This is the Lawn Art Center in San Francisco on October 4, 2011 local time. With a little attention, it is not difficult to find that at this iPhone 4S conference, there is an extra empty seat marked "reserved".

That was Jobs' reserved seat, who did not attend the conference because of illness. The very next day, the founder of what may be the greatest technology company of all time died. He was replaced as the new head of Apple Inc by Tim Cook, who is not familiar to the public. During the years when Jobs struggled with illness, Cook briefly served as CEO of the company twice, but it went unnoticed.

Like the vacant seat, Cook had to face the fact that even though he was at the helm of the company, Jobs was unforgettable and critical of his new CEO: Cook was questioned about his incompetence and Apple Inc was frequently reviled by the outside world.

Even today, nine years later, Apple Inc's market capitalization has exceeded $2 trillion, making it the first stock in the history of US stocks to exceed $2 trillion. Apple Inc has also become the most valuable listed company in the world.

Skeptics cannot deny Cook's nine years at the helm of Apple Inc, but they claim that under Cook, Apple Inc is moving away from Jobs' original spirit of innovation and geek temperament into a more utilitarian and purer business enterprise.

Since Cook took the helm of Apple Inc, the mobile phone products after the iPhone 6 series have been complained by users that there is no innovation, and the iPhone X, which Cook attaches great importance to, has also received a lot of bad criticism for its lackluster appearance. As for its single-handed Apple watch and AirPods, they were also questioned in the early days of the launch.

This puts Cook in two completely different atmospheres of public opinion. On the one hand, some Apple Inc users are worried about Apple Inc's innovation ability on the product side; on the other side,Apple Inc, led by Cook, is completing the transformation from hardware to software, a diversified business model based on the iOS ecosystem, so that investors are unanimously optimistic about Cook.

You know, when Cook took over from Jobs in 2011, Apple Inc had a market capitalization of less than $400 billion, but after seven years in chargeApple Inc broke through the trillion-dollar market capitalization for the first time in August 2018, and that figure doubled just two years later.

This is not an easy thing to do.

Immelt, selected by General Electric Co legendary leader Welch in eight years, General Electric Co's market value has shrunk from $432 billion to $227 billion during his 16 years as CEO; during the few years when Ballmer succeeded Bill Gates at the helm of Microsoft Corp, the company's market value has dropped from $600 billion to $220 billion, and even his resignation has increased Microsoft Corp's market value by 8%.

Thus looking back at Cook's nine years, from a broader business history point of viewCook has undoubtedly become the greatest defender, not one of them.

In an interview with Bloomberg in 2012, Cook mentioned what Jobs had said to him:

"I still remember the time when Walter Walt Disney Company (the founder of Walt Disney Company) died, people looked around and kept asking the question, 'what would he do if Walter were still there?' and the company's business was paralyzed. People sat around for a meeting and talked about 'what would he do if Walter were still here'. I hope you never ask me the same question.You just need to do the right thing. "

Cook lived up to what Jobs had entrusted.

A

"in any case, he did do something that would never have happened in the past: to make Apple Inc's press conference unexciting. This is what Lionde Carney, author of the Legend of Tim Cook, commented on Cook's performance at a press conference.

This happened in March 2012, when Cook demonstrated the new product at a press conference for the first time since Jobs' death. Apple fans were obviously disappointed at the launch of iPad 3, which they thought was insipid and more like an update of the previous generation.

Cook got off to a bad start. What is more difficult is that, next, a series of difficult problems are found in Apple Inc.

First, in April 2012, the US Department of Justice accused Apple Inc of manipulating e-book prices with several book publishers. The case lasted for several years and ended with Apple Inc paying a fine and accepting antitrust supervision appointed by the court.

Later in July, Apple Inc's third-quarter financial results showed that iPhone shipments were 26 million units, falling short of analysts' shipments of 28.9 million units. Apple Inc's share price fell immediately, which was the second time in 10 years that Apple Inc failed to meet Wall Street expectations.

Apple Inc was also forced to cancel the cloud service MobieMe and shut down the music social networking site Ping. The former was replaced by iCould in October 2011, while the latter has not opened the market and is not liked by Apple Inc users. Apple Inc Map, which was launched in September, was soon abandoned because of its complex functions, navigation deformation and other problems.

It is hard to say whether this is Cook's weak leadership or a legacy of the Jobs era, but it is clear that these problems have to be digested by Cook, who was in charge for less than a year at that time.

Cook and Jobs are two types of leaders with very different styles: the former is good at operating, while the latter is a natural product master; the former is used to keeping silent, while the latter has a strong "reality distortion force field". The appearance is extremely persuasive speech ability, as well as rare leadership. As a result, the change Cook brought to Apple Inc was less direct than that of Jobs.

The change began from within Apple Inc. This year, John Brauit, senior vice president in charge of Apple Inc retail store, and Scott Fausto, senior vice president, were successively fired by Cook. At the root, they clashed with the values of Apple Inc in the Cook era.

Brout only officially joined Apple Inc in January of that year and was the first executive to be hired since Cook took over as CEO, but in Apple Inc's retail business, due to paying too much attention to sales targets, he cut costs by cutting staff and working hours, which hurt the user experience; Fausto left mainly because he was defeated by Apple Inc Map and refused to make a public apology.

It is worth noting that NeXT, founded by Fausto, is exactly where Jobs went after leaving Apple Inc for the first time. He joined Apple Inc with Jobs in 1997 and was recognized as the most likely candidate to succeed Jobs as Apple Inc CEO.

In retrospect, Cook's adjustments are an important turning point in Apple's history.

Before Apple Inc, Jobs was already the spiritual leader, and even the soul of Apple Inc. At that time, Jobs' values were Apple Inc's values: emphasis on products, innovation, service, and ambition to change the world. But Apple Inc in the post-Jobs era has quietly undergone some changes, and even in many ways, Cook and Jobs are doing the opposite.

Jobs often let teams and even individual managers compete with each other, thus motivating the team, similar to the "horse racing mechanism." Cook took a very different approach after taking office, and he would go deep into the employees. Emphasis on "team" and cross-departmental collaboration.

Jobs is indifferent to philanthropy and has said publicly that the biggest charity he can do is to increase Apple Inc's market capitalization. But in January 2012, at an internal staff meeting after Apple Inc released his last quarterly results, Cook highlighted Apple Inc's philanthropy, which he called "new and exciting." The charities donated by Apple Inc include projects such as education, health and human rights.

Cook began to promote Apple Inc's environmental policy and sustainable development plan, pay attention to the labor security of employees in supply chain enterprises, and care about the construction of privacy. Jobs is clearly reluctant to spend time on these things.

A few years later, people will find that these causes planted by Cook at that time constitute the values of Apple Inc in the Cook era.

At the end of 2017, Apple Inc's six values were officially listed on Apple Inc's website: accessibility, education, environmental responsibility, inclusiveness and diversity, privacy and security, and supplier responsibility. Today, Apple Inc's values have been further condensed into accessibility, environmental responsibility, privacy and supplier responsibility. But it's not hard to find that it all stems from Cook's behavior at the time.

To a large extent, this also softens the impression left on the outside world by Apple Inc, and the "edges and corners" left by the Jobs era are gradually being smoothed out.

B

In 2013, Cook made three trips to China. Prior to that, Apple Inc had only two stores in China: one in Beijing, which opened in 2008, and one in Shanghai, which opened in 2010.

This is the biggest difference between Cook and Jobs, who has never been to China.

In an interview with the Financial Times in 2010, Liu Chuanzhi said of Jobs: "Apple Inc is missing a big opportunity in the Chinese market. We are very lucky because Jobs has a bad temper and doesn't take the Chinese market seriously." If Apple Inc spends the same amount of work on Chinese consumers as we do, we will be in trouble. "

It turns out that Cook chose to focus on the Chinese market more wisely than Jobs. With the brilliance of iPhone 5S series and iPhone 6S series, the Chinese market has become an important engine driving Apple Inc's revenue growth. Apple Inc's revenue in Greater China has been maintained at about 20 per cent since 2014. In addition, nearly 50 per cent of Apple Inc's supply chain comes from the Chinese market.

When we focus on the smartphone market at that time, it is not difficult to find that seizing the Chinese market is the choice that Cook has to make. In those years, Samsung quickly competed with Apple Inc in the high-end smartphone market with the sudden rise of the Galaxy S series. Later, Huawei will also enter the high-end market with the mate series.

In 2014, for example, Apple Inc's smartphone shipments grew at an annual rate of 25.4%, with global shipments of 191.3 million units, accounting for 16.4% of the global market share, while Samsung topped the list with a 28.0% market share.

Apple Inc needed the Chinese market to compete with Samsung, not to mention that the Chinese market was almost the largest incremental market in the world at the time. According to the Mobile Internet Development trend report released by Baidu, Inc. in the second quarter of 2014, the domestic smartphone penetration rate was only 30 per cent in that quarter.

Cook began to come to China frequently, including three visits to China in 2013. Cook came to China 15 times during his nine years at the helm of Apple Inc.

However, even if it is fully surpassed by Samsung in terms of market share, but reflected in the profit margin, Apple Inc, who is only a high-end, has completely beat Samsung, which has a richer product layout. According to a report released by Canaccord Genuity, Apple Inc accounted for 65% of the mobile phone industry's profits in the first quarter of 2014, while Samsung accounted for 41%, but by the third quarter, Apple Inc's profit share had reached 86%, while Samsung's share had dropped to 18%.

With less than 20% of the market share and 80% or more of the market profit, why? In addition to the brand premium, Cook's continuous layout in the upstream supply chain and downstream retail system can not be ignored.

In October, nearly a year after the position of senior vice president of retail was vacant, Cook hired Angela Arentz to replace John Brayt for Apple Inc, whose last job was CEO of Burberry.

Apple Inc was not calm this year. After the release of the first-quarter results, Apple Inc's share price continued to fall, falling 40 per cent from its peak because sales and revenue fell short of analysts' expectations. Meanwhile, Apple Inc's profitability is weakening.

Arentz's biggest move during Apple Inc's tenure was to integrate Apple Inc's physical and e-retail businesses. She reorganized the retail store system according to sales volume to simplify the operation of Apple Inc's retail links and improve efficiency. In addition, she also improved the mobile payment services of Apple Inc retail stores and online and offline mobile applications, bridging the gap between online and offline purchasing experience.

According to the financial report released by Apple Inc in 2016, the number of entrants and total sales of Apple Inc retail stores have doubled. In addition, Apple Inc's online sales grew at an annual rate of 40% to US $168 billion, exceeding Walmart Inc's income in the same period.

By 2017, Apple Store had sales of $5546 per square foot and contributed about 15 per cent of Apple Inc's net profit each year.

On the other hand, when Cook joined Apple Inc in 1998, the former star company was on the brink of life and death: disorderly expansion of product lines, no longer competition for product power, declining sales and mountains of inventory.

At this time, Cook showed the professional ability of a professional manager-reshaping Apple Inc's supply chain. Before that, Cook, who worked for IBM and Compaq for nearly 20 years, had been regarded by the industry as a master of the supply chain. His supply chain philosophy is "inventory is the most fundamental evil." "

Cook draws lessons from the JIT production model commonly used in IBM and Compaq. The core idea of this model is to abandon the previous large-scale procurement of materials, large-scale production, from upstream thrust-based production mode to the following order-driven production mode.

From supplier management to supply chain operation to the mode of production, Cook reduced the number of Apple Inc's main suppliers from 100 to 24, persuaded suppliers to move near Apple Inc's factory, while abandoning the previous practice of being produced by Apple Inc's own factory. more production was outsourced and the pressure of parts inventory was grafted onto the suppliers.

Cook also led Apple Inc to invest in the most advanced enterprise resource planning (ERP) system at that time, and directly got through the information systems of parts suppliers, assembly plants, and channels. From this system, Apple Inc was able to master weekly sales forecasts, retail channel inventory statistics, outsourcing factory ordering demand, inventory backlog and other details, achieving fine cost control.

In early 1998, Jobs shortened Apple Inc's two-month inventory period to one month, but at the end of the same year, Cook shortened that number to nine days, and by September 1999, Apple Inc's inventory period reached an astonishing two days, sometimes as long as 15 hours.

Apple Inc, under Cook's reform, is still showing strong control over the supply chain.

According to Hu olfactory report, Apple Inc's common means is to return to the traditional mode of "large-scale procurement." Apple Inc invested billions of dollars in the supply chain in 2010, according to independent analyst Horace Dediu, and Bloomberg pointed out that Apple Inc invested as much as $10.5 billion in machinery and laser equipment in the supply chain in 2013.

Apple Inc, who is more well-funded, uses orders to control global supply chain capacity through the advantage of less money and more quantity of iPhone. For example, in 2011, Apple Inc bought out the LG high-resolution screen for $3.9 billion, leaving the market seriously out of stock; in 2014, Apple Inc again spent 23% of the flash capacity, causing the flash market price to rise sharply.

Apple Inc's supply chain operation method has brought it huge profits.

C

In an exclusive interview with Fortune magazine in 2017, Cook was asked: "how does Apple Inc change the world?"

He immediately replied, "our products."

The first thing Jobs did when he returned to Apple Inc in 1997 was to cut off unprofitable product lines and even fire most of his engineering and marketing teams. As we all know, Jobs cut the chaotic product lines to only four. More is to simplify. At the time of Jobs' death, Apple Inc's product line was divided into iMac, iPod, iPhone and iPad.

Cook took a path that ran counter to Jobs' minimalism.

In 2014, Apple Inc launched the smart wearable device Apple Watch; in 2015. Apple Inc launched MacBook; after MacBook Air and MacBooc Pro, followed by Apple Pencle, AirPods, HomePod and other derivative products.

At the same time, under the iPhone product line, since the release of the XR series in 2018, a clear signal is that there are more and more iPhone models.

For comparison, in 2010, Apple Inc's official website offered a total of 14 Apple Inc products, but now Apple Inc's product line has expanded to 27 products, with more than 200 different versions.

This seems to confirm the fact that in the Biography of Jobs, Jobs himself said that "Cook really doesn't understand products." In fact, the two most successful iPhone during Cook's tenure were just the iPhone 5S and iPhone 6S series.

But what is amazing about Cook is that he organically linked these products through the iOS ecosystem, opening up another business model for content services for Apple Inc.

According to the financial results released by Apple Inc for the third quarter of April-June this year, iPhone/iPad/Mac/ services / wearable revenue increased by 2%, 32%, 22%, 15% and 18% respectively compared with the same period last year, while the share of iPhone in the overall revenue fell further to about 44%.

You know, during the iPhone 6 period, Apple Inc's iPhone contributed 63% of its revenue.

Apple Inc's shift probably began to signal around 2015: at the end of 14 years, Cook launched his first new category of products led by him, Apple watch, and in 16 years, AirPods launched. This shows that Cook is looking for other possibilities besides iPhone for Apple Inc.

Service revenue based on the full-capacity ecosystem is one of Cook's favorite areas. In 2017, Cook set Apple Inc's next goal: to double service revenue to $46 billion by 2020. Results as of June this year, Apple Inc reported service revenue of US $13.16 billion, accounting for about 22% of the company's total sales.

At Apple Inc's spring press conference last year, Apple Inc rarely did not release hardware products, but launched four services, including: News+ (a new way to browse news), Card (a simpler credit card experience), Arcade (a better gaming experience), and TV (a broader and smarter TV application).

In response, Dan Ives, an analyst at Wade Bush Securities, said, "this is a key change for Apple Inc. In our view, this is the largest strategic move for the company since it launched iPhone in 2007." Cook and Apple Inc are under tremendous pressure to provide services, and streaming content may be the key to growth. "

Apple Inc is preparing to launch a bundled service that allows users to use a variety of Apple Inc's digital services at lower prices, according to a recent report by Bloomberg. Services such as Apple Music, Apple New+, Apple TV+ and iCloud will be included and will be divided into different packages.

This bundled service is called "Apple One". It is reported that this subscription service will be released at the same time as the upcoming iPhone 12 series mobile phones.

And this is why investors continue to be bullish on Apple Inc. Even if there is a view that Apple Inc has lost the first-mover advantage of 5G, the stability of its sales so far this year is mainly due to the iPhone SE 2, which sells for about 3000 yuan. Nick Gross of Ark Investment said: "in the long run, when we think about Apple Inc, we may not focus on other areas that analysts focus on, such as iPhone sales and equipment sales, we focus more on their services." "

Now, compared with Jobs, Cook's questionable shortcomings in product innovation and so on are being made up for by ecology, service innovation, and a business empire. He and Jobs are just achieving Apple Inc in different ways.

We can't predict whether Jobs will take Apple Inc to such a high level, just as we can't deny what Cook has done.

According to foreign media PhoneArena, Cook's 10-year term is approaching at the end of next year, when he will retire or remain in charge, he will have become another synonym for Apple Inc after Steve Jobs and the greatest defender in history.

Let's go back to the beginning of the story. "within the first five minutes of Jobs' interview, I decided to abandon all caution and logic and join Apple Inc. In 1998, Jobs persuaded Cook in five minutes.

Lionde Carney, author of the biography of Tim Cook, wrote of the story: they are the best partners.