appleEddy Cue, the firm’s senior vice president of services, attributes the success of the market’s biggest companies to saying “no” more than “yes.”
“We say ‘no’ to almost everything,” Cue said in a conversation with CNBC’s Jim Cramer on Tuesday at the inaugural CNBC CEO Council Summit in Santa Barbara, California. “When you get as big as we are, it’s easy to think you can do anything, but that’s not the case.”
According to Cue, an idea only gets off Apple’s drawing board when the company knows it can execute well and consumers actually care about it.
Cue joins Apple 1989 as a software engineering manager. Since then, he’s been a key figure in many of Apple’s innovations, including the launch of the iTunes Store and the company’s foray into sports streaming.
Apple signed a 10-year deal with Major League Soccer in 2022 and opened up the service to fans for the first time at the start of this year’s season. Cue cites ice hockey player Wayne Gretzky’s famous foresight when discussing Apple’s foray into sports streaming.
“We want to go where the puck is going, not where the puck is,” Cue said. “That’s what (Gretzky) does. He skates to where the puck is going, not where the puck is. That’s what we want to do in sports.”