How serious is this comment? As a thought experiment, this intrigues me. Imagine Steve Wozniak suddenly pops in as CEO. What might happen to the company in the following years?
I doubt Woz would want the job. He's an engineer, not a corporate strategist, and he seems happy that way.
The ideal CEO would be a business strategist, innovator and thought-leader, and world-class marketer, but with enough of an engineering background to chase hard problems.
There aren't many of those around.
Jobs did okay at all four, mostly. Cook gets the first, mostly, and has adequate delegation skills for engineering and marketing. This works superbly when the engineering is world-leading (the M chips) and badly when the engineering is mediocre (the software.) The marketing has drifted towards attempts at luxury-consumer branding, which is an off-the-shelf pitch. It hasn't been a failure. But it has lost some of its distinctiveness, and it's a little incoherent at times.
Cook's still been hugely more successful than Sculley or Amelio. Sculley was a bland corporatist, and Amelio was very, very smart, but too much of an engineer to be good at the rest. He did really well elsewhere, but Apple just wasn't a good fit.
The job is a poisoned chalice. It's going to be extremely difficult for the new CEO to assert their authority over the established fiefdoms, keep the plates spinning, deal with a weird political and economic environment, and still create Apple-styled innovation.
The problem of running a $4 Trillion consumer hardware company, with incredibly optimized supply chain operations, is that it heavily constrains the directions a new CEO would take the company, and by extension, the set of plausible people who could take the helm. I think even if the next CEO has a new or different product vision, they'd need deep knowledge on the hardware side of the house just to steer in any different direction.
I don't know if OP is serious, but more than once, his name has come up on this topic in discussions in the past that I've had with people in my social circle who work at Apple. He obviously gets much respect and is considered an engineer's engineer.
I don't think anyone would be against Woz stepping into to revitalize Apple. The real question is whether Woz would do it.
Everybody loves Woz, for good reasons, but (a) he’s not a manager (b) he’s not executive material (c) he’s notoriously unmotivated (d) he hasn’t engineered anything significant since what, the mid-1980’s?
Valve is privately-owned with its BDFL owning over half of it. It has never gone through a leadership transition. It could relatively quickly go entirely bad after Gabe Newell is gone.
Shit, I'd take it. Sideloading, custom OSes, less-wimpy legal chops against hackers... Valve could turn Apple around.
A 5 year release cadence would incentivize the iPhone to change something more significant than just the price tag. And Proton would give me my first justification for a owning a powerful phone.
