Steve Jobs was unique, cut from a different cloth, on a different plane of thinking that set him apart from other CEOs and leaders. Over the past ten years Apple has gone from strength to strength because of his vision, but now that Steve Jobs is gone, can Apple keep it up? I think they can, and I think it’s because the Apple Board knows what drives long-term shareholder value. And you only need to look at the extreme remuneration package that the new CEO Tim Cook has signed up to as proof.
When you look at companies that are delivering great results globally, it’s hard to ignore that many of them are run by the guys that started them. Apple of course, Google, Facebook… all of these are run by the founders. These companies appear driven by the legacy that the founders want to leave behind, and their entire business and decision making process revolves around that, not the current years financial numbers. In short, they are hard-wired to create sustainable value for their business.
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I’m finally starting to see where Google are going with Google+ with the annoucement that they now allow search functionality. It’s all starting to make sense. At the moment when you search or something using Google’s traditional search engine, there is practically no social integration. That’s a gap that Google+ will fill. So if you want to find a plumber that your friends might have talked about positively in the past, you might use Google+ as the search engine, not traditional Google. It now seems obvious that Google are envisioning a time when a subset of searches are no longer done by users at Google.com, but rather at plus.google.com.
