With the withdrawal of Steve Jobs as Apple CEO, the new head of the company is faced with the question: “Is Tim Cook aggressive enough to push the company to market segments that Apple has not touched?”, writes the American newspaper The New York Times. Investors are at the moment on the new Apple’s leadership side, company’s shares recording a decrease of only 0.65% last week. The first major challenge for Cook will be to advance Apple plans on the digital video market. Apple is working on a new technology to distribute video content on TV the launch of a subscription TV service is in discussion, according to several sources familiar with Apple’s plans. Unlike the digital music market, where Apple has the iPod with leadership, fighting on the online video market is fierce, and Apple will face a highly competitive battle.
Even if Cook will be willing to risk as much as Jobs, the company board will examine its movements more carefully. “Tim Cook will be highly motivated and will make logical moves, but Apple will not make the same leaps that it during the tenure of Steve Jobs”, said George Colony, director of research firm Forrester Research.
“A major advantage that Apple had with with Jobs at its helm is the scare that Steve instilled”, said one of the Apple business partners.
Compared with the style of Jobs, Cook’s approach is analytical, say people who know him.
Jobs will be in the annals of business as one of the most important people who changed the course of industry. Apple II has helped the PC computer revolution. Macintosh and the software for editing and publishing took the printer from the commercial print shops brought it in all offices. iPod has dominated the portable music market, invented by Sony with transistor radios in the 50s and then the Walkman portable tape recorders in the 70s. Steve Jobs has used the iPod to launch iTunes music, taking a big slice of music sales from the record stores.
The iPhone created by Jobs has shaken the world of mobile phones and the iPad inaugurated a new category of mobile gadgets that consumers did not know that they need.
Often, Jobs’ influenced the decisions of the competition. Two weeks ago Google bought Motorola, largely to increase the number of patents in its portfolio in an attempt to provide an operating system to rival Apple’s iOS. Hewlett-Packard recently announced that it would close the division of mobile devices, including Palm smartphones and TouchPad tablets, market dominated by Apple.
Tim Cook, the former chief operating officer becoming CEO after the departure of Jobs, is praised for the restructuring of the Apple retail chains, making a decisive contribution to the company’s recovery after the problems in the mid 90s. As a personality, people close to Cook say that he contrasts in a good measure to the explosive Jobs, being “down to earth and slower”.
“Tim Cook, Apple’s director of operations, was fully involved on the company path to unprecedented revenue growth. We expect that all his knowledge about Apple products and cycles to result in little change in market strategy”, said the analysts of the JP Morgan investment fund.