Apple is the past; Amazon is the future. That’s one of many takeaways from analyst Mary Meeker’s annual state of the Internet report, delivered last night at the Code technology conference.
Meeker believes iPhone sales may have peaked in 2015. On the other hand, she sees Amazon’s voice-activated home assistant Echo as at the beginning of a new boom. She believes that voice ultimately will become the most efficient form of computer input, because it is fast, easy, and keyboard free. You can find other takeaways from Meeker’s report here, and get the full 213 page slideshow here.
Meeker’s assessment appears to be echoed in our survey of Fortune 500 CEOs. We asked the 500: “Which CEO other than yourself do you most admire.” Last year, Tim Cook and Jamie Dimon took top honors. This year, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos walked away with it. He was mentioned by almost a quarter of those responding. No other CEO got even a third as many mentions. The lagging “runner up” category included Cook, Dimon, Satya Nadella, Warren Buffett, Larry Page and Jeff Immelt.
Fortune put Bezos in the number one spot on its World’s Greatest Leaders list earlier this year. If you missed Adam Lashinky’s insightful profile, you should go back and read it here, to find out why Bezos is so admired by his peers (if not by the New York Times.)
