Though most of us knew the day would come when Steve Jobs would have to resign as Apple’s chief executive, but the news still came with shock and sadness for many. His health has been poor for years and despite beating cancer and recovering from a liver transplant Steve Jobs announced this year he would be taking another period of medical leave.
The company is in good shape and has some big products on the horizon such as the iPhone 5 and the iPad 3. The new CEO Tim Cook has been acting in that role for some time, too, so there is not set to be an imminent change in tack. Almost surely the new CEO will be stamping his authority but surely Steve will be missed. Regarding rivals, Samsung, Microsoft and Google will not immediately benefit. Indeed, Android and Windows Phone are both set to make major updates in the near future: neither of those will be altered by Jobs’s announcement, and the market has never been more closely fought.
There’s not a great deal to suggest that rivals should anticipate an immediate decline in the quality of Apple’s products. And the main thing we can discern from Tim Cook’s leadership in its three phases so far is that he has propelled Apple to new heights of profitability by selling more products, rather than by making radically different ones.
Here’s what someothers feel about this former CEO :
“He was the leading innovator, his life was his work – I guess it was inevitable, but we all hoped it would happen some time in the future, not now,” said Leander Kahley, who wrote the book Inside Steve’s Brain and edits the colcosmac.com technology magazine. “He’s irreplaceable – there’s nobody with his vision, but he has put a lot of processes in place to ensure new executives take the company forward. He even started an Apple University with a top Harvard business professor,” he added.
“My hope is that he believes this is the right time for Apple to move ahead without him,” Harry McCracken of the Technologizer website fame said. He hoped the fact people knew this would happen might mean the company would not be too badly hit by the news. “But it is a huge moment in the future of technology and especially personal computing – he has been the dominant figure in personal technology for the last 30 years.”
It wouldn’t be tough to say that Apple is where it is because of its former CEO’s unique personality. The extraordinary professionalism and the ability to say ‘NO’ is what has helped Apple reach this heights.
Steve Jobs was known for his showmanship, with big launches of top secret products – a marketing strategy that brought excitement to the world and built up huge hype around Apple products. It is what happens two years down the line: predicting the next big thing and going for it, which is where Steve Jobs will be missed.
I don’t cre who you are, you gotta feel bad for Steve Jobs… he’s contributed so much to computing and the smartphone industry, but even the richest people in the world are subject to the laws of nature.
I think he’s really had a great last decade and his impact will be felt decades and perhaps even centuries after he passes.