Cook passes attitude portion of Apple CEO replacement test

It was just Monday when Steve Jobs made the announcement that he was taking his third medical leave from his post as CEO of Apple, and though he was not surrendering that title quite yet, he was appointing COO Tim Cook to be in charge of the company’s daily operations. On Tuesday, Cook’s second day in charge, he showed the world that he definitely has the attitude to fill Jobs’ shoes.

Please don’t get me wrong here. I think that Steve Jobs is a highly respectable and very talented individual, however, every so often he seems to let his immense success go to his head (who wouldn’t?), and a bit of arrogance comes across in his presence.

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Cook made a comparable show of arrogance during the Apple’s quarterly earnings announcement yesterday, when asked about how the iPad might fare against the increasing pool of tablet competitors.

First Cook took a few digs at Windows 7 tablets: “Windows tablet PC[s] are fairly big and heavy and expensive. They have weak battery life, they require a stylus, and from our point of view and what we've seen customers are just not interested in them,” Cook said.

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He then went on to give a strong opinion about Android tablets: “The operating system really wasn't designed for a tablet,” Cook pointed out. “Google has said this, so this is not just an Apple view by any means. And so you wind up having a size of a tablet that is less than what we believe is reasonable, or one that we provide what we feel is the real tablet experience. So basically, you end up with a sort of scaled-up smartphone, which is a bizarre product, in our view”

"The next generation of Android tablets, which is what you discussed primarily at CES - there's nothing shipping yet, and so I don't know," Cook concluded. "Generally they lack performance specs, they lack prices, they lack timing, and so today they're vapor. We'll assess them as they come out, wherever, but we're not sitting still, and we have a huge first mover advantage. And we have an incredible user experience from iTunes to the App Store and an enormous number of apps and a huge ecosystem. So we're very, very confident…"

That confidence is a Jobs trait that Apple needs to maintain in whoever ends up being his successor as CEO of the company, and it’s obviously something that Cook has already proven he possesses.

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Industry analyst Brian Marshall is already predicting that Cook will claim Apple’s top spot sometime this year. "He's proven that he can do the job," said Marshall, noting Cook's prior performance as Job’s back-up, and the $5 million bonus the Apple board awarded him for work in 2009. "Cook is the right guy for the job."

Cook may indeed be the right man for the CEO role, but the real test is going to be winning over millions of loyal Apple followers to which Steve Jobs is not just a mere CEO, but also an industry legend. Cook still has quite a ways to go.

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