Slashdot Mirror
Steve Jobs Takes Leave of Absence From Apple
An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from Network World: "A number of sites are reporting that Apple's CEO Steve Jobs is taking a leave of absence till June at least. Speculation over Jobs' possibly failing health has run rampant in the past few weeks. Prior to the recent MacWorld show, Jobs said he had a hormone deficiency that had caused him to dramatically lose weight. In a memo today Jobs told workers his health issues are more complex than he thought." Reader Bastian227 adds a link to this letter from Steve Jobs on Apple's website, which also says that Tim Cook will be responsible for daily operations, though Jobs will remain involved with major strategic decisions.
Love 'em or hate 'em, he's changed a lot in the tech sector. His presence will be missed.
æeee!
He had to lose weight and do hormone therapy before all of the bionic implants could go in...
I bought AAPL at $50 a few years ago, it's the only individual stock besides AMD (which I got burned on in the late 1990s) I have ever purchased. For a while there AAPL was touching $200 and my wife and I said that our stock in AAPL is going to pay for our daughter's college education someday.
With the way that AAPL has been going lately, I think she's going to have to go to a community college :/
Would it be safe to say that there is a Jobs opening at Apple?
Or would that be Steve closing?
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
This is all just part of the build-up for what will be the most astounding corporate marketing stunt of all time: the death and resurrection of Steve Jobs.
On a different note, this is a sad day for those owning AAPL shares - expect them to plunge even further than they have over the past year.
Well, if you didn't see this coming a mile off, you probably shouldn't be in the market at all.
... and that's when the C.H.U.D.'s came at me.
If he was going for six months of chemo, he wouldn't be talking about returning in six months. More like a year. I think he's taking the leave between now and the next major event, which would be WWDC.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
That's usually when WWDC happens. I think he's planning on doing that keynote.
-jcr
I don't think so. WWDC was June 9-13 last year, and Jobs' announcement specifically says "until the end of June." There will be tons of cool stuff to show off at WWDC this year, and it doesn't make sense to bet on Jobs' health improving enough to be able to do the keynote, especially if he won't be involved with operations beforehand.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
... Apple now has the thinnest, lightest CEO on the market.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
Even with the prospect of Jobs having of an extended absence from the day-to-day at Apple I think we will see the company continue to do fine, or at least continue on their existing business path.
While leadership is a key element of business success, so is having a well balanced team of professionals driving your development/innovation teams.
I have to image Apple has this balance in their organization.
He still built up a ton of excitement around all of the Apple products. MP3 players were drab and virtually useless before the iPod - a few years later everyone had one.
Apple products have influenced design across the hardware and software landscape (for the better IMHO).
Without the iPhone, there just wouldn't be any exciting phones out right now. It changed the playing field and helped bring us the G1 and Palm Pre.
æeee!
I wish him well. As someone who had to retire at age 33 to fight cancer, I know how discouraging it is to have your body spoil what your brain wants to do. But I also found that giving up the full-time job really did improve my health and led to greater productivity in my remaining activities.
Inverse snob.
Learn to discriminate your pancreatic cancers. Adenocarcinoma has a 5% survival rate. Steve had a islet cell neuroendocrine tumor, which has a 50 to 75% 5 year survival.
Seems like a good idea for Steve to take some time. It gives him a chance to see how well Cook handles the shop when no major new products are shipping and seems to indicate that he is at least semi-comfortable that he's got the right management to oversee day-to-day operations, and gives them a chance to fine-tune anything should he want to retire or passes away pre-maturely. As die-hard as he is, I can't imagine him doing the keynotes if he is too frail (physically) to "wow" the crowd.
Since the major aesthetic overhall in the iMac, MBP and MB lines in the past year or two, and OS X 10.6 shaping up to be a smaller update (aesthetically and technically) to 10.5 than the 10.4->10.5 jump was; it doesn't appear that there is going to be much "new business" from now to then. Maybe some hardware line updates to faster chips, and some 10.5.x updates; but nothing major. I'd imagine 10.6 won't even ship until summer; just in time for the WWDC in June.
Forgive my spelling from time to time. I'm often posting during short breaks.
Not that I recall - the major theme that I recall is that millionaires tend to be the winners of a high risk bet - entrepreneurism. They're also people of normal taste and lifestyle, with a large difference between what they bring in and what they spend.
My original point was that, on average, people don't value what they're given, just what they have to work for.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
I'll bet there will be no returning for Jobs. Sad news but a lesson to all. A company should never be about "A" person. None of us are eternal.
Jobs has had more than a decade with which to root out the nonperformers at Apple and replace them with performers. Performers can carry on in the boss' absence. Nonperformers cannot.
If over all that time he did nothing to replace the people who couldn't run Apple with people who could, he's not as good a CEO as we all thought.
Read my blog.
...We need MORE POWER to the REALITY DISTORTION FIELD, now!
No.
If the company is sound, this will be a short term drop follwed by a recovery. If you own shares, and think AAPL is sound without Jobs, then selling makes no sense. Instead, you should be buying the discounted shares in anticipation of a recovery, which is what strong companies do.
On the other hand, if you think AAPL is not strong without Jobs, then WTF were you doing buying AAPL in the first place?
In short, you are making the same mistake all amateurs make.
And no, I'm not a pro, but this point has been emphasized enough, and proven accurate enough, that I take it as correct.
"The government grants you rights, not the other way around."-- beav007. Yes, these people really exist...
Let me get this straight: you let the opinions of the type of people who post semiliterate anonymous screeds on Slashdot dictate when, where, and how you use a useful piece of equipment? Wow.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Your data is not relevant, and Jobs and Patrick Swayze are going throgh very different things. Jobs had/has a neuroendocrine tumor, which is much more survivable than the much more common adenocarcinoma that Swayze has, which has a 5% 5-year survival rate. Jobs basically has a completely different type of cancer than you usually think of when you hear the term pancreatic cancer.
I'm going to make a /. post next time Michael Morhaime (head of Blizzard) is hung over. Honestly, what other CEOs get this cult level of worship?
What other CEOs have personally made noticeable changes to the world?
Jobs was indirectly responsible for the IBM PC, which is what "PC compatible" computers were imitations of. IBM created the PC in response to the threat they felt from Apple.
Jobs was responsible for bringing a lot of the ideas from Xerox PARC to a mainstream market, something Xerox couldn't have done. Most people don't realize that Apple pioneered the "noun, then verb" paradigm we're all familiar with in GUIs (select an icon, then choose something to do with it); Xerox's GUI required the user to select an action first, before selecting the item upon which to perform it. This makes sense if you're used to a command line, but it's less intuitive to the masses.
After leaving Apple, Jobs created NeXT, which was the source of much of what became Mac OS X. Microsoft has been incorporating a lot of Apple's ideas into Vista and Windows 7.
Jobs bought Pixar from George Lucas, and was at the helm during the creation of the first feature film ever to be entirely computer animated. Jobs now sits on the board of directors of Disney and owns 7% of the company. RenderMan has become an industry standard.
This isn't worship; Jobs has been genuinely influential in a lot of areas. The fact that you (correctly) felt the need to add "(head of Blizzard)" after Morhaime's name is why he doesn't get this kind of attention. Sure, Blizzard has had a significant impact on computer gaming... but what else has he done?
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
Even healthy living can kill you I guess.
Eat more bacon, you won't live long. but at least you can have some bacon.
I just don't see that Jobs going changes the fundamentals of the company all that much. I think Apple at the current price is a great buy, and if it tanks tomorrow, it is a great buy. Time to take some money out of bonds :)
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
The iDroids dream of them.
On a different note, this is a sad day for those owning AAPL shares - expect them to plunge even further than they have over the past year.
Ohh and I don't know it might also be a sad day for his family. Let's get some perspective here. He has serious health issues and people seem to care more about the stock prices.
mp3 players might have been drab before the iPod, but they were certainly far from useless.
Are you forgetting that Apple was the first to use a 5 gig micro hard drive? Everything else was either tiny flash memory (64-256 megs) or heavy desktop hard drives. And Apple used 400 Mpbs Firewire when everything else used 11 Mpbs USB 1.1.
You can argue the iPod was priced high, or that it's nothing special now. You can't argue that it wasn't revolutionary when it came out.
I don't suppose his frequent use of off-list pharmaceuticals and other fun-seeking drugs during his youth would have had anything to do with his poor health. While 60 isn't old, it seems like a lot of people his age who "lived too hard" are now suffering the consequences through odd early/uneven aging, hormonal issues, cancer, auto-immune diseases, and other odd things we've not seen before.
Always pisses me off when people use the argument of "'blah' diseases that we've never seen before" - all we've done is improved diagnostics so we can tell "what" is killing you, and in some cases, "why" you got it.
Dude, you can't spell out your cool obscure reference to an awesome book just because someone modded you troll, that ruins it. You just have to trust in the idea that there are cool people on /. who will get your hip shit and mod you up just to stick it to the less nerdy mods. You'll just have to live with the mod-kipple, for some day all moderations will be filled with kipple, and we'll be consumed by it.