Doing a Thatcher.

When Steve Jobs was dying and passed the reins at Apple to Tim Cook my instant reaction was that he was ‘doing a Thatcher’. That strong and successful British leader had ceded the reins of power to a weak nonentity as successor and the general reaction was that this would only make her look better in retrospect. Indeed, in public life, there are any number of such examples – Thatcher-Major, FDR-Truman, Churchill-Eden, Reagan-Bush, de Gaulle-Pompidou. Each transition succeeded loudly in emphasizing the greatness of the predecessor.

And that suspicion has not only deepened since Jobs died some four and a half years ago, it’s being shouted from the rooftops today. Since he rode Jobs’s coattails to record iPhone sales with such stunning innovations like a bigger phone display, a lighter iPad and the Apple Watch with its thrilling selection of bands, we see the culmination of this unimaginative Apple CEO’s leadership in today’s announcement that Apple has invested $1bn of its shareholders’ monies in …. a cab service – an amount which buys Apple but 4% of the company based on its $25bn valuation:

With Apple just having recorded its first quarter of falling revenues since Jobs returned at the helm in 1998, this on the back of a greenmailing investor in the guise of Carl Icahn teaching Cook about shareholder dividends and returns, Apple has decided that its best and highest use of money is to buy into a Chinese Uber-variant named Didi because, after all, there’s a billion of them out there waiting to hail a ride …. on their knock-off Android phones. A Doodoo ‘investment’ (‘bribe’, inept as it sounds, might be closer to the mark, if equally unproductive) if ever there was one.

Meanwhile Apple Mail is broken, El Capitan is a disaster getting worse with each version, Siri’s AI is fundamentally deficient, iOS voice recognition badly lags GOOG’s and the predictive corrections in the iOS keyboard are worse than useless – and positively embarassing when some doofus ‘correction’ slips through and you tell your girlfriend she’s a slut when you meant to compliment her cooking.

Steve, where are you when we need you?

Doing a Thatcher, and spinning in his grave.

Cook, when not donating money to transgender causes, has made a point of making Apple a ‘nice’ place to work, devoid of conflict and tension. I expect to learn that Apple HQ has transitioned to unisex bathrooms any day now. Recall this is the man who, when first CEO, gave all Apple workers Thanksgiving week off …. That same ‘niceness’ thing, the craving for popularity which Jobs never had, was the reason he immediately fired Scott Forstall – the driver behind both OS X and iOS (and, indeed, Siri, which he would have made great had he been given a chance). Forstall was the proverbial irritant, a disruptive force and one with which Steve was perfectly at ease, having been cast from the same mold. When you fire people like that, you forever lose the competitive edge. Apple has managed to do just that under its current leadership.