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Steve Jobs resigns: analysis
What does the departure of Steve Jobs mean for Apple and the technology industry? Shane Richmond explains.
What does the departure of Steve Jobs mean for Apple and the technology industry? Shane Richmond explains.
It’s a sad day for the technology industry: one of its most charismatic figures, a genius in an industry filled with brilliant minds, has stepped aside.
Steve Jobs is one of the founding figures of the modern computer industry. He has twice run Apple: once from its creation in 1976 until he was ousted in 1985, and again, 20 years later, when he returned to rescue a company on the brink of collapse. Turning the company around and presiding over the release of one hit product after another, from the iMac and iPod, through to the iPhone and iPad, is perhaps Jobs’s greatest achievement.
Eleven years ago, another of the modern computer industry’s founders, Bill Gates, stepped aside from his role as chief executive of the company he had founded. However, Gates’s resignation came in happier circumstances. The Microsoft chief executive planned to work instead on his charitable foundation.
In contrast, Steve Jobs, in a letter to the Apple board, said that he is resigning because he “could no longer meet my duties and expectations as CEO”. In 2004, Jobs announced that he had pancreatic cancer, and in 2009 he underwent a liver transplant. At the beginning of this year, he went on medical leave again. This, then, is how Steve Jobs’s third medical leave of absence ends: with Jobs replaced by Tim Cook, who was until yesterday, acting CEO, and Jobs serving as Chairman.
Each time Jobs went on medical leave it was Cook who took over, so this decision should not be a surprise. With Cook at the helm Apple has continued to release products and to grow in a way has astounded investors. Early reaction from investors and analysts suggests that the market will greet the news calmly.
It would be foolish to believe that Apple is a one-man company, though the firm’s desire to focus on its products and not its people means that Jobs’s team is not terribly well known. One exception is Jonathan Ive, the British design guru behind some of Apple’s best-known products, who has become relatively well-known.
In fact, the unusual thing is that Jobs and Gates became household names at all. Most people outside the technology industry could not name the person in charge of Sony PlayStation or Amazon, despite the popularity of both brands.
Apple’s innovations over the last decade are the result of the company’s structure: a small team at the top, focusing on a tightly-controlled number of products. Ideas can come from anywhere but those top executives spend a lot of time deciding what not to work on, to ensure that the company’s resources aren’t spread too thinly. Though Jobs played a key role in developing those working practices, the ideas are embedded deep within the company by this point. Apple's competitors might be hoping that the company's fortunes will change for the worse without Jobs but I wouldn't bet on it.
Still, Jobs has been the face of Apple for a decade now. Something that the company has only belatedly begun to challenge. When the iPad 2 was launched earlier this year, not long after Jobs had taken sick leave, the chief executive returned to host the announcement. “I just didn’t want to miss today,” he told the audience.
However, by June this year, at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco, Jobs introduced the event and then left the bulk of the presentation to his colleagues Phil Schiller and Scott Forstall. Apple-watcher John Gruber described it as the company’s “first post-Steve keynote”.
Apple likes to have its big on-stage reveals for new products and, at present, they don’t have a figure with the charisma of Steve Jobs to take those on. But watch Jobs’s earliest presentations and you’ll see that he was once far less polished than he is now. His successors will learn, just as he did.
The departure of Steve Jobs is not the end of Apple but it is the end of an extraordinary chapter in the history of the technology business.
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