Apple under siege - The Guardian

Two years after Steve Jobs left us, Apple now wears Tim Cook's imprint and, for all the doubt and perpetual doomsaying, seems to wear it well Photograph: Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images

Last Friday, Tim Cook issued a sombre remembrance to Apple employees:

Team-
Tomorrow marks the second anniversary of Steve's death. I hope everyone will reflect on what he meant to all of us and to the world. Steve was an amazing human being and left the world a better place. I think of him often and find enormous strength in memories of his friendship, vision and leadership. He left behind a company that only he could have built and his spirit will forever be the foundation of Apple. We will continue to honour his memory by dedicating ourselves to the work he loved so much. There is no higher tribute to his memory. I know that he would be proud of all of you.
Best,
Tim

I am one of the many who are in Steve's debt and I miss him greatly. I consider him the greatest creator and editor of products this industry has ever known, and am awed by how he managed the most successful transformation of a company – and of himself – we've ever seen. I watched his career from its very beginning, I was fortunate to have worked with him, and I thoroughly enjoyed agreeing and disagreeing with him.

I tried to convey this in an 9 October, 2011 Monday Note titled Too Soon. I just reread it and hope you'll take the time to do the same. You'll read words of dissent by Richard Stallman and Hamilton Nolan, but you'll mostly find praise by Barack Obama, John Stewart, Nicholson Baker in the New Yorker, and this elegant image by Jonathan Mak:

Two years later, we can look at Apple under Tim Cook's leadership. These haven't been an easy 24 months: company shares have gone on a wild ride, execs have been shown the door, there was the Maps embarrassment and apology, and there has been a product drought for most of the last fiscal year (ending in September).

All of this has provided fodder for the Fox Newsstands of the Web, for netwalkers seeking pageviews. The main theme is simple and prurient, hence its power: Without Steve, Apple is on the decline. The variations range from the lack of innovation – where's the Apple TV?, the iWatch?, the next Big Thing? – to The Decline of the Brand, Android Is Winning, and Everything Will Be Commoditised.

Scan Philip Ellmer-DeWitt's Apple 2.0 or John Gruber's Daring Fireball and treat yourself to intelligent repudiations of this incessant "claim chowder", discredited pontifications. I'll extract a few morsels from my own Evernote stash:

Apple's press conference showed a brand unraveling, or so said VentureBeat in March, 2012. Eighteen months later, Apple passed Coca-Cola to become the world's most valuable brand.

How Tim Cook can save himself (and Apple), subtitled, for good measure: What the confused Apple CEO can do to avoid getting canned and having to slink away with nothing but his $378m compensation package as comfort. Penned by a communications consultant who "teaches public relations at NYU", the article features an unexpected gem: Cook should buy a blazer. You know, "to break the deleterious chokehold of the Steve Jobs' [sic] legacy".

Apple: The Beginning of a Long Decline? (note the hedging question mark.) This LinkedIn piece, which questions the value of the fingerprint sensor, ends with a lament:

There was no sign of a watch. So those of us in Silicon Valley are left watching, wondering, and feeling a little empty inside … Jobs is gone. It looks like Apple's magic is slowly seeping away now too.

Shortly thereafter, Samsung's iWatch killer came out … and got panned by most reviewers.

Last: Apple's board of directors are concerned about Apple's pace of innovation, says Fox Business News Charlie Gasparino, who claims to have "reliable sources".

Considering how secretive the company is, can anyone imagine a member of Apple's board blabbing to a Fox Business News irrespondent?

Despite the braying of the visionary sheep, Tim Cook never lost his preternatural calm, he never took the kommentariat's bait. Nor have his customers: They keep buying, enjoying, and recommending Apple's products. And they do so in such numbers – 9m new iPhones sold in the launch weekend – that Apple had to file a Form 8-K with the security and exchanges commission (SEC) to "warn" shareholders that revenue and profits would exceed the guidance they had provided just two months ago when management reviewed the results of the previous quarter.

In Daniel Eran Dilger's words, Data bites dogma: Apple's iOS ate up Android, BlackBerry US market share losses this summer:

Apple's increase accounted for 1.5 of the 1.6 percentage points that Android and BlackBerry collectively lost. This occurred a full month before the launch of Apple's iPhone 5s and 5c and the deployment of iOS 7.

Regarding the "Apple no longer innovates" myth, Jay Yarow tells us why Apple can't just 'innovate' a new product every other year. His explanation draws from a substantial New York Times Magazine article in which Fred Vogelstein describes the convergence of company-wide risk-taking and engineering feats that resulted in the iPhone:

It's hard to overstate the gamble Jobs took when he decided to unveil the iPhone back in January 2007. Not only was he introducing a new kind of phone – something Apple had never made before – he was doing so with a prototype that barely worked. Even though the iPhone wouldn't go on sale for another six months, he wanted the world to want one right then. In truth, the list of things that still needed to be done was enormous.

It's a great read. But even Vogelstein can't resist the temptation of inserting a word of caution: "And yet Apple today is under siege …"

This is something I heard 33 years ago when I signed up to start Apple France in 1980, and I've heard it constantly since then. I'll again quote Horace Dediu, who best summarises the concern:

"[There's a] perception that Apple is not going to survive as a going concern. At this point of time, as at all other points of time in the past, no activity by Apple has been seen as sufficient for its survival . Apple has always been priced as a company that is in a perpetual state of free-fall. It's a consequence of being dependent on breakthrough products for its survival. No matter how many breakthroughs it makes, the assumption is (and has always been) that there will never be another. When Apple was the Apple II company, its end was imminent because the Apple II had an easily foreseen demise. When Apple was a Mac company its end was imminent because the Mac was predictably going to decline. Repeat for iPod, iPhone and iPad. It's a wonder that the company is worth anything at all."

I recently experienced a small epiphany: I think the never-ending worry about Apple's future is a good thing for the company. Look at what happened to those who were on top and became comfortable with their place under the sun: Palm, BlackBerry, Nokia …

In ancient Rome, victorious generals marched in triumph to the Capitol. Lest the occasion go to the army commander's head, a slave would march behind the victor, murmuring in his ear, memento mori, "remember you're mortal".

With that in mind, one can almost appreciate the doomsayers – well, some of them. They might very well save Apple from becoming inebriated with their prestige and, instead, force the company to remember, two years later and counting, how they won it.

via apple - Google News http://news.google.com/news/url?sa=t&fd=R&usg=AFQjCNEdIZq35ogwKPIMp7aouKy8wKiZNw&url=http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/oct/07/apple-steve-jobs-tim-cook