Tim Cook talks Apple future in sweeping Fast Company interview

In an exclusive interview with Fast Company’s Rick Tetzeli and Brent Schlender, Apple CEO’s Tim Cook has talked about how Apple lives “outside the box,” how Steve Jobs’s legacy lives on at Apple, and the upcoming Apple Watch.

He discussed topics like the future of the company Steve Jobs co-founded, upcoming Apple Campus 2 (iSpaceship), Steve Jobs’ legacy and more.

When questioned about how Steve Job’s legacy still influences Apple, Cook said that Jobs made people believe that they can “change things” and the things that they can do are limitless. This thinking “drove him to have big ideas,” and he proved this through “his action, way more than any preaching, he embedded this nonacceptance of the status quo into the company.”

This philosophy plays a key role at Apple when it decides to enter a new market as evident from the below statement of Cook:

When Apple looks at what categories to enter, we ask these kinds of questions: What are the primary technologies behind this? What do we bring? Can we make a significant contribution to society with this? If we can’t, and if we can’t own the key technologies, we don’t do it. That philosophy comes directly from him and it still very much permeates the place. I hope that it always will.

Cook also says that Steve Jobs was a great teacher, and that he did a great job of building a culture and picking a great team, that would then pick another great team, and so on, and these teams would ensure the same quality of standard was applied as Jobs.

He’s not given credit as a teacher. But he’s the best teacher I ever had by far. There was nothing traditional about him as a teacher. But he was the best. He was the absolute best.
Let me just make this one point. Last year, the company did $200 billion worth of business. We’re either the top smartphone maker in the world, or one of the top ones. Would the company have been able to do that if he were the micromanager that he was made out to be? Obviously not.

Cook also showed the Apple Watch during his interview, and said the small screen forced the company to invent new ways for UI interaction.

You look at the watch, and the primary technologies are software and the UI [user interface]. You’re working with a small screen, so you have to invent new ways for input. The inputs that work for a phone, a tablet, or a Mac don’t work as well on a smaller screen. Most of the companies who have done smartwatches haven’t thought that through, so they’re still using pinch-to-zoom and other gestures that we created for the iPhone.
Try to do those on a watch and you quickly find out they don’t work. So out of that thinking come new ideas, like force touch. [On a small screen] you need another dimension of a user interface. So just press a little harder and you bring up another UI that has been hidden. This makes the screen seem larger, in some ways, than it really is.

And perhaps the most touching part of the interview was when Cook was questioned about Steve Jobs office at Apple. Cook confirmed that Jobs nameplate is still up next to his old office, and that the room was basically untouched, though Laurene Jobs (Steve Jobs’s wife) did take some things of Steve to her home.

What we’ll do over time, I don’t know. I didn’t want to move in there. I think he’s an irreplaceable person and so it didn’t feel right . . . for anything to go on in that office. So his computer is still in there as it was, his desk is still in there as it was, he’s got a bunch of books in there. Laurene took some things to the house.
I don’t know. His name should still be on the door. That’s just the way it should be. That’s what felt right to me.

In case you want to read the complete interview made by Fast Company, head over to this link.