Cook was palatable to both Wall Street and Apple employees while SJ was on medical leave. IMO, he's passed the test already. Everyone was willing to accept him then, back when there was serious doubt about whether Jobs would return after his leave. So there's no reason why they wouldn't be willing to accept him in a genuine succession event.
Seems to me that the post doesn't fully address the most important fact: "He cannot be replaced..." Gruber takes the paragraph to points about what Jobs' absence will do to the stock, and then takes the rest of the post to talk about the sourcing of the story and who might eventually replace him, but those strike me as ancillary issues at best.
Jobs can't really be replaced, can he? Certainly Apple will continue to make heaps of money for the forseeable future, but without Jobs, the company will lose its essential nature. How can it not?
If Jobs has really, truly done it right this time, he won't need to be replaced. Cook, Forstall, Ive, and Schiller are obviously people he trusts with his life's work. Time will tell how good his choice of stewards was, but given that he learned the hard way nearly three decades ago, I'd say the odds are in his favor.
Jobs can be replaced, he's not some magical being, he's a person making decisions and he isn't doing it all by himself.
He probably won't be replaced (at least not completely by one person) but -- and this again ties back to the Apple University effort -- it will be even more impressive if the crux of what makes Jobs/Apple great is successfully imprinted on dozens or hundreds of Apple execs and engineers.
Jobs actually is sort of magical, at least at Apple. One thing Jobs has that will be hard to replicate is that fact that he's Steve Jobs. His decision is final and adored. Forstall or Cook won't try an end run to try to make something happen and hope that with enough corporate backing they can put Jobs's back against the wall. Won't happen. With any other CEO it could.
It's not just the decisions that Jobs makes that are important, but the fact that a decision coming from Jobs means something to every employee at Apple.
Ive+Forstall are within a couple of orders of magnitude from Jobs (the only people who are even in the neighborhood of reverence). But the fact that they're two people, with two egos will probably mean that the two together as the visionary aspects of the company won't be as unified as a single Jobs.
You're correct, but I think this also is why it needs to be Cook.
Essentially, Apple is a one product company. That product is "the mac". The "mac" comes in the form of a combination of software and hardware. OS X on Macintoshes is the past, iOS on iDevices is the future. All of that is Forstall (if I'm understanding things right.) And even then, the hardware is merely the box for the software. They make a very great box.
But Forstall is the "new jobs" in that regard. Ive can demand that it have fewer buttons, and Schiller can demand that marketing be on message, and Forstall has to listen to them, and if he doesn't then Cook should have their backs. Cook is thus well placed to be the "vision guy" (and yes, I think that is a legitimate description and that he'd be just as good as jobs at it) whose got his finger on the daily operations but also is looking 5, 10 & 15 years into the future.
Apple University is the glue that holds these four guys together and keeps them on the same page. Plus, of course, The Writings of The Chairman from Jobs over the years.
In fact, I would bet good money that there literally is a book within Apple, that probably only has a dozen or fewer copies, written by Jobs about the Apple Way and presenting his vision for the Apple Way. In a way, his living will to the future.
I think this book is Apple's equivalent to Cokes "secret formula", only Apple doesn't trumpet that they have a secret formula, they keep even the existence of it secret.
Tim Cook's function at Apple is to take care of all the shit Steve doesn't want to be burdened with because Steve wants to spend all day obsessing on small product details like removing unneeded buttons. Steve is a designer. Jon Ive is a designer. Tim Cook afaik is not a designer. Who's going to take the prototype home and obsess over the tiniest details?
That's essentially why Cook will be the new CEO. No one will accept a "new Steve Jobs" in the Steve Jobs role, so trying to foist a new Steve Jobs onto the company -- and into the public eye -- would be an exercise in futility. People would rebel. People would doubt. People would question this person's every move. One slip-up or bad quarter, and people would be calling for his head; analysts would be publishing lengthy diatribes about how Apple had lost its way. Etc.
Apple has some amazing designers and engineers in the likes of Ive, Forstall, etc. It doesn't need to promote one of them to the top spot in order to extract the genius from them.
This is why Cook wins by default. He's a CEO Wall Street and employees will accept, and nobody's expecting him to have a Jobsian design aesthetic or artistic vision. But they're expecting his lieutenants to carry that torch while he keeps everyone and everything unified.
It depends on your definition of "product", but most would classify the iPhone as a different category of product from a mac, not just a different product. As different as a minicomputer is from a desktop. I think before long we'll see Apple launch yet another new category.
Even if we forget the special talents of Steve Jobs, most companies go downhill without their founder/s. Probably HP most famously. It's partly that others lack the unique clout of founder, as kenjackson says. In addition, founders tend to be insightful, energetic and bold (else they couldn't have succeeded as founders). Employees generally don't have that crazy extreme fire, or they'd be founders themselves.
But Jobs is unique beyond that, because it's rare for even founders to create more than one dominating industry. Jobs has done it with the Apple IIe, iPod, iPhone and iPad. It's that he can see what's important; and can make it happen.
I think his design talent/taste is in addition to this, and while yet another unique talent in its own right (and related), is not quite as important.
I mean, yeah, I get that that's the hope, but I'm not sure I buy the idea that a collection of individuals even as talented and capable as those can really replace someone with as singular a vision and fierce a personality as Jobs. I'm sure they'll be able to run the company, but I just don't see Apple maintaining its place as market-inventing thought-leader, or at least not to the same degree.
Jobs is a time teller. He can look up at the heavens, see the positioning of the stars in the industry and tell you exactly what the time is and for what. It's extremely rare for such time tellers to exist, and it's doubtful anyone exactly like Jobs will ever come along.
However, for any great company to stand the test of time it needs to answer the question who tells the time after the time-teller is gone? That's why a company built to last is like a clock. It is a part of the ethos and the system for it to tell the time, and that's the bit that makes all of the difference.
So, if he has spent the last decade making a clock, then Apple will survive him and the loss of Tim Cook, Ive, Schiller and almost anyone you think is crucial to Apple's success, because the ability to predict and act on those predictions would have been built into the structure of Apple itself.
