Apple CEO Tim Cook Has A Different Definition Of Innovation en-us Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:00:00 -0500 Fri, 20 Dec 2013 05:07:30 -0500 Alyson Shontell hammerman Mon, 23 Sep 2013 13:06:46 -0400 He's not doing anything different than steve's just consumers are 5 years smarter and used to apple. STeve jobs made people think LTE or 4G was an upgrade, made people think copy/paste as an update....Tim cook is doing the same thing; he's just not as good as a salesman as Jobs. Period Steve W Mon, 23 Sep 2013 10:27:56 -0400 Tim Cook did not say that changing color schemes is innovation. Steve Jobs said. Of course, that was 15 years ago, and a 15 year old innovation "isn't" any more. Maybe what is confusing you is that the same Apple design team that "innovated" with colorful iMacs, followed by colorful iPods; has decided to make colorful iPhones. Actually, Steve Jobs did not call color an innovation. He called it thinking different. I guess when you try it a third time, it isn't so different - unless your target market was wearing diapers the first time you tried it, or bought gazillions of your products the second time. eilonwy Mon, 23 Sep 2013 09:02:22 -0400 This is Tim Cook's consistent philosophy, and it's exactly why there's some worry about Apple stalling. When tech enters the "innovation is incremental updates and changing the color scheme" phase, there will usually be some period when this is actually enough to keep sales ticking along, and they can tick very nicely. Microsoft demonstrated that this can be a surprisingly long period: roughly ten years ago, Linux and thin clients were touted as "sure to" disrupt Microsoft's domination of the enterprise, and of course that never happened. But the disruption comes eventually, and if the company's been coasting along on incremental innovation, it hits hard... because to do year after year of "innovation is these little changes" requires that there be an entire corporate culture in place that supports that. The company can't just turn on a dime and become a major innovator again. The last time that it was a big deal for mobile phones to come in multiple colors, the technology had temporarily "matured" and what drove sales was largely cosmetic (first colors, then the addition of primitive cameras and the switch to flip-style phones). The companies that dominated the market then are not in great shape now, as they didn't respond effectively to the smartphone disruption. Dan Clover Mon, 23 Sep 2013 07:55:46 -0400 Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower. That's what Steve said. He "stole" ideas from other and used them as his own. The difference is, he made it better in the process. Where others were seeing same old same old, He saw a hidden goldmine.