Business Insider: Tim Cook has not had a hit product
November 29, 2018 by Steven M. Peters
But only if you dismiss Apple Watch as a “minor hit” and ignore AirPods entirely.
Posted Wednesday by Troy Wolverton with the subhead: Under Satya Nadella, Microsoft has found its next act. Tim Cook’s Apple is still searching for one.
But in truth, the concerns about Cook are longstanding. Apple is a product company, but Cook, as Jobs so memorably told his biographer shortly before he died, “is not a product person.” He’s great at operations. He’s proven to be a good manager, but he’s no product visionary.
It’s not that Cook hasn’t tried. In fact, he’s repeatedly attempted to broaden Apple’s business with new products. For years, he’s pushed iPads as Apple’s next big product line. Apple launched the Apple Watch under his leadership. The company’s made major investments in automobiles, television, augmented reality, and streaming media under his direction.
But little of that has paid off — or, at least, nothing’s been a big enough hit to make Apple noticeably less dependent on the iPhone. After an initial boom, iPad sales declined, then stagnated. The Apple Watch has been a minor hit at best. Apple TV has never been more than a self-described “hobby” for the company.
My take: That last paragraph had to twist itself into a pretzel, misread Apple’s revenue stream and suffer a memory lapse to make it to a full stop.
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