Mission accomplished
On October 6, 2011 Tim Cook's mission itself of the young bell-founder, Boriska, after the death of the plague of all the bell masters in Tarkovsky's masterpiece, Andrei Rublev. Just as Boriska succeeds with humility and fortitude to such an extent that Rublev breaks his vow of silence, so after three years Tim Cook seems to have convinced everyone that we can stop regretting Steve Jobs and look to the future of Apple with serenity .Apple shares are at an all-time high, close to a combined value of 700 billion dollars. A chain of new products has confirmed Apple as the most important innovation factory on a global level. In 2014 alone, Apple's capitalization grew as much as Google's entire market value. The "Financial Times", which usually looks a lot to the point, declared Tim Cook person of the year 2014 dedicating him a big page that looks like a "native advertising", but it's not. The big business magazine, "Fortune", put him in second place, behind the competitor Larry Page, as "businessperson of 2014". Adam Lashinsky closed the article on Cook with these words: "The light continues to shine bright in the rooms of the Apple management even without the legendary boss who first turned it on." A nice recognition for Cook, not at all obvious: in 2013 the mood of "Fortune" towards Cook was very negative. A mood shared by all the big press. But 2014 really was the year of Tim Cook.
The iPhone 6 of records
Without going into Cook's work in detail, as Brad Stone and Adam Satariano did in "Bloomberg Businessweek", it would be enough to look at what happened between December 19 and 25, 2014 with the activation of the new smartphones under the tree Christmas. According to estimates by Flurry, which specializes in this type of metric, 51,3% of new activations were iPhones. For every activated Samsung smartphone there were three iPhones; for each Microsoft Lumia there were nine activated iPhones. Morgan Stanley has estimated 70 million iPhones sold in the last quarter of 2014, an almost doubling of sales in the third quarter of 2014. But there is another indicator that tells us the favor met by the new iPhone among consumers. In 2013, only 3% of activations consisted of large format smartphones, the so-called phablets. In 2014, the percentage rose to 13%, making it the segment with the strongest growth (+450%) of the entire mobile phone sector. How not to think that in this astounding growth there is the hand of Apple with its iPhone 6 plus. In the diagram shown alongside, also drawn up by Flurry, we note that medium format smartphones and actual tablets have lost important points to phablets, thus confirming the unification trend of the tablet-smartphone market. Three years after Jobs' death, despite fierce competition from the Koreans, the Chinese, and Microsoft, the iPhone continues to be not only Apple's most important source of revenue, but has significantly increased its share of the latter.
Apple's reform
The iPhone 6 wasn't the only ace dropped by Tim Cook and his team before the big winter shopping season of 2014: there was also the Apple Watch and Apple Pay, two products that got many votes and put the silence Apple's fierce critics who couldn't find the design and manufacturing flaws that had compromised some of the most important post-Jobs launches like maps and Siri. Perhaps the most philosophically significant change is the disappearance of the mythical Jobsian prefix "i" to connote every new product released from the Cupertino laboratories. Instead of the trademark "i" there is now "Apple" to establish the pre-eminence of the brand over any other factor. Continuity and change, this seems to be Tim Cook's operating formula which he is carrying out methodically and gradually. A not only nominal transition that has resulted in many pleasant news that have softened all the angularities of Steve Jobs' management towards investors, the media, competitors, stakeholders, acquisitions and the social and environmental issues with which Cook has showed uncommon sensitivity. There was a relaxation that is felt on all levels and in all aspects of the apple house's relationship with the surrounding world and also within the company. For example, Cook has put an end to the famous thermonuclear war against Android and Samsung declared by Jobs, much to the great regret of the big New York law firms. Wars, as Clint Eastwood's latest film tells us, cause only material and inner destruction. In the end, Apple too, like the offending publishers, settled with the Justice Department on the thorny issue of the price of ebooks by writing a check for 450 million dollars to close the class action brought by consumer associations. Jobs would never have signed that check.
Cook's value system
Apple is today, in its organization and in its internal relations, much more open and transparent than in the past with a diminished obsession with secrecy, even if this will still remain as a sort of objective necessity. Cook's outing regarding the own sexuality has also highlighted a different sensitivity than Jobs on issues of privacy and personal life. The result is also a different awareness of corporate America's leadership, public role and social responsibility. In an interview with "Bloomberg Businessweek" Cook declared If knowing that the CEO of Apple is gay can help someone accept themselves as they are, or bring some comfort to those who feel lonely or inspire people to fight for the own equality, then it will have been worth exchanging this thing for my privacy. It would be enough to compare this statement with the many dry denials on Steve Jobs' illness, which the co-founder of Apple conceived as a purely private circumstance confined to his own family. Even then, many people in Jobs' position could have taken comfort in knowing that a great leader fought the same battle as them. Cook's declaration of his homosexuality has received a lot of accolades from partners with Mark Zuckerberg and historical competitors with Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft and Ginni Rommety, CEO of IBM, with whom Cook is forging an important alliance to introduce Apple products into the information management systems of large companies whose historical point of reference is IBM. The outing of Tim Cook, the first CEO to make it to the Fortune 500 list, has contributed tremendously to the cause of gay rights, demonstrating that the market is totally agnostic about the sexual proclivities of the people who run big business.
A new corporate culture
In short, Tim Cook is truly changing the corporate culture of Apple by expunging the many eccentricities of Jobs' management while respecting the legacy of the great leader whose office, on the fourth floor of building 1 of Infinite Loop in Cupertino, has significantly remained as Jobs l he left in August 2011. When Cook took over the leadership of Apple, the whole organization was centered on Jobs who coordinated and directed the activity of a series of decentralized structures that did not communicate with each other and often fought hard to receive the attention of Jobs.Tim Cook has torn down the walls that divided these structures and spread a culture of collaboration, exchange and contamination. The result is a relational organization permeated by the important concept of operational continuity which is the same one that has been transferred to all Apple devices which are strongly integrated with each other and each activity flows from one device to another as if it were happening within a single hardware. With the release of Yosemite and iOS 8, mobile devices and Macs, despite having different operating systems, dialogue efficiently, foreshadowing almost total integration. A different way from that of Microsoft who built, not without complications and with courage, a single operating system. A choice that Tim Cook has criticized on several occasions.
Cook's clothes
Even in clothing, Cook implemented a soft discontinuity with Jobs: on official occasions he is seen in a slightly creased black or blue shirt, unbuttoned at the collar and with the sleeves rolled up. However, she often shows up wearing the classic black crew-neck T-shirt that was Jobs' uniform. Continuity and change also in clothing, about which Cook himself joked during the presentation of the Apple Watch when he said that the new device will be enthusiastically welcomed by "people who know more about fashion and style than I am capable" And so Vanessa Friedman, the New York Times fashion critic, took up Cook's annotation and offered to give the Apple CEO some advice about her wardrobe as the head of a company that is about to enter the world of fashion as a protagonist. She did it in an amusing article entitled “This Emperor Needs New Clothes. For Tim Cook of Apple, the Fashion of No Fashion” also available in the Italian translation.
