Tim Cook is Leaving. Good.
27th April 2026
There’s a passage in Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs that gets quoted less than the famous ones. Jobs talked about how great companies die, and his theory was that the rot has nothing to do with competition or markets or innovation cycles. The rot starts when the salespeople end up running the company.
He named names. He pointed at IBM under John Akers. He pointed at Microsoft under Ballmer. He even pointed at the Sculley era of his own Apple as the cautionary tale. The phrase Jobs kept circling back to was that the people running these companies eventually “have no conception of a good product versus a bad product.” They can’t tell the difference. They can run a supply chain better than anyone alive, but they couldn’t tell you whether the radius on a button looks right.
That’s not a small criticism. That’s the founder of Apple, on the record, naming the disease and warning the company against catching it.
Then, in 2011, Apple promoted its head of operations to CEO.
I’m not saying Cook was a bad pick at the time. He was the right person to keep the trains running while everyone caught their breath after losing Steve. But fifteen years later it’s worth asking the question Steve himself would have asked. What kind of products are we shipping now?