Oliver Haslam on January 19, 2017, 6:19 am

Former Engineer Criticizes Apple’s Current Leadership, Calls The Company ‘Boring’ Under Tim Cook

Given the way many Apple commentators feel about the company and its neglect of previously important product lines, such as just about everything with the word “Mac” in the title, it shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone that the methods of CEO Tim Cook are being brought into question.

It’s something that was almost inevitable, and although Tim Cook has made Apple the largest company on the planet during his tenure, there will always be problems. One former Apple engineer has today spoken out about the differences between the Apple he worked at under Steve Jobs and the Apple he left, saying that current CEO Tim Cook has turned Apple “from a dynamic change-maker into a boring operations company.”

Bob Burrough, a former Apple engineer, told CNBC that even while the iPhone was being devised, Apple was a company in “chaos.” That chaos eventually led to arguably Apple’s biggest invention and the creation of a product that even today is still the market leader.

The iPhone remodelled Apple as a smartphone company in the same way the iPod made it into a music company, and it all happened when Jobs was running a very different company to that which Cook has moulded.

“At Apple in 2007, organizationally it was the wild west,” Burrough said. “I was hired under a particular manager, but for the first two years worked on projects that had virtually nothing to do with that manager’s core responsibility. That’s because the organization wasn’t the priority, the projects were the priority. It was the exact opposite of ‘not my job.’ It was ‘I’m here to solve whatever problems I can, irrespective of my role, my title, or to whom I report.’ It was wild. But it was also very rewarding, because everything you did had maximal impact on the product.”

But today, the “dynamic has clearly and distinctly changed,” and Apple is much closer to his job at Palm, said Burrough.

We all know what happened to Palm, don’t we?

It has been clear for some time that Cook’s Apple is very different to that which Jobs oversaw, and until recently, few could argue with the results. Huge profits quarter after quarter saw Apple become the poster child for business, but as the gloss has begun to fade, Apple is being accused of a lack of focus and importantly, a lack of innovation. The rumored Apple Car is said to be stumbling, and may not actually be a car at all anymore. The Mac line is ageing and apparently simply being discarded by the company, with the Mac Pro and Mac mini almost forgotten about. Does Apple perhaps need a little more chaos in its life?

Probably not. After all, much of the company’s current problems could be fixed by releasing a new Mac Pro. Unfortunately however, we just don’t see it happening any time soon.

(source: CNBC)