Lucent

"Cook’s reputation quickly extended beyond the Apple campus. When Jon Rubinstein, Apple’s head of hardware, invited Cook to the Netherlands to negotiate with a company called Lucent as they were trying to help make Wi-Fi a standard, Cook demonstrated a skill in negotiating that awed him. Apple wasn’t even a big company at the time, but Cook managed to grasp every facet of Lucent’s business to understand what the real costs were, so he could low-ball an offer and convince them they’d still earn profit at scale. “Tim hammered home the prices,” Rubinstein says. “It was basically a proctology exam.”"

"The dotcom crisis reshaped tech manufacturing for years to come. In the prior decade, leading contract manufacturers had begun to purchase factories from major brands including IBM, Texas Instruments, Ericsson, Siemens, and Lucent. The deals were often seen as a win-win, with the big brands saving on costs. Negative media headlines could be avoided, since factories were not being shuttered so much as being put under new management. When Apple sold its Fountain, Colorado, factory in 1996, most of its 1,100 employees simply got a new uniform. But the result was a huge transfer in practical knowledge from the computer brands to the contract manufacturers."