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Gurman throws Apple’s new CEO under the bus just as it starts moving.
John Ternus has been Apple CEO all of a week so it’s time to start stirring things up! Hey, he’s had seven whole days!
Writing for Bloomberg, Mark Gurman is here to dish the dirt and lob some Baby Ruths over the fence and into Ternus’s pool, and he’s all out of, uh, dirt, I guess, in this metaphor? That one kind of got away from the Macalope.
“Tim Cook’s CEO-Like Pay Package Shows He Isn’t Going Anywhere” (subscription required)
In regard to the timing of Cook’s exit, Gurman says it’s to give Ternus “a massive tailwind” while Apple is at the top of its game.
If Cook waited another two or three years to give the job to Ternus, the cupboard of genuinely new and impressive products could be bare.
BREAKING: APPLE ALMOST OUT OF IDEAS. ONLY TWO OR THREE YEARS UNTIL COMPANY SHIPS VISION PRO SOCKS.
It’s also unclear where Apple would sit in the technology hierarchy after OpenAI and Anthropic become public companies…
Right where it sits now? The Macalope will just leave this piece by Horace Dediu right there for you. Pondering AI’s “killer app” moment, which has yet to happen, Dediu says:
I don’t think it’s ChatGPT. That’s like saying TCP/IP. That’s like saying Intel 8088…
Having worked first for 9to5Mac and now Bloomberg, Gurman has not seen the world from the trenches of corporate America (“IT WAS HELL,” RECALLS SURVIVOR).
It would mark a first for Apple, whose previous CEO transitions were anything but orderly, including Cook’s own succession of Jobs amid the company co-founder’s illness.
While you could point to a few things that could have gone better (Scott Forstall), the transition from Jobs to Cook was hardly a “The Purge”-style nightmare of fear, bedlam, and anarchy. It’s not like Jobs died and the Board of Directors broke a pool cue and locked Apple executives in a meeting room to fight for the position. Jobs made Cook CEO. That was pretty much that.
Again, other than Scott Forstall, whose dog apparently ate the memo.
Gurman is not wrong, however, about Cook’s new salary and position being an unusual arrangement that raises a lot of questions about just how this is all going to work. It’ll probably be fine, but it’s probably also not going to be that different, which makes one wonder how Ternus will be able to make his mark on the company.
Gurman has one more decidedly not “fun-sized” Baby Ruth to lob, this time into the Apple community’s collective pool.
But there’s a bit more to the story, I’m told.
TERNUS IS MIKE MARKKULA’S SECRET LOVE CHILD… wait, no, that’s not it.
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Foundry
Ternus and services chief Eddy Cue want to make even more money from the App Store and figure out ways to raise margins and squeeze additional recurring revenue from the platform. Schiller, on the other hand, seems to believe that such moves will only further irk developers and governments. While there was no internal blowup or anything like that, it’s something he wanted no part of.
It would be ironic if, after years of developers dragging Schiller for App Store woes, he turned out to be the one keeping it from being even worse all along. (If this turns out to be the case, in lieu of sending Phil a nice fruit basket, developers can just send donations to the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.)
But you have to wonder who Gurman’s sources are here. It’s not like Schiller called him and said, “Mark, it is time I told you the dark secret about the App Store! Do you have a pen? Because I’ll be naming names. First off… CUE. That’s with a ‘C,’ not a ‘Q’.” Certainly no one close to these executives spoke to Gurman. So who else would be in a position to know (or think they know) and be willing to talk out of school? Certainly a former Apple employee might be willing, which makes it possible that the sound you hear is the grinding of some axes.
No, not that sound. That sound is your CD of “Pocket Full of Kryptonite” by The Spin Doctors that fell behind the credenza in 1998 and landed in front of the air vent and has been rattling ever since. This is more of a GEEENEEERRRRRTTTT noise. Yeah, that’s the one.
Let’s just be clear that the Macalope really hopes Gurman is wrong about this. Apple has already been blinkered enough on the issue, and the idea of it doubling down and raising its take or worsening terms for developers really boggles the imagination. Maybe this represents attitudes Ternus and Cue no longer have; maybe cooler heads will still prevail.
Or maybe we’re just going to keep complaining about the App Store until the heat death of the universe.
