When asked by Fast Company in a recent interview whether he was worried that Apple may face the same problems that Microsoft did when it tried to become everything for everybody with Windows, Apple CEO Tim Cook said no. According to Cook: “Part of the reason Microsoft ran into an issue was that they didn’t want to walk away from legacy stuff.”
Fast Company: How does Steve Jobs’s legacy live on at Apple? Tim Cook: Steve felt that most people live in a small box. They think they can’t influence or change things a lot. I think he would probably call that a limited life. And more than anybody I’ve ever met, Steve never accepted that. He got each of us [his top executives] to reject that philosophy. If you can do that, then you can change things. If you embrace that the things that you can do are limitless, you can put your ding in the universe. You can change the world That was the huge arc of his life, the common thread. That’s what drove him to have big ideas. Through his actions, way more than any preaching, he embedded this nonacceptance of the status quo into the company.