Steve Jobs called Tim Cook ‘not a product person,’ but still hand-picked him to run Apple and turn it into a $4 trillion tech giant |
Steve Jobs called Tim Cook ‘not a product person,’ but still hand-picked him to run Apple and turn it into a $4 trillion tech giant
Tim Cook and Steve Jobs couldn’t have been more different, according to the Apple founder’s biographer Walter.
Jobs was a creative genius that spearheaded the development of Apple’s signature products including the Mac, the iPhone, and the iPod. But he was also a hothead, known for pushing people to their limits and sometimes creating conflict on purpose in meetings to see if it would yield a better outcome, according to Isaacson.
By contrast, Cook, who announced he was retiring as Apple CEO this week, was level-headed and serious. An engineer with a business degree from Duke, he had worked for 12 years at IBM, Jobs’ sworn enemy, before joining Apple. Yet, Cook and Jobs got along great.
“He had the same vision I did, and we could interact at a high strategic level, and I could just forget about a lot of things unless he came and pinged me,” Jobs said of Cook, according to Isaacson’s biography of the Apple cofounder.
Jobs only had one criticism of him: He was “not a product........