Apple is doing quite well under Cook. Same with Google under Pichai. Microsoft had some pains during the Balmer years, but I think that's partially due to the anti-trust suit making them gunshy and Balmer being a generally poor choice as a tech CEO, but they are doing very well with Nadella.

I expect Amazon to be as ambitious as ever. Though, I am slightly afraid of a shift in focus towards AWS over retail. But I suspect Jassy's selection had to do with fears that a pick from the retail side may see Jassy as a threat and may seek to undermine AWS in an effort to keep him in check.

Google isn’t doing all that well under Pichai, they haven’t launched a successful product under him since Chromebooks (I guess GCP, but when you are that size and <10% of market share, I don’t know if it’s successful), and they are just coasting on ads, YouTube and GSuite. Whereas Apple (say what you will about Cook) has launched AirPods, the Apple Watch and Apple Silicon-based Macs, which are all raking in cash. It’s possible that Google is only ever going to be an ads company, but based on their corporate rhetoric I don’t think that was the goal.

Apple Silicon Macs aren’t really raking in cash yet, but Mac sales are up $1B in the last quarter, so by time transition is complete they will be.

Yeah, I think Cook and Apple are doing well.

Google is doing poorly, but they have a monopoly on web advertising. If they lose that they'd be in trouble. They also weren't doing better when lead by Page (Google+ era).

Microsoft was on the path to irrelevance during the Ballmer years and Nadella has pulled off a miracle to save them.

I hope Amazon is more of a Tim Cook story than a Steve Ballmer one.

> I suspect Jassy's selection had to do with fears that a pick from the retail side may see Jassy as a threat

Amazon had (has) three CEOs: Bezos as overall CEO, Jassy as CEO of AWS, and Jeff Wilke as CEO of the "Consumer" business, i.e. the retail operation.

Wilke announced last year that he would be leaving and that SVP of Operations Dave Clark would replace him as head of the Consumer business.

The question is whether Bezos chose Jassy and that made Wilke leave, or whether Wilke leaving left Jassy as the only remaining choice to replace Bezos.

Apple and Microsoft are arguably much better off today with their new leaders than they might've been. I don't see your point?

I think Facebook, too, could use a new face at the top as a matter of fact.

They are not. On the surface revenues keeps growing, profits are enormous but underneath there are virtually no new product lines. If you look at Microsoft of 1990s, there were new $1B business each year - MSSQL, Sharepoint, Dynamics etc etc. For Apple, Jobs made it a point for one new product line every 2-3 years. For Google, you had new stuff like Gmail, Maps keep coming. Now its mostly barren land. Amazon had a lot going on with Alexa, pharmacy, Fire tablets, prime video etc. Don't expect these stuff 2-3 years down the road with new business suit at the helm.

There are real impact of not having a "product person" at helm. Business suits will squeeze out revenues and profits no matter what but there are no more tech that truly leap frogs existing art.

Exactly. Expect Prime membership to cost more and deliver less. New suits aren’t going to be beholden to Jeff’s mode of thinking and this historical precedent. We may well see Video culled outright or spun off into another media subscription, etc.

I think consistently improving existing products is just as good as, and oftentimes preferable to, creating entirely new products.

I think it’s more the case that so many years have passed that it’s not like they were likely to fail. They just failed to succeed quite as much as their original CEOs could have made them. Steve left Tim a cash machine.

Big difference: Andy Jassy is an execution machine, AND has a really good sense of vision and strategy. AND has worked at Amazon for ~25 years.

Source: my humble opinion, and I worked at AWS and met him several times.

Looks like a typical MBA business suit to me. Could you elaborate on vision/technical aspect? I'd think he would delegate those to others.

Apple under Cook is a juggernaut. I'm not sure why you would use Apple as an example. Same with MS and Satya. You could argue MS floundered with Ballmer.

I'd guess that Bezos's genes are pretty well baked into the company.

With Jobs, it sounded like there was a singular personality role that was a chaotic influence in the company. That wasn't the only thing that made Apple great, but were people throughout the company inspired to be more like Jobs?

Please also include Google in your list.

That’s actually a really good example too. The fact I didn’t shows how far they’ve slipped of late.

MS completely missed on mobile phones and tablets, despite trying so many times at it. The “Windows everywhere” approach prevented them from doing what really had to be done (make something new for these new devices). That was all under the Ballmer era.

It’s only now that they have a new CEO who is happy to pursue other approaches that they have been able to start going in a better direction again.

Exactly. Bill stepped down in 2008. Balmer was CEO until 2014. Oddly that’s when their products started to turn around significantly.

Cook has made a lot of original Mac power users completely pissed. He’s gutted entire software products that people relied upon using. He’s probably why we had the half decade of MBPs developers didn’t like. Etc. His best accomplishment has been the services stuff and maybe the M1.

No one cares about the technical users. They are, by and large, irrelevant.

But they did have a rough patch under Ballmer.