The news that Steve Jobs is stepping down as chief executive officer of Apple is rippling through the media, just as yesterday’s earthquake traveled up the East Coast. There are more good wishes in my Twitter feed this evening than there were immediately following yesterday’s earthquake, and fewer jokes in questionable taste. Both humor and sympathy are natural reactions to shock. In this case, death had been forestalled—Jobs had pancreatic cancer, then received a liver transplant—but it cannot be averted, and the unspoken assumption is that Jobs’s medical condition has deteriorated.
Jobs can resign his position as the C.E.O. of Apple by releasing a statement, but it isn’t so easy to stop embodying the company he founded with Steve Wozniak in 1976, left in 1985, and returned to in 1996, to transform the flailing maker of the also-ran personal computer into a dominant force in how we communicate, listen, watch, read, and buy things, including this magazine. Apple partisans explain their loyalty with rational arguments about elegant design and freedom from viruses, but their devotion runs as deep as sports fandom or religious faith, and they hang on Jobs’s every word.
Can Apple thrive without Jobs? It almost didn’t the first time around, and shares have plunged this evening. On the other hand, Jobs has been on medical leave since the beginning of the year. This kind of question is always hard to answer, but it’s so much more difficult here because of the code of silence enforced by Jobs. As a result, journalists, bloggers, and fans have been parsing his every utterance, from W.W.D.C. keynotes to purported e-mails to members of the public, the way Moscow reporters used to watch the Kremlin. Apple is in much better financial shape than the Soviet Union was at the end, so I’m not counting on a period of glasnost, at least not yet.
| I Want You To Join The Apple Army |
One of the great tech visionaries of our time has given up the ghost. The question everyone wants an answer to is can Apple keep the mojo Jobs has built up?
I don't think they can. And I will tell you why.
The differences between Jobs and another Master Of The Universe who ceded responsibility - Bill Gates - are stark. Where Gates' management style could be in the neighborhood of hands-on and involvement in top-to-bottom decision-making was peripheral, Jobs is the archetype of the micromanager and involved in even the most trivial manners.
How much Jobs has done to pass the mantle of leadership beyond prepping Tim Cook is only part of the transition. Will everyone else be able to adjust without him? Changing how an organization thinks takes years... ask Tim Gerstner.
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