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Apple's Life After Steve Jobs
animusCollards writes "Slate ponders a post-Steve Jobs Apple, including possible successors, and the future is... boring. '..it's certainly true that Jobs' style is central to the company's brand and the fierce connection it forges with its customers. His product announcements prompt hundreds of millions of dollars worth of free press coverage and whip up greater and more loyal fans, generating ever-greater interest in the company. ... At some point, all that will end. Jobs will eventually leave the company. There are no obvious plans for succession; in addition to Schiller, observers finger Tim Cook, Apple's COO, and Scott Forstall, who helped develop Mac OS X and the iPhone's software, as contenders for the job. But Tuesday's keynote illustrated how difficult it will be for any of those guys to replace Jobs.'"
Jobs will eventually leave the company? I thought he was immortal. Damn you reality distortion field!
How did Tuesdays Keynote illustrate 'how difficult it will be for any of those guys to replace Jobs.'? Just a bloggers opinion, nothing to see here, please move along
Watch those corners
But a less charismatic person could make different decisions that get Apple way more into the main stream.
Like Dell or Gateway?
No, thanks.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
...when even Apple is forced to consider the possibility of losing Jobs.
This sig is certified free of self-referential humour!
I am the very model of an iPod fashion follower,
My waist is getting thinner but my head is getting hollower,
I know the name of every Mac, in Apple stores a wallower,
And at the MacWorld every year I tell Steve I'm a swallower.
(Yes at the MacWorld every year he tells Steve he's a swallower)
But a less charismatic person could make different decisions that get Apple way more into the main stream.
Like Dell or Gateway?
No, like John Scully.
No, thanks.
More, like, NO THANKS! Scully's time at Apple was disastrous. While everyone at the time said that "mainstream" line was the best strategy for Apple.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Steve Jobs died in a car wreck in 1988. The current "Steve Jobs" is San Jose session musician, Roland Trisk. Trisk, who often doubled for Steve Jobs before his death in sales meetings and conferences, had plastic surgery in order closely resemble Jobs. There are hints everywhere-in the enclosure of the Mac LCII, the first NeXT CUBE, even Pixar's first full-length film, Toy Story. Wake up people! The truth is out there!
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
I believe that would be rather errouneus. Apple isn't playing in Microsoft's sandbox. Particularly the Enterprise one. Too many big bullies there. Apple will be more than happy to play in it's metrosexual box with all the dolls and shiny things. Laughing all the way to the bank. Why does everybody think that Apple wants to deal with Enterprise issues?
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Why do you think Jobs bought Pixar? to make cartoons? No they are working to cross the uncanny divide where live action animated figures are indistinguishable from humans. They will just have an all digital Jobs up there in a few years presenting the products and you will never know.
Indeed maybe they already have. Jobs maybe is not ill but actually just an early version like Tom Hanks in Polar express.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
The admirers of Apple's cult of personality forget how it was created: Jobs drove away those who didn't fit his whims. He had the first Mac designed around his choices for the Apple II that Woz over ruled. The very act of creating it was purposely divisive, with a skull and crossbones flag flying over the Mac building, and non-Mac people barred from entry except by invitation. Rather than complimentary lines, the Mac was intended to supplant the very successful and projected to be long-lived Apple II (16 bit version in production, 32 bit processor, machine and OS in design phase). After Woz got fed up and left*, Jobs shut down the Apple II line. At every step people who'd been loyal employees, customers, third party manufacturers or fans fell away -- literally by the millions. More than once, to a lesser but significant extent, severe and abrupt changes to the Mac line instigated repeat performances of the II exodus. "Love it or leave it" seemed to be the corporate motto.
Jobs' cantankerous ways with the remaining employees, manufacturers and fans drove away so many, including major players and stock holders, that he was taken out of the spotlight and replaced by John Scully. It took a decade for him to grow up enough to be given back the reins.
Those remaining fans view Jobs as charismatic. Ex-fans remember him as anti-charismatic, and view him that way still if they even bother to think about him at all.
I've recounted these and similar details before, and gotten modded down as flamebait and troll. I expect the same to happen now, despite the fact that while it may be in somewhat negative phrasing, it's accurate and verifiable in media archives and others' writings. In the spirit of full disclosure, I was an Apple II fan in the extreme, was senior/technical editor of an Apple II fan-zine (The Road Apple; the first computer media source published simultaneously in the US and USSR), and said much these same things back then. But I'm not the only one who said them. I'm just one of the very few who still bothers to recount the history that most have ceased to care about.
* Woz left Apple primarily due to a re-examination of his life following a private plane accident. However, his displeasure at the direction of things was no secret, nor was Jobs' efforts to marginalize him. Between those, had he not had the accident, he'd almost certainly have left anyway.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B