A skivvy for your vision

There's no shortage of parallels to be drawn between the leaders that drove tech giants Microsoft and Apple. Which begs the question: With Steve Jobs stepping down and Tim Cook stepping up, will Cook become Apple's Steve Ballmer?

In a 2004 interview with Business Week, Jobs pointed out that, with the appointment of Ballmer to succeed Bill Gates, it was a sales guy that eventually ended up running Microsoft, just as Apple was sales-led.

Not surprising given Jobs once described Microsoft as lacking taste and said Bill Gates would “be a broader guy if he had dropped acid once or gone off to an ashram when he was younger''.

There's probably more than a few people who think Steve Ballmer was on acid when he did his now infamous monkey dance in front of a pumped up crowd. Since then, as Alexander Liddington-Cox explained in June, Ballmer-bashing has almost become a professional sport, particularly among disappointed investors, who have watched Microsoft shares shed almost 60 per cent of their value under Ballmer's reign.

The short-term situation is less dire for Apple, given Tim Cook has been running operations at Apple, and has stepped into the CEO role twice before. He's already been welcomed with open arms by analysts, despite investors punishing the news of Jobs' resignation with a 7 per cent clip to Apple shares in after-hours trading.

Both Ballmer and Cook are workaholics known for their relentless focus on the numbers, and for shredding underlings who don't know their business, reports Business Insider.

But let's face it, Ballmer is all sales and Cook is a softly-spoken engineer. It will take more than an obsessive eye for detail and willingness to burn the midnight oil for Cook to fill Jobs' shoes. Order the man a skivvy, stat.

Beyond the short-term it will be the success of Jobs' in imprinting a culture of creativity that determines how successful Apple will be in the future. Apple University is one example of how he's tried to do this.

Innovation in large companies is often driven by visionaries, but it's the execution of that vision that can make or break. In championing the user experience Jobs created a vision not just for Apple, but for technology companies large and small. That very few have been able to come close to delivering the experience Apple delivers (with the exception of a few copycats), is evidence Apple is full of talented people who know how to turn vision into reality.

The bigger question is not whether the talent at Apple will continue to deliver, but whether those same people will miss working directly for Steve Jobs so much that they decide to jump ship.