It seems to me that the 'Jobsian' management style has some inherent boundaries in how large such an organisation can get. By that I mean if you have
a) a micro manager that wants to be involved in all important and medium important product and marketing decisions and
b) this micro manager as the actual CEO of the company
you will run into some limitations. There's only so much a man can review and decide on. Now, of course, Tim Cook is probably not that person, but the Jobs legacy seems to live on in how the 'second line' (Ive, Schiller,..) and everyone after them still acts.
In the longer run, from what we can see from the outside, only Ive has the potential to step into Steve's shoes when it comes to designing new product lines. I'm very curious about how he will manage iOS, at the least we're in for a few surprises in the near future I'd say.
Software teams rarely scale well -- sure management styles and culture will come into it -- However, scaling and layering up software teams is horrendously inefficient. I'd argue that's a bigger boundary.
If you take software out of the equation - Apple is pretty huge. Both in their own right & positively massive when you consider their contractors and partners.
I'd argue that you really can't do that in this case. Apple's main value proposition is hardware/software integration and if your software teams can't keep up it will limit the product lines you can manage. However, in Apple's case, most of their product lines sell so incredibly well that they still operate at a massive scale, even though they have a limited amount of chips in the game. This is of course where Tim Cook comes in, and why he's CEO now.
a) a micro manager that wants to be involved in all important and medium important product and marketing decisions and
b) this micro manager as the actual CEO of the company
you will run into some limitations. There's only so much a man can review and decide on. Now, of course, Tim Cook is probably not that person, but the Jobs legacy seems to live on in how the 'second line' (Ive, Schiller,..) and everyone after them still acts.
In the longer run, from what we can see from the outside, only Ive has the potential to step into Steve's shoes when it comes to designing new product lines. I'm very curious about how he will manage iOS, at the least we're in for a few surprises in the near future I'd say.