What becomes of Apple without Steve Jobs?

James Temple, Chronicle Staff Writer





The huge Apple Store at Stockton and Market streets in San Francisco is the company's retail headquarters for its wondrous array of cutting-edge tech products.



CUPERTINO -- This generation's most successful business leader is no longer leading a business.

Steve Jobs' abrupt resignation as chief executive of Apple raises immediate questions about the future of the Cupertino company, as well as the future of the technology industry itself.

But let's take a moment to consider the greater importance of the news: A cruel disease is forcing a 56-year-old man, who has done as much as anyone to transform the world through technology, to give up doing what he does better than anyone.

Jobs has been battling pancreatic cancer and other health problems since at least 2004, and has already taken three leaves of absence.

It's a sad moment for the Bay Area business world, which is being cheated of his talents. It's a sad moment for tens of millions of customers who have, all marketing hype aside, been delighted by the products he gave to the world. And it's a sad moment for Steve Jobs and his family.

He has been one of the most influential figures in the information age, continually nudging a sector overrun with engineers and nerds toward consumer-friendly territory. His vision of elegant design, intuitive user interfaces and simplified features is imprinted across the shelves of any electronics retailer.

The track record

To fully appreciate his impact and success, consider the track record:

After dropping out of college, Jobs co-founded Apple, serving as the public face and master marketer as the company kicked off the personal computer revolution.

After stepping down amid a power struggle, he picked up a wobbling computer graphics company on the cheap and helped invent another industry, feature-length digital animation. Pixar would go on to release a virtually unbroken string of blockbusters.

Jobs also founded a second computer company, NeXT, which seemed a rare failure until it formed the nucleus of Apple's rebirth. Months from bankruptcy, Apple bought NeXT and brought Jobs back into the fold. The NeXT software would form the underpinnings of the next release of Apple's operating system, and the beginning of the company's resurrection.

After Jobs returned to the CEO role, his biography arrives at the all-important I's: iPod, iPhone, iPad.

The products transformed Apple into the world's biggest technology company and provided further proof of Job's uncanny ability to play taste-maker - that rare business leader who doesn't sell people what they ask for so much as tell them what they want.

To see it is to want it

Who knew they needed an MP3 player until they saw an iPod? Who simply had to have a phone with an Internet browser before they glimpsed their friend's iPhone? Who knew they'd feel compelled to pay for digital music until they tried out iTunes?

In many cases, his competitors benefited as much as they suffered as Jobs spawned entire new categories of personal technology and provided clear instructions on how the products should look, feel and work. Note the brushed aluminum on HP and Sony laptops; notice the widgets on Android smart phones.

Which brings us back to the questions: What happens to Apple and the industry without Steve Jobs?

Investors were certainly fretting the answers late Wednesday, as shares sank more than 5 percent in after-hours trading.

Jobs' continuing roles

Jobs said he would like to continue serving as chairman of Apple, as well as a director and employee. He advocated that interim CEO Tim Cook succeed him officially.

Analysts have faith in Cook as an operational leader, but it's still unclear whether he can be anything like the visionary force in product development that Jobs has been for decades.

Makers of PCs, tablets, smart phones and cameras will continue to apply the lessons he so deeply ingrained into the tech mind-set. But what of those brand new categories he didn't have time to dream up?

And now who will pull back the industry from its own worst tendencies to bog down products with features, to release bug-ridden software and to confuse customers, instead of delight them?

There are tech leaders who are better engineers, bigger personalities and maybe even nicer people. But this many decades into the digital era, no one has emerged who can translate chips and code into consumer products quite so wondrously as Steve Jobs.

E-mail James Temple at jtemple@sfchronicle.com.

my advice would for any body with money invested into Apple to take it out now before is too late. Tim Cook is nothing like Steve is. Tim is a guy of numbers and there fore most of his decisions will be based on numbers instead of vision like Steve's.

Steve is moving on because he knows Android is taking over. Everybody thought i was joking when i said Apple was going down once Android matured and here is the beginning of the drop.

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NEWS DESK
Notes on Washington and the world by the staff of The New Yorker.

« Apple: What Happens Now? MainSteve Jobs’s Power »
AUGUST 24, 2011
THE WIZARD OF APPLE
Posted by Ken Auletta
The twentieth century’s Thomas Edison has stepped from the stage with the resignation, announced Wednesday, of Steve Jobs as chief executive officer of Apple. The scope of the technologies that sprang from or were transformed by Jobs’s Apple laboratories—the Mac, the mouse, the laptop, Pixar, iTunes, iPod, iPhone, iPad—is awesome, as was that from Edison’s Menlo Park. And Jobs, like Edison, accomplished his imaginative feats without the crutch of survey research, of endless polls to tell him what people wanted. He knew that people could not know what they wanted, because they had no frame of reference for an iPhone that delivered a small miracle as it fit into the palm of a hand.

Jobs battled with Microsoft, and Silicon Valley companies, and music and publishing and Hollywood companies. He was disrupting their comfortable business models. Yet as irate as Bill Gates and others got with Jobs, they knew he set a standard they could not ignore. They scoffed at first when he said Apple would produce both software and hardware, and now they follow. They scoffed when he insisted on consumer friendly products that needed no elaborate instructions written as if by a committee of engineers, and now they try to follow. They scoffed when he opened Apple stores, noting that Disney and Sony and others had failed at this, and now they follow. They scoffed that he was impossible to partner with because he was dictatorial, and then they clamored to partner with Apple.

Steve Jobs could be arrogant and unpleasant, a brutal man a sane person would not want to work for. But the products he created will be his monuments. And so will the memory of how he created those products. Unlike those folks in Washington who dare not offend their favored constituencies—Republicans unwilling to raise taxes, Tea Party members who praise James Madison’s belief in small government but not his belief in checks and balances and compromise, Congressional Democrats unwilling to offend senior citizens or labor, a President unwilling to stick his neck out to endorse the work of the bipartisan budget-balancing commission he appointed—Steve Jobs has been a true leader. Like Edison, he’s been an inventor and a man who has changed our lives.

Read Sasha Frere-Jones, James Surowiecki, Nicholas Thompson, and other New Yorker writers on Steve Jobs's resignation.



Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2011/08/the-wizard-of-apple.html#ixzz1W3GXrMqt

Apple is one of the world's greatest Marketing company. So many people pay top Dollar for a product that who's equivalent or better can be purchased for 50% less or more.

Droid already has the major share of the market and growing. their iPad sales are down and Macs are just for hipster college students spending daddy's money. Even the Video and graphics industry are abandoning their Macs.

For my production company we can purchase 3 Windows based machines for the price of 1 mac with the same speed and capability,

expect Apple stocks top tank over the coming year or so as Wall Street realizes that the company was all smoke and mirrors.

Seems you're right. If even Steve Jobs is abandoning ship because he sees what's coming you know it's too late for Apple. I've been saying it for years that Apple has a limited lifespan. Their products look good, but spec wise they are not as good as many other products.

And speaking for myself; I'd rather have a good PC by whoever for about a 1000 then pay 2000-2500 for a Mac because it's got a freaking Apple on it. In the worst case scenario I'd just buy some Apple stickers

Hollanda you are Eurocentric but not as warped as ABC .....Demean this Company at your own risk ...the yellow people have not taken over yet .....You had better get on board or your great grandchildren will be working in Hi Tech rice paddies ....The Jobs Resignation is his last great marketing move of his life ......He was the Thomas Edison of this century His resignation came as little surprise in the Silicon Valley. His health troubles, which have included pancreatic cancer and a liver transplant, are well known.

The main problem about Apple is actually not prices because regardless today is still sales like hot cake. The main problem Apple has always had is the such strict rules to do anything in it platforms. Many developers (I'm one of them) have been wishing for Android to take over and avoid dealing with Apple all together. Apple is a great hardware company but is obsesión with keeping all the money that flows by them, simply comes back to bite them.

Steve knows what's coming and he doesn't want to be part of it. I'm sure he is only "staying" to avoid Apple from a complete nose dive and keep people trusting the brand.

Many are loyal and will stick with them. I used droids but still love the Iphone4, feels weird to use anything else.