Apple announced this Monday that Tim CookCEO of the company since the death of Steve Jobs in 2011, will leave office on September 1, not Apple, to be replaced by John Ternuscurrent director of hardware engineering. According to account Mark Gurman In Bloomberg, Cook recently held a meeting with Apple employees in which he reviewed his career at the company and pointed out what his biggest mistakes have been as CEO in these 15 years.
The main one, at the beginning of his career at the head of Apple. Cook rated the disastrous launch of Apple Maps in 2012 as his ‘first really big mistake’and not without reason. The initial version of Apple Maps, released seven years after Google Mapsis remembered for her numerous errors. These include incorrect directions, mislabeled locations, inaccurate satellite images, warped maps, and other glitches. So many that Cook was forced to publicly apologize, something very unusual. Scott Forstallthe Apple executive responsible for Maps, was ousted from the company.
According to Bloomberg, Cook explained to employees that ‘the product was not ready and we thought it was because we were testing more local issues’in reference to the fact that Apple was so focused on getting the details right in areas close to Cupertino that neglected the global vision and other problems that affected the service.
That said, as with any good mistake, the still CEO stated that The deployment of Apple Maps ended up being a ‘valuable experience’ for the company. ‘We apologized for that and said use these other (map) apps. They are better than ours. And that was a good dose of humility. But it was the right thing to do for our users. And so it is an example of keeping the user at the center of the decisions we make… Now we have the best map application on the planet. We learned about perseverance and did exactly the right thing after making the mistake.‘, he added.
He also pointed out other setbacks for the company under his direction, such as the abandonment of the AirPower wireless charging baseannounced in 2018 but never released, and the canceled autonomous car projectwhich involved an investment of 10 billion dollars over a period of ten years.
In any case, although Cook reaffirms the value of the lessons learned from mistakes, that does not mean that he has stopped making them. The most recent, the renewed version of Siri which he announced in 2024 and whose promises seem to come true in 2026, two years later. To Apple, the success of ChatGPT and the chatbots caught him on the wrong foot and it was soon noticed.
In the WWDC 2024, the company announced that Apple Intelligence It would allow Siri to understand your personal context, work within applications and much more using proprietary AI models. Then, only some of the announced news arrived in stages and later than expected, to the despair of users. Finally, it will be the collaboration with Google and the technology of Gemini which will make the promises of 2024 a reality, something we will know more about at the next WWDC, which will be held in June.
All this is not to say that Cook was a bad CEO for Apple, quite the opposite. When Steve Jobs died and Apple was coming off a decade in which it had launched the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad, among other products, the company’s stock market value was 350 billion dollars. Currently, it is about 4.06 trillion dollars.
In some periods it has become the most valuable company in the world by market capitalization and is currently the third, behind Nvidiawith 4.86 billion, and Alphabetwith 4.08 billion, and ahead of Microsoftwith 3.10 billion. So not so bad.