You make it sound like Cook does everything at Apple.
His job has been to keep the train rolling and on the tracks. He's very competent at that but the slow atrophy of Apple shows he's not doing anything more than that.
Apple was doing great before he became CEO and it'll do great after he leaves.
While Cook isn't a product visionary, and never pretended to be, he's also not a mere caretaker: before he was CEO, he was responsible for the design and implementation of Apple's global supply chain and manufacturing operations as they exist today.
To torture your analogy, he designed and built the tracks and related infrastructure that kept Jobs' trains running on time.
Delivering products to customers, as you may recall, was always as important to Jobs as the design of the products themselves.
Part of the reason Apple was doing great before he became CEO is because Tim Cook was the COO. A huge part of their success was getting good deals on the non standard parts they needed at massive scale.
Not sure there was a clear better candidate for CEO after Jobs died.
His job has been to keep the train rolling and on the tracks. He's very competent at that but the slow atrophy of Apple shows he's not doing anything more than that.
Apple was doing great before he became CEO and it'll do great after he leaves.