Tim Cook honors Steve Jobs 60th birthday with Apple message

By Will Stabley | February 24, 2015

Apple CEO Tim Cook doesn’t speak often, and when he does, his words are carefully parsed by those looking for clues about the company’s upcoming direction. But Cook’s message today is simple: a remembrance of his friend and former colleague, the late Steve Jobs, who would have celebrated his 60th birthday today, posted to his personal Twitter account.

Tim Cook’s message was brief and straightforward: “Remembering Steve, who would have turned 60 today. ‘The only way to do great work is to love what you do.'” But the mere fact that Cook has a Twitter account serves to highlight the differences in managerial styles between the two men. Steve Jobs was the public face of the company, but rarely did interviews and preferred to speak only from the stage of his keynote addresses. Cook has been more open in general, and has erased a small fraction of the secrecy surrounding Apple, even as the product line has continued in the kind of general direction which could have been expected from Jobs.

Steve Jobs is widely credited with turning around a sinking Apple in the late 1990s and spearheading the launch of products like the iMac and iPad, turning the company he co-founded into a multibillion dollar powerhouse. Tim Cook worked alongside him in a fairly silent COO capacity for fourteen years, and assumed the CEO title shorting before Jobs died of cancer. Cook’s tenure was initially questioned due to a gap in major product launches after he took over, but that has since been resolved with a successful new iPhone and the introduction of the Apple Watch. The latter is the first product developed without any significant input from Jobs himself.