First of all, this is overdue. Thanks in no small part to my flat out laziness but I’d also like to lay blame to the piles and piles of articles and blurbs, both online and in print, that I’ve skimmed through when Steve Jobs announced his resignation. The general vibe I got was that people were panicky. Scratch that, maybe that’s too dramatic – maybe anxious. Or nervous? Wusses.
It took several flips around the internet to confirm the authenticity of it all. I resisted an eye roll every time I saw a headline sporting the word “shocking” to describe the then-minutes old announcement. To someone keeping even a modicum of attention to the power-shifts at Apple, this is not out of the blue. Its not even unanticipated. We could all see the smoke signals.
But it is a shock.
The kind of shock that wakes you up in the morning when your alarm clock goes off, although you knew it would.
But despite that its most shocking to the people who involve themselves in Apple’s stock price. But why? I mean sort of get it; its the cut-the-head-off-the-snake circumstance. The body wiggles around for a bit and dies. The body in this case being the rest of Apple. With Apple being arguably (one of) the most important player in the tech industry, I can understand why overweight men with bluetooth earpieces who wear the kind of shoes that have to be constantly shined start to get all sweaty under the collar. Steve’s retirement is the single most worrying prospect to the mind of the Apple stock holder. I’m not going to bother explaining why that is.
The fact is he’s not retiring. He is just stepping down as CEO, whose day-to-day tasks were already passed along to Tim Cook anyway. He will continue to still be very much involved with Apple because he is the Chairman of the Board of Directors. And I think nobody within Apple would have it any other way. An Apple without Steve Jobs entirely will come one day, but not yet. Its happened before in the late 80s early 90s and Apple almost went under so its not a stretch to imagine that they’ll want to put off something like that from happening again.
The reality that Apple will have to face eventually is of Steve Jobs leaving the industry altogether, for whatever reason. Apple in the tech industry is the player every other player wants to be and no matter what definition of ‘the best’ you use, nobody can touch the envy that those other guys have for it. Steve and Apple inspired their peers and that could well be the single greatest driving force that spurred the tech industry to where it is now.
The thing to grasp here is that Apple from this point on will be the exact same Apple you remember from yesterday, a week ago and the last few months. Tim Cook wasn’t named “CEO” until the 24th of August, when Steve officially stepped down, but he has been the chief executive there since Jobs began his third medical leave back in January, and who knows how long before that. So far as I can tell, the only difference in Steve’s role henceforth is in title only. With his battle with whatever that ails him, he’s not the CEO he once was. There must be a good reason why Steve chose Tim Cook as his successor.
One of my favorite Steve Jobs quotes came from an Apple internal video about marketing which went something like “Marketing is about values, and we’ll have very little time to show our customer what we’re really about”. And to me Apple’s values are the core assets that cannot be copied or stolen or traded: of simplicity and elegance, directness and humility, truth and beauty. Take a step back and you can almost see that the same attributes that define Apple’s products also apply to Apple itself, as an entity. A question like “how should this computer/phone/music player work?” is given the same care and restless thought as the equally important question of “how should such a company operate?”
All the Macs, iPods, iPhones and iPads in the world fall away in the scope of Steve Jobs’s greatest creation: Apple itself.
