The author | Xiao man
Edited | Anna Qin
WeChat public number: slightly larger reference (ID: hyzibenlun)
On October 4, 2011, Apple's autumn new product launch, Tim Cook, dressed in blue jeans and dark gray shirt, walked onto the podium of Apple's "City Hall". This is the first time since he became ceo of Apple that he has participated in a product launch as a keynote speaker.
His nervousness was palpable, he said two words of "Good morning" and began pacing back and forth on the podium, telling apple's achievements in a flat and straightforward way.
The seats on the far right of the first row were labeled "Reserved", but no one sat on them until the end of the conference. The seat was reserved for Jobs.
The next day, the news of Jobs's death swept the news pages of major media around the world.
The next day, Cook's gentle and low-pitched speech style was criticized by the tech media.
If it weren't for Apple, Tim Cook, an "Alabama boy" from a family of dockyard workers, wouldn't have the attention it has today. He has a quiet personality, has worked with supply chains for most of his career, and is a manager who pays attention to operational efficiency.
But in his ten years as CEO of Apple, he has received too much scrutiny. Every time Apple's new product launch, Cook has to experience the moment of being questioned and compared. The outside world tried to find Jobs in him, and quickly denied that he was like Jobs. "If Steve Jobs had been around, it wouldn't have happened" became an abusive assessment.
Amid many scrutiny and doubts, Cook has taken Apple to another business peak, with annual revenue growth of 3.5 times and the company's market value doubling 7 times, becoming the world's most valuable company.
Jobs gave the outside world a taste of the creative beauty of the combination of humanities and technology, and Cook injected the beauty of management and operational efficiency into Apple. As Buffett, Apple's second-largest shareholder, said: Cook can't do Jobs's step creatively, and Jobs may not be as good as Cook in management.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="29" >01 Squeeze toothpaste innovation</h1>
"I'm not going to play those buzzwords, I'm just calling them augmented reality (AR)."
Recently, when asked by Time Magazine about the "metaverse", Apple CEO Tim Cook's answer was rather understated.
When technology companies shouted slogans such as "new energy car" and "building a meta-universe", Cook still launched a new generation of iPhone 13 in this autumn.
As always, the disruptive innovations that people expected did not arrive.
Although this is just a "modified and enhanced version" of the iPhone 12, the iPhone 13 has sparked a familiar rush to buy.
In Cook's body, it always reveals the undertone of a conservative. Ten years at the helm of Apple, no epoch-making product was born, and the iPhone is still the most concerned and sought after product. But Apple has not only completed the independent research and development of A-series chips and M-series chips, but also boosted the market value from $400 billion to nearly 2.5 trillion today.
Cook did many things to make Apple stronger, more profitable, and more vibrant.
At Apple's new product launch in 2014, Cook wore white headphones in the backstage of the Flint Center and listened to OneRepublic's "I Lived" on his iPhone to encourage himself: "I hope you are brave and don't have to be afraid of the feeling of falling... Hope that crowd shouts loudly and shouts your name. ”
That day Apple released its first large-screen phone, the iPhone 6, and a new product, the Apple Watch, two products with Cook-style innovations.
iPhone 6 for the first time using a thin and light body and a large screen, the color matching is also more bold, one of the color matching of the local luxury gold, became the most popular color matching of the year. You know, in the Jobs era, the iPhone has always had only two colors, black and white.
Jobs, who believed in minimalism, felt that any superfluous color was a destruction of the design aesthetic, and the small screen was also the most suitable scale that Jobs had always insisted on. In a sense, Cook, who pays more attention to the needs of users, chose to embrace large-screen mobile phones and did something that Jobs would never have done before he died.
The Apple Watch is Cook's first product, a new product area, which Cook sees as a landmark product that is ready to disrupt the traditional watch and smart wear industry.
In the end, the iPhone 6 series of mobile phones set a historical record for Apple's best-selling products, with more than 340 million units sold worldwide, and no Apple model can break it so far.
During Cook's ten years at the helm of Apple, the iPhone launched a total of 28 phones. From the iPhone 4s to the iPhone 13, from the home button small screen to the bangs full screen, from a single lens to a bath master triple camera, from the A5 processor jumped to the A15.
Of course, Cook's way of constantly developing new colors, fiddling with camera arrangements, and "refining" the size of the bangs has also been criticized as a toothpaste-style innovation.
But none of the 28 new iPhones have a product that is seriously left behind. The Apple Watch to AirPods that Cook participated in the development of, although not an epoch-making product, are also the most recognizable and sold products in the same category.
A lot of people don't like the big conservative, small innovative Cook. Born in a family of workers in the southern United States, this professional manager grew up in a conservative environment, majored in engineering and business in college, and formed a rational, efficient and rigorous operation management style in his work. However, it was the recalcitrant Tim Cook who led Apple to become the first trillion-dollar commercial company in history in 2018.
In the decade since he took over Apple, he has been practicing the product innovations that belong to Cook "extremely slowly" and "without losing the opportunity".
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="152" >02 Reinforced iron bones</h1>
The biggest attempt Cook led Apple to make was to get into the services business, not hardware devices. This list is growing every year: Apple Music, Apple Pay, Apple News Plus, Apple Credit Card, Apple Arcade, Apple TV Plus, and other services.
Apple made a smooth transition from hardware-driven to service-driven, entering a business that could never have been dreamed of in Jobs's time, but was considered crucial to consolidating Apple's ecosystem.
So, whether it's spring or fall, the percentage of third-party stagers at Apple's two annual extravaganzas is increasing year by year, and the outside world has seen Microsoft's vice president show up to demonstrate the experience of the Office suite on the iPad Pro , which is also the biggest competitor to the Surface — and Adobe has become "Good Friend" again, and Flash's history of being expelled by Apple's entire range of products seems to have been "shelved controversy and co-development", not to mention the one who once had the "slate controversy and co-development". IBM, which was metaphorically referred to as the "Big Brother" in the 1984 classic ad, appeared alongside Cisco on Apple's list of strategic partners.
The efficacy of the hardware itself is to provide the ability to implement, and as for how to achieve it, that is the work of the software alliance camp. Apple under Cook's leadership is softer and more inclusive, and has more support from partners. It is reflected in the increase in revenue, the App Store's total revenue in 2020 reached $64 billion, and the power of the "Apple tax" can be seen.
Unlike Jobs, Cook placed a high value on the Chinese market.
Jobs never visited China in his lifetime, but he traveled to Japan many times to ask about Zen Buddhism, and his industrial design aesthetics and product system concept were largely inspired and influenced by Japanese culture.
An apple executive once said: "Apple's problems in China are rooted in Jobs, who has never been to China once." In his mind, the Chinese market is even inferior to Malaysia. ”
But since becoming Ceo of Apple, Cook has visited China several times almost every year to find key ways to open up the Chinese market.
Some media have made Apple's efforts to sinicize "flattering", and there are many examples. For example, the iOS9 system, which was launched in 2015, launched the "Pingfang" font designed for Chinese users for the first time.
Launched in 2016, the iPhone7, its intelligent voice assistant Siri supports Didi Taxi, iMessage allows access to dianping, and for the first time launched the "China Red" color matching.
In the new iPhone released in 2018, Apple implemented the dual-SIM dual-standby function for the first time, of which the iPhone XS Max and iPhone XR only support dual-SIM dual-standby physical card slots in China.
Of course, Cook's efforts paid off accordingly.
When he first took over as CEO, the iPhone had not yet been released by the National Bank of China, and Cook said at the fourth quarter of 2011 earnings conference: "We underestimated the Chinese market, and we did not do enough." ”
On July 30 this year, Apple announced the third quarter of fiscal 2020 as of the end of June 2020, which showed that Apple achieved revenue of $14.76 billion in Greater China this quarter, an increase of 58% year-on-year.
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In 2012, ABC's special Show Nightline and The New York Times published an investigative report on Foxconn's working conditions, which dealt Apple a huge blow.
In Foxconn's factories, workers work six days a week, often in shifts of 12 hours a day, for less than $20 a day, the survey notes. Most of the workers live in extremely overcrowded, air-conditioned dormitories, and there are even child laborers.
In the Jobs era, criticism from Foxconn employees jumping off buildings also occurred from time to time, but Jobs has always ignored these voices.
Cook, who was at the center of the storm of public opinion, decided to act immediately, and he promoted the establishment of 360 "remedial action guidelines" covering matters that need to be amended, such as worker safety, compensation and work conditions.
Under the positive statement of Cook's many occasions, the negative public opinion about Apple was gradually calmed, but this is also a microcosm of Cook's leadership of Apple for ten years.
In the past decade, Apple has faced various unexpected social difficulties, but it is the flexible Cook that has dragged Apple out of the shoal again and again, turning the unicorn company, which was once known for innovation, into a more mainstream commercial technology company.
For example, in the 2016 San Bernardino shooting, Apple defended against a court order asking it to assist the FBI in unlocking it. In the dilemma of "protecting personal privacy" or "supporting terrorists", Cook finally firmly chose the former and won the support of a considerable number of American public.
Cook, who loves wilderness activities, attaches great importance to green energy and sustainable development. In 2013, he hired Lisa Jackson, a former director of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, to work on Apple's environmental programs. Apple has partnered with the Nature Conservancy to help protect more than 36,000 acres of forest in the United States.
At Apple's shareholder meeting in 2014, Cook was rarely "mad" due to environmental problems. Shareholders asked Cook what the return on investment in removing harmful chemicals would bring, saying: "I will not pursue a 'bloody' return on investment, if you want me to focus only on profits, then you get rid of the stock as soon as possible!" ”
In addition, Cook has made in-depth reforms to Apple's environmental policy and sustainability programs. They launched Liam and Daisy, two robots that disassemble parts of their equipment, hoping to reduce carbon emissions by recycling materials to create new products.
Apple has set a goal of being carbon neutral for all of its footprint by 2030. Last year, Apple achieved 100% carbon neutrality across all of its operations. Achieve low-carbon design of products in terms of efficient use of materials, low-carbon alternatives, and improved product energy efficiency. The new iPhone also uses a lot of recycled materials.
At the same time, Apple has made great efforts to increase the proportion of female and minority employees, which account for about 30%. Apple's "2020-2021 Apple China Corporate Responsibility Report" mentioned that the proportion of female managers in Apple's Greater China region reached 40%.
As a professional manager, Cook also did what Jobs would never have done as an investor manager.
In March 2012, Apple officially announced that it would pay dividends to shareholders at the beginning of the fiscal year, initially set at $2.65 per share, which was the first dividend paid by Apple since 1995.
This decision is almost contrary to Jobs's thinking before his death, because in his view, it will make Apple lose its favorable equity structure, but in Cook's view, only by allowing more investors to share the benefits can apple's development be stabilized, which is in line with the world trend of corporate reform.
Cook not only promoted dividends, but also revived the charity project that Jobs was called off after he returned to apple. The project stipulates that Apple will donate an equal amount of money as long as employees' charitable donations do not exceed $10,000.
The cautious Cook has iterated in small steps in product innovation, but in terms of corporate culture and values, there is no conservative and step-by-step implementation of Jobs's approach. On the contrary, cook, who acted low-key, did a lot of things that Jobs would never have done in his lifetime. He turned Apple from a pioneering brand loved by tech enthusiasts into a popular high-end consumer product.
Looking back ten years later, Cook's greatest achievement is to make Apple a more recognizable symbol than "Jobs".