Asking Tim Cook the right questions

Matthew Panzarino over at The Next Web has a really insightful piece up discussing how interviewers and analysts afforded the chance to ask Apple CEO Tim Cook questions aren't really taking full advantage of the opportunity.

Following Tim Cook's interview at this year's All Things D conference, there seemed to be a collective yawn from people who found Cook's time on stage to be particularly uninteresting and not terribly informative.

Adam Lashinsky, who perhaps went a bit overboard in his critique, penned a piece titled, "The unbearable lightness of what Tim Cook says."

Here's a snippet:

Panzarino posits that maybe we're asking Tim Cook the wrong questions, and I'm inclined to agree.

It's no secret that Apple is a notoriously secretive company. While some companies in the tech world like making grand announcements about products still in development or talking about internal strategies, Apple shuns doing so like the plague.

Apple views product secrecy as a competitive advantage, and any interviewer who knows even a little about Apple should know that its executives will not, under any circumstance, talk about what new products they have in the pipeline.

And yet, without fail, every time Tim Cook is open to fielding questions, we hear an endless stream of questions about the iWatch, future iPhone models and Apple's mythical HDTV. In response to these somewhat generic questions, Tim Cook feeds us generic answers.

I mean, what else do you expect him to do?

Then of course, there are often asked questions which never lead to anywhere interesting. "Is Apple less cool of a company than it used to be?" "Is Apple looking at any big acquisition these days?"

At this point, I could probably predict half of Tim Cook's answers in an interview before the questions are even asked.

Do any of these gems sound familiar?

"We are focused on delighting our customers."

"Apple is the world's most innovative company."

"When you work on hardware, software and services together, that's where the magic happens."

Yawn.

But here's the thing about Cook -- if you get beyond trying to figure out what products Apple will release next, he actually has a lot of interesting things to say.

Panzarino writes:

I couldn't agree more.

If we look back at Tim Cook's All Things D interview, one of his most interesting answers dealt with the potential for Google Glass to succeed in the marketplace.

What's more, we recently posted about Tim Cook's visit to the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University where he participated in the school's "Real Conversations with Real Leaders" symposium.

There, Cook opined on leadership, what makes a good collaborative environment, the importance of intuition and a whole lot more.

The takeaway here, I think, is that when Cook isn't preoccupied with evading questions about Apple's secretive product plans, he is more than capable of engaging in an interesting discussion on a wide range of topics.

There's no denying that Cook isn't as engaging or dynamic of a personality as Steve Jobs, who was effectively a walking soundbite of insight, controversy and opinion. Jobs, of course, was never prone to discussing future product plans either, but it didn't take much for him to go off on a tangent regarding some bigger picture type issue in the technology realm, whether it be the state of the music industry or the problems associated with Blu-ray licensing.

Cook, in contrast, isn't going to explore such topics unless asked directly. Admittedly, Cook isn't the most exciting speaker on the planet, but if interviewers starting asking him better questions, I imagine we'd start getting more interesting answers.