Tim Cook Picked By Time Magazine As Person Of The Year Runner-Up

Yesterday, we noted that Apple CEO Tim Cook was one of the nominees for Time Magazine's Person of the Year for 2012. Today, Time has announced that it has awarded the title to none other than President Barack Obama, with Cook coming in as second runner-up. Cook is definitely in excellent company. The first runner-up is Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani student activist who survived an assassination attempt by the Taliban. And the third and fourth runner-ups are Egyptian president Mohammed Morsi and Italian physicist Fabiola Gianotti, respectively. Cook and his fellow awardees are deemed by Time to have "done the most to influence the events of the year." And what a year it has been for Cook, Apple, and the tech world at large. My colleague Lory summarized it rather succinctly:

Apple’s current CEO had some fairly big shoes to fill when he stepped in to take over for the late, great Steve Jobs in mid 2011. This past year has been a rocky one for the new guy. We’ve seen a mass exodus that included the likes of Ron Johnson, Bob Mansfield, and Bertrand Serlet. Even more recently was the shake-up in the executive pool that ended Scott Forstall and John Browett’s time at Apple. Oh, and we can’t talk about rocky times for Apple without mentioning “Mapsgate.” After all is said and done, Cook has managed to weather the storm and present the world a new way of doing things that includes working toward protecting the human rights of foreign workers and bringing jobs back to the U.S. Maybe the Maps app turned out to be a huge failure, but Apple’s CEO wasn’t nominated for Person of the Year because of how well the company is doing. He was nominated for his impact on the world.

As a runner-up, Cook gets to be on one of the covers for Time's Person of the Year issue, in which he is also featured in an in-depth profile. The profile, which is written by senior writer and book critic Lev Grossman, details Cook's important role as "the Technologist." An undeniably good read, it contains a great deal of interesting points, my favorite being the following observation regarding Cook: "He doesn’t look like Jobs, he looks like something Jobs would have made … And like an Apple product, Cook runs smooth and fast." Source: Time

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