With Steve Jobs Gone, Has Apple Lost Its ‘Wow’ Factor? Pressure Is On For Cook To Deliver This Fall

It’s no secret that Apple has been a very different company since Steve Jobs’ death in 2011, nearly three years ago. It was bound to happen. Apple was a company built by, as Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle once stated, “a bit of a control freak,” and with him gone for the past two years, has it finally lost its “Wow” factor? A man of extreme vision and action, Jobs’ infamous tirades have been chronicled more times than one can count, and even more recently in an interview Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak had with The Business Journals:

Steve Jobs had a lot of questionable things. Some of my very best friends at Apple, the most creative people at apple, who worked on the Macintosh, almost all of them said they would never work for Steve Jobs again. It was that bad, I was shocked.

None of this information is very new regarding Steve Jobs, as he was infamous being difficult to work with. In spite of his intense personality (and probably even because of it) he turned Apple into one of the world’s biggest companies. And since Jobs’ time at Apple is done, nearly three years later we ask the question: Does Apple still have that magic? Do they still carry the same emphasis on innovation they once did? Guy Kawasaki, former chief evangelist of Apple, isn’t so sure, Business Insider reports:

What people expect from Apple is great hardware. Not some decision to open up the architecture… Android have been doing that for years but they [Apple] announce it like it’s a revolutionary new concept… The Apple that I remember is they announced some gizmo that is just so cool that you want to stand in line at midnight… We haven’t had that reaction lately.

The latest keynote from current Apple CEO Tim Cook did not seem to impress too much. It had substantial, incremental upgrades across the board, but the idea opening up the architecture does tend to feel more like Apple delivering what consumers are asking for, rather than digging for what they don’t even know they want, which is something Steve Jobs was always big on.

With the upcoming and long-awaited iWatch announcement, the pressure is on for Cook. Since Steve Jobs’ death in 2011, there really haven’t been any key expansions into different markets for Apple, so when it hits later this fall, the pressure will be on to bring back the flare that’s been gone since Jobs passed.