Mossberg:

Five years ago last week, the legendary Steve Jobs stepped down as Apple’s CEO after an amazing 14-year run that took the technology company from the edge of disaster to the heights of glory. He personally selected his COO, Tim Cook, as the new CEO, and passed away six weeks later.

So, how has Apple changed in the first five years of the Tim Cook era? How is it different from the peak of the Jobs era?

The short answer is that the company has surged financially to heights Jobs likely never dreamed of. It has also refined its popular product line and retained most of its senior talent.

But Cook’s Apple has yet to produce the kind of new, game-changing product Jobs was famous for launching. Or, if it has, we don’t know it yet.

I think a better title for this article would have been, “Jobs’ metric of success is different than Cook’s metric of success. Both were critical.”

I think Walt Mossberg’s analysis is interesting, worth reading, but I also think it is couched incorrectly. Steve Jobs ran Apple in a startup mode. Just as most startups need different leadership as they mature, in my opinion, Tim Cook is exactly the kind of leader Apple needed to crush the supply chain and build up Apple’s presence around the world, exactly the kind of leader Apple needs to navigate the choppy tax waters ahead.

And I have no doubt that Apple has plenty of innovation in the hopper, some of it extensions to familiar forms, some of it in the labs, still being shaped.