Under Tim Cook’s leadership, Apple has launched popular products such as the Apple iPhone 5C and Apple iPhone 5S. However, according to Nolan Bushnell, Atari’s founder, Cook is not the next Steve Jobs.
Speaking to CNN, Bushnell said, “If I were to choose somebody to run international manufacturing and processing and keep the wheels on the bus, Tim Cook is about as good as anybody can get.
“But I just feel like somebody needs to stick a little bit of dynamite under his left cheek.”
Speaking about Cook, he said, “I have a feeling — and this is a funny thing that happens with people who are very buttoned down — that (Cook) probably thinks he’s innovating, when in fact it’s just micro-evolution. They were able to build (the new iPhones) cheaper, which is something I would expect Tim Cook to do.
“But the market cap of Apple is underpinned by its innovation margin.” This, he believes “has a shelf life of maybe three to five years. Then, all of a sudden, the followers have matched you feature by feature.”
Speaking about Google’s Android, he said, “I use some Apple products and like them. But I lately have been spending much more time in the Google-sphere than the Apple-sphere.”
Speaking about hiring the sandal-wearing Steve Jobs back in 1974, Bushnell said, “Understand that we at Atari at the time thought of ourselves as being quite counterculture. We were really young and somewhat arrogant and we really felt that we could rewrite the rules in an absolute way. We took the attitude of hiring for intensity or passion. That really worked for us. We felt that we could train anybody that had the passion and fire in their belly. Steve — actually both Steves (referring to Jobs’ longtime friend and collaborator Steve Wozniak) — had passion that was a very different passion, but it was passion. … Jobs loved kind of seeing the world as it could be, as opposed to what it is. That was an important thing about what our ethic was.”
Speaking about why he didn’t invest in Apple earlier, he said, “I didn’t think that Steve would be a good chief executive and I didn’t have the time to do it. I’ve often thought one of the unsung heroes was actually (early investor and second Apple CEO) Mike Markkula, who actually provided the adult supervision for the first few years, which I think was really important. If I’d invested and Markkula hadn’t been there, the outcome could have been very different.”
Speaking about how Google does things different, he said, “From a corporate standpoint, think about the difference between the way you think about Google and the way you think about Hewlett Packard. At the outset — eight years ago, five years ago — Hewlett Packard had significantly more resources that they could have been innovating with than Google did. Google has the one cash cow (search), but they are planting seeds for their future that I think are extraordinary.”
Speaking about finding the next Steve Jobs, Bushnell said, “I think there are thousands of them out there. I think the main issue is going to be, are they going to be allowed to perform? Remember, Steve was at an integral point where he was product maven and had control of tremendous amounts of resources at his fingertips. A lot of the Steve Jobses out there don’t have that control, don’t have those resources at their disposal. They have to be given them. When I hear a company say ‘We’ll vote on that’ or ‘We’ll get consensus,’ you know that they’re going to be mediocre. True innovation has no consistency. Nobody sees it until it’s done.”
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