Why a former employee thinks Apple is 'boring' under Tim Cook

Being number one isn’t a lot of fun. Just ask Apple, which was just called "boring" by a former employee.

With a market cap of over $639 billion, Apple is the biggest company in the world. It has enviable profits and unit sales (every quarter it manages to sell tens of millions of iPhones, though that number is declining) and is slowly, but smartly, shifting its attention to its highly lucrative services business, which includes the App Store and Apple Pay.

It’s also one of the most heavily scrutinized companies on the planet. Apple cultivates a level of secrecy and loyalty rarely found in business. Which is why when one member of the fold cleaves off and starts talking, people listen.

Bob Burrough spent seven seminal years with Apple (2007 to 2014), managing software and Q+A on iPods, the iPhone and iPads. He worked under iPod team leader Tony Fadell (who left in 2008 to found Nest in 2010) and witnessed both the late Steve Jobs and Tim Cook operate as CEO. He thinks there is a distinct and potentially damaging difference between the two leaders.

“The first thing Tim did as CEO was convert Apple from dynamic change-maker into a boring operations company,” wrote Burrough in a Tweet.

Burrough later qualified this charge, explaining that Cook’s decision to fire former Apple hotshot and software lead Scott Forstall was solely so Cook could “have peace…which is to say there is no conflict.” He claimed that Cook running the company meant the end of conflict, and maybe innovation, at Apple.

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The conflict hasn’t disappeared from the organization, but Burrough contends that it has moved down to middle managers, whose ranks, he claims, “have exploded” at Apple.

“This is all an extreme contrast to the way it was under Steve. Thin, competitive, dynamic,” tweeted Burrough.

There is no question that Steve Jobs managed differently than Cook. In Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs biography, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak described Jobs “terrorizing folks.” He was a shouter who inspired passion by wearing his heart on his sleeve.

“He would shout at a meeting, ‘You asshole, you never do anything right,’” [former finance chief at Apple] Debi Coleman recalled. “It was like an hourly occurrence. Yet I consider myself the absolute luckiest person in the world to have worked with him.”

Cook, who joined Apple in 1997 (the same year Jobs returned from exile) is quite a different beast. He’s a master of process, manufacturing and inventory management. He has a slow, laconic way of speaking. Even an outsider like me can see he’s harder to read than Jobs was.

Obviously, Apple is a different company than it was under Jobs. Insiders confirm this, though they also insist that what makes Apple Apple has not changed. What Burrough calls “conflict” still exists. It’s called debate.

Cook did fire Forstall, but, it was, it seems, to remove politics that might hamper collaboration. In a 2012 interview, Cook explained how such changes improved collaboration. Without mentioning his name, Cook implied that Forstall might have been at the center of some executive-level jockeying, which didn’t sit well with Cook:

And there can’t be politics. I despise politics,” he told Bloomberg, “There is no room for it in a company. My life is going to be way too short to deal with that. No bureaucracy. We want this fast-moving, agile company where there are no politics, no agendas.

For Burrough, who now leads an on-demand 3D printing company, Blit It, Forstall’s departure signaled a bigger change.

In a Twitter direct message exchange, Burrough told me:

“Tim Cook made changes that implied very strongly that there was to be no conflict amongst the executive staff. Giving human interface design of the software to Jony [Ive] was part of that. That decision was made because it was understood that the other executives could better work with Jony than with Scott Forstall. Heck, Bob Mansfield [Apple Senior Hardware Engineer] unretired due to that change.”

Burrough, though, admitted that no one at Apple had ever told him to avoid conflict. He also tweeted:

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Other former Apple execs have chaffed at the idea that Steve Jobs ever fostered internal competition.

Burrough’s former boss Tony Fadell tweeted:

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Apple insiders tell me that Burrough’s perspective is just plain wrong. The company’s culture of debate and argument is still there, even at the executive and leadership level.

“Jobs was very passionate, but I have seen more fire in Cook’s eyes as he has grown in this new role,” said Creative Strategies president and analyst Tim Bajarin in an email to me. Bajarin has watched Apple from the sidelines for decades and met with Jobs on multiple occasions over the years. He has only had one sit-down with Cook.

“I find these comments about Apple being boring interesting. They are still making incredible profits and it is clear from Cook that Apple is not standing still when it comes to trying to innovate,” added Bajarin.

Apple’s problem is not, perhaps, conflict, debate or even a lack of fire in the corporate belly. It’s perception. The famously secretive company lives inside a growing black hole of rumor, guesswork and innuendo.

Coupled with that is the inescapable reality of hardware development.

After a solid decade of one high-profile category launch after another, Apple seems mired in a hole it helped dig. The now decade-old iPhone set the standard for all smartphones that would come after it. Today, all of them look like iPhones and each other. We’re nearing the limits of screen size, resolution, product thickness and battery tolerances. The most significant changes can be found in software. Hardware changes only incrementally now. And when it does change more radically, like the removal of the headphone jack, Apple gets plenty of criticism.

The desperation for that shiny new thing, though, is palpable. Entering and disrupting categories is risky business. Dreams of an Apple Car and Apple TV set have been dashed against the rocky shores of market realities.

An Apple that focuses on the growing and dependable service business is, no doubt, duller than the one that introduced the first iPhone or iPad. Would more conflict make Apple a more exciting company? Maybe. Would it result in more exciting product launches? Maybe, maybe not.

If, in 2017, Apple does deliver the Next Big Thing, all will be forgiven and Burrough’s comments (and maybe Burrough himself) forgotten. Apple will be the innovator. If not, people may be going back to Twitter and Bob Burrough’s feed, wondering if he got it right, after all.