Tim Cook Personified Big Tech's Maturity ↗
Andrew Sharp:
And that's ultimately Cook's legacy, to me. He made sensible choices under the circumstances, nurturing Apple profits and its stock price at every turn. If many of those choices were ultimately predictable and unfulfilling, well, that's the game for a company at Apple's stage of the corporate life cycle.
Where Apple under Jobs was selling performance and possibility, Apple today capitalizes on our collective dependence on the iPhone ecosystem and promises superior reliability to any peers. And that's still a pretty good deal! But it's a categorically different value proposition than that of the company that was changing the way an entire generation interacted with technology.
This is the best commentary I've read in light of the announcement of Cook's retirement. Most of the other coverage has been way too positive, this is much more balanced and closer to how I feel.