Changing of the Guard at Apple

John Ternus will now be the new CEO of Apple, replacing Tim Cook, who will be come Executive Chairman. This is an interesting development in the leadership pipeline. Tim Cook is a famous supply chain expert, and he’s been able to squeeze the most profit he can out of Apple because of it. I am literally in a supply chain class for my MBA and I wonder why we’ve never talked about him. John Ternus, it seems, is a hardware expert, and you’d think the focus is going to be back on the product.

Ternus is also young as well, which means we’ll hear a lot from him over the next decade or so. If the focus is going to be on hardware, what is next for software under Ternus’ leadership? We all agree Apple hardware is great, but iOS and Mac OS X needs some work. Unfortunately, there is no real alternative as Windows is trash, Chrome is lacking features beyond what can be accomplished via a browser, Linux is a PITA (that its users will not admit), Android is junk (we all know it is junk), and then all of the other runner ups floating around out there.

I still feel like people are waiting for Tim Cook to fail. Did he? Apple’s stock returns would disagree. It was impossible to fill Steve Jobs’ shoes but maybe all along Tim Cook was the right choice after all.