We don't really know that much about Apple CEO Tim Cook. As much as Steve Jobs was the face of Apple, Cook seems to just be the unassuming guy in the background, even though he's now in charge of one of the most successful companies ever. For the entire year after Jobs died, we never saw his replacement on TV and only saw him in action during the product announcements.
Yet, we seem to trust him without question. Why is that? We do we trust this man so much? Only because we know that Jobs handpicked him to be his replacement. That's how much trust we had in Jobs to manufacture, manage, and create the devices that run our lives, that we're willing to also trust his replacement simply because Jobs did.
Last night Brian Williams sat down with Cook for his first televised interview, and from the sounds of it, it took some convincing to get him to agree to appear on Rock Center. Yet watching him, it didn't lessen my trust at all. Perhaps it's because he seems so grandfatherly, despite the fact that he's only four years older than I am.
Cook mentions in the interview that everyone thought he was crazy for leaving Compaq and going to Apple. People wouldn't think that now, but in 1998, when Jobs had just returned to Apple, it was far from the thriving company it is today. He admitted that five minutes into his conversation with Jobs, he wanted to “throw caution to the wind and come to Apple.”
Williams tried to pin Cook down to get him to admit what the next big thing is for Apple, but Cook wasn't biting. In regards to the possibility of the company entering the television market, he would only say that “it's an area of intense interest.” It sounds like there has to be something in the works.
As far as a comparison between how he runs the company and how Jobs did it so successfully, Cook explained to Williams that before Jobs passed away, he told Cook to never question what Steve would have done and “to just do what is right.”
And somehow in all of that, we don't question Cook either, and in this past year, he's done everything possible to make things right. With the whole Maps app snafu, he not only publicly apologized on the Apple website, he also fired a couple of the executives in charge. He admitted to Williams that they screwed up and that they are putting the weight of the company behind correcting it.
After watching Cook last night, I feel I know him a little more, and I still am throwing all my trust behind him. His appearance on Rock Center assured me that there are still some great things to come for Apple. He may not be leading the same public way Jobs did, yet he is just as successful in the way he is doing it.
