"Not First, But Best"

AAPL is 10X as valuable as it was when Steve Jobs died on October 5, 2011

(Photo by Sakuma/WSJ)

Steve Jobs gets all the adulation, but Tim Cook deserves his own chapter in the history of American business. Steve Jobs rescued Apple from insolvency and transformed it into the world's most innovative consumer company; Tim Cook was handed the keys in 2011 and oversaw its growth into an international colossus that is worth ten times as much as it was when he took over. Perhaps we should focus less on what Apple products are in the pipeline than the man himself. The WSJ ran a profile over the weekend: [bold added]

There is one idea that encapsulates the approach to innovation that makes all of it possible—and it’s maybe the closest thing to a grand unified theory of Apple. It’s a philosophy of just four words that describe Apple’s past, present and definitely its future. Four words that help explain why this was the year the company plowed into spatial computing and artificial intelligence. During one of those epochal years when it feels like everything is about to change again, I heard them over and over, in conversation with Apple executives and Cook himself: Not first, but best.

...“We weren’t the first to do intelligence,” he says. “But we’ve done it in a way that we think is the best for the customer.”...He puts Apple Intelligence in the same pantheon of innovative breakthroughs as the iPod’s click wheel and the iPhone’s touch interface. “I think we’ll look back and it will be one of these air pockets that happened to get you on a different technology curve,” he says.

Tim Cook, 64, may not be as inventive as Steve Jobs, but he has arrived at the point where he trusts his ability to select that one "great" idea from the merely good ones that Apple considers every day. As a shareholder, I hope his tenure continues for a long, long time.