Cook’s ethical commitments, particularly toward LBGT+ and Black representation, privacy, and the environment have also become far more fundamental to corporate DNA than they were under Jobs. The Jobs-era Apple was worth a healthy $350 billion when he stepped down; as Cook moves on, Apple has become a $4 trillion corporation with hundreds of millions of consumers contributing monthly recurring fees for a variety of compelling services.
You need to follow your own star
Perhaps it didn’t matter that critical opinion didn’t shift. Cook’s tenure saw the man define his own measure of success. Some may recall that when Jobs launched the iPhone in 2007, he said, “Every once in a while, a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything.”
Jobs argued that the Mac, iPod, and then iPhone were all such products. It’s important, I think, to remember that Cook was part of the team that launched the last two of those and arguably contributed to the iMac, which redefined the first. My point is that revolutionary products do not grow on trees; even Jobs understood that. So did Cook — and his work on the Vision Pro and AI showed how challenging it is to build revolution. Success is seldom a straightforward journey. Jobs himself might have found himself considering the difficulty of such voyage on April 11, 1985, when ousted from the company he loved.
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