply about it. And I thought, “This is amazing.” I still remember it like it was yesterday. I was walking to the lift that day and thinking, “Oh my God, my life is different.” It was so great. It was so great. You know, I have been involved in hundreds of new product announcements, hundreds of product withdrawals. At one of the companies I worked at, not to mention any names, we’d put [new products] in the lobby. We’d get on the employee intercom system and say, “Come look at them,” and nobody came. They didn’t even care.[/quote]
Tim Cook on the team at Apple:
[quote] As I look around the table at the executive team, arguably, at least in my opinion, we have the best designer in the world, the top silicon expert in the world, the best operational executive in the world, and the best leaders in marketing, software, hardware, and services. These are people that have very high standards that are driven to do things beyond what other people have thought. And I think it’s that ambition and that desire and that thrust for excellence that make creating new things even more likely.[/quote]
Tim Cook on Creativity:
[quote] Two things. One, I wouldn’t call it a process. Creativity is not a process, right? It’s people who care enough to keep thinking about something until they find the simplest way to do it. They keep thinking about something until they find the best way to do it. It’s caring enough to call the person who works over in this other area, because you think the two of you can do something fantastic that hasn’t been thought of before. It’s providing an environment where that feeds off each other and grows.
So just to be clear, I wouldn’t call that a process. Creativity and innovation are something you can’t flowchart out. Some things you can, and we do, and we’re very disciplined in those areas. But creativity isn’t one of those. A lot of companies have innovation departments, and this is always a sign that something is wrong when you have a VP of innovation or something. You know, put a for-sale sign on the door.
Everybody in our company is responsible to be innovative, whether they’re doing operational work or product work or customer service work. So in terms of the pressure, all of us put a great deal of pressure on ourselves. And yes, part of my job is to be a cheerleader, and getting people to stop for a moment and think about everything that’s been done.[/quote]
Tim Cook on Forstall departure:
[quote] The key in the change that you’re referencing is my deep belief that collaboration is essential for innovation—and I didn’t just start believing that. I’ve always believed that. It’s always been a core belief at Apple. Steve very deeply believed this.
So the changes—it’s not a matter of going from no collaboration to collaboration. We have an enormous level of collaboration in Apple, but it’s a matter of taking it to another level. You look at what we are great at. There are many things. But the one thing we do, which I think no one else does, is integrate hardware, software, and services in such a way that most consumers begin to not differentiate anymore. They just care that the experience is fantastic.
Jony [Ive, senior vice president of industrial design], who I think has the best taste of anyone in the world and the best design skills, now has responsibility for the human interface. I mean, look at our products. (Cook reaches for his iPhone.) The face of this is the software, right? And the face of this iPad is the software. So it’s saying, Jony has done a remarkable job leading our hardware design, so let’s also have Jony responsible for the software and the look and feel of the software, not the underlying architecture and so forth, but the look and feel.[/quote]
Tim Cook on competing tablets:
[quote] Again, if you look at our North Star, we’re focused on making the best products, so ours is very product-centric. We care about every detail. We’re also marrying hardware, software, and services. If you think about Android, it’s more like the Windows PC model. The operating system comes from company A. Company B is doing some integration work, and maybe the services come from yet somewhere else. I think we know the kind of customer experience that produces.
In fact, there are all these tablets that have come out—there were a lot of tablets that came out last year as well—and the usage of them appears to be very low. Certainly the data that I’m seeing suggests—and this is all third-party data—that over 90 percent of the Web-browsing traffic from tablets are from iPad. You may have seen the data over the weekend from IBM (IBM) that was Black Friday sales that showed the iPad was used in more e-commerce transactions than any other device. And that’s more than all Android devices combined, tablets and smartphones.
Since these statistics do not correlate with unit sales, it suggests to me that the iPad user experience is so far above the competition. The iPad has become a part of their lives, instead of a product that they buy and place in a drawer. And so the advantage for us in having some competition is the more products that are out there, the more attention a category gets. The more attention the category gets, the more people that are in the buying and consideration process. I think that’s actually good for us.[/quote]
Tim Cook on whether Apple focused a corporate strategy rather than user experience with Maps:
[quote] No. No, it’s not how I would characterize it. I would characterize—well, let me back up for a minute. The reason we did Maps is we looked at this, and we said, “What does the customer want? What would be great for the customer?” We wanted to provide the customer turn-by-turn directions. We wanted to provide the customer voice integration. We wanted to provide the customer flyover. And so we had a list of things that we thought would be a great customer experience, and we couldn’t do it any other way than to do it ourselves.[/quote]
Tim Cook on manufacturing products in the US:
[quote] It’s not known well that the engine for the iPhone and iPad is made in the U.S., and many of these are also exported—the engine, the processor. The glass is made in Kentucky. And next year we are going to bring some production to the U.S. on the Mac. We’ve been working on this for a long time, and we were getting closer to it. It will happen in 2013. We’re really proud of it. We could have quickly maybe done just assembly, but it’s broader because we wanted to do something more substantial. So we’ll literally invest over $100 million. This doesn’t mean that Apple will do it ourselves, but we’ll be working with people, and we’ll be investing our money.[/quote]
Tim Cook on Steve Jobs:
[quote] More so than any person I ever met in my life, he had the ability to change his mind, much more so than anyone I’ve ever met. He could be so sold on a certain direction and in a nanosecond (Cook snaps his fingers) have a completely different view. (Laughs.) I thought in the early days, “Wow, this is strange.” Then I realized how much of a gift it was. So many people, particularly, I think, CEOs and top executives, they get so planted in their old ideas, and they refuse or don’t have the courage to admit that they’re now wrong. Maybe the most underappreciated thing about Steve was that he had the courage to change his mind. And you know—it’s a talent. It’s a talent. So, anyway.[/quote]
Source: Bloomberg Businessweek
