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Steve Jobs Health Worries Escalate
PolygamousRanchKid writes with this sad snippet from the San Francisco Chronicle: "We all know that Steve Jobs is sick. What's not known is how sick he is, and that's worrying investors of Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) this morning, as well as everyone else. Jobs did have pancreatic cancer a few years ago, but he had a transplant and was able to come back to work. Last time, he gave some kind of time frame for returning to work. This time, he did not. Supposedly the National Enquirer is set to run pictures of Jobs with him looking frail and gaunt. Jobs was spotted leaving the Stanford Cancer Center in Palo Alto, California, according to RadarOnline.com."
who cares? let the man live his own life
Abdominal cancers are not fun. Pancreatic cancers are almost always fatal. I'm sure his wealth has probably bought him time... but you can't cheat death.
Leave him alone!
-Android Fanboy
The preceding message was based on actual events. Only the names, locations and events have been changed.
and the reasons are multiple... - I don't own stock in Apple, its over priced anyway for a consumer electronics company. - Steve Jobs wouldn't give a crap if I was dying, nor would I get press for my health issues. - The market knows he is not the messiah, and Apple as a mega corp will continue on with the wisdom of many other vested parties. - Health issues should be private, kept private and not trivialized by news media. - Respect the privacy of others, too many people in the media don't. and the list goes on and one. Just make it a non story by wishing him the best and in the afterlife and if he is reborn he is more than a toad or troll for his massive good deeds to the people he has destroyed and belittled.
Long story short, Satan has come to collect his part of the agreement.
Posted anon, cause apple fanbois gave up their sense of humor in exchange for shiny things.
I won't accept that I'm not immortal until after I die.
In the meantime. It's fun being immortal!
Man, i may dump my savings into apple stock once it bottoms out after his death. There's going to be a massive unloading, we all know it.
http://static2.businessinsider.com/image/4d5c75d8cadcbbc41b160000/steve-jobs-sick.jpg
There's also a sensationalist headline over here:
http://thenextweb.com/apple/2011/02/17/steve-jobs-may-have-just-six-weeks-to-live-receiving-treatment/
The Daily Mail spoke to Dr Jerome Spunberg, a certified Oncologist, who said: âoeMr Jobs is most likely getting outpatient chemotherapy at Stanford because the cancer has recurred.â
Another consultant, Dr. Gabe Mirkin, a physician with over fourty years experience, said: âoeHe is terminal. What you are seeing is extreme muscle wasting from calorie depravation, most likely caused by cancer. He has no muscle left in his buttocks, which is the last place to go. He definitely appears to be in the terminal stages of his life from these photos. I would be surprised if he weighed more than 130lb.â
The National Enquirer, who initially reported the news today (to be published tomorrow), talked to critical-care physician Dr. Samuel Jacobson, who said, âoeJudging from the photos, he is close to terminal. I would say he has six weeks.â That said, given the reliability of The National Enquirer, waiting for further news before jumping to conclusions is advised.
Weâ(TM)ve done a little digging into Dr. Samuel Jacobson. Jacobson appears to be a Florida based pulmonologist (breathing doctor) â" not Oncologist. Which would naturally make you wonder just how qualified he is to diagnose someone via a photo, especially outside of his speciality.
Yeah, the fact that investors are worried about one man's health instead of the actual product should tell you something.
The National Enquirer talks about running photos of Steve, and the entire news media gets a hard on and starts running stories on this. Has the media degraded so far that we are now counting the National Enquirer as a reliable news source?
The only people who are escalating the health worries here are the media itself to push for circulation. It's not news, it's bullshit. Thanks for contributing to the bullshit, Timothy.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
This item has only been up a few minutes, and already a lot of people are asking why this matters, why they should care. Here's why:
If you use a Mac, you should care about this.
Steve Jobs is unquestionably the driving force behind Apple. His return to Apple as the iCEO, followed by the introduction of new streamlined iMacs, the iPod, ... all demonstrated that Steve had returned to make Apple's mark on the industry. How many of the general population - not to mention us IT geeks - have an iPod? I look around my office and see high level executives using iPads. Steve made these a success. The same technology in a different package - maybe even the same package but a different salesman - wouldn't be as popular.
Pundits, fans, and teh haters all pay attention when Steve makes a new announcement of any new Apple product. That's the presence Steve brings to the game. He's like a tiny god. Love him or hate him, you can't deny he understands the market, and how to drive new products to get at that "I want it" mentality.
But unfortunately, Steve's success is a double-edged sword. He's the driving force behind Apple. He's also the driving force behind Apple. There was no succession planning here. His second in command isn't well known. He's not the face of Apple. I wonder who will follow him.
I wish Steve the best, and if he's able to return as CEO, I think that would be great. But if he doesn't ... look for Apple's stock to plummet. Even if the new guy has all kinds of bright ideas, I don't think he'll have the same presence as Steve, and won't be able to garner the same attention for the company. Apple has lots of new items in the pipeline, I'm sure, so the new guy's leadership won't truly be tested/visible for another 12 to 18 months. In that time, he needs to make his own mark, or Apple will quickly find itself on the sidelines trying to catch up to the rest of the market - rather than leading the market.
That's what has investors worried. And that is why you should care about this item.
Disclaimer: I am not an Apple fan, but I work in IT.
When the pictures come from The National Enquirer, you really need to consider the source. Also, the doctor making this prognosis was doing so based on the pictures. Didn't we all jump on the idiot in Congress a few years ago for diagnosing that woman in Florida using a short video clip?
Let's take this to a conspiracy level and say people are putting out this news to get the stock price to drop a bit so they can snap it up and wait for the retraction of the article and the stock goes back up, they make a pretty penny.
Plant a tree in a developing country.
Doctors of Medicinal Wizardry at Netcraft Sanitoriums have determined that Steve Jobs is dying. His slow lapse into death is due to a lack of Ego, which he has depleted to run Apple Enterprises. It was considered giving him a shot of Humility (which has has no natural reserve of) as an experimental treatment, but past review of his life has determined that this would be of no effect. Apple fanbois are quietly assembling at Cupertino to prepare for the inevitable deathwatch.
Don't forget that it was The National Enquirer who broke the story on the Edwards baby and affair. They've established some cred on investigative journalism over the last several years.
I'm not saying they're right here, I'm just saying it's foolish to discount them out of hand.
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
Not to mention he wasn't the genius behind Apple. Steve Wozniak was. In fact in numerous interviews about all Steve Jobs had a hand in in actually designing the original Apple computers was insisting that the power supply be a certain color for aesthetics. The real work was done by a man whom half the nation probably has no idea exists.
Woz is the genius behind the original Apple products from decades past, and Jobs is the genius behind the consumer electronics and publishing juggernaut that Apple is today.
Not really. The real geniuses are the engineers and the designers. The difference between the Apple II days and now is that decades ago the engineers and designers were far more visible or well known. The Apple II and Woz being at one extreme, however the original Mac had the designers/engineers names molded into the interior of the case. Jobs, then and now, stands on the shoulders of the engineers and designers.
Best wishes for Jobs. Hopefully he just has to slow down and relax.
I am still bothered by the way he pretended to invent multitasking instead of just admitting that he was catching up to Android,
Where did he ever say that? When he introduced multitasking for the iPhone he said that Apple was "late to the party".
Seriously I really think Apple-haters like to make things like this up or seem unable to separate marketing-speeak from reality.
The guys over at jalopnik aren't so sure, unless he's traded in his Mercedes SL55 AMG for a 10+ year old Honda Civic...
http://jalopnik.com/#!5763321/cmon-does-the-national-enquirer-really-think-steve-jobs-owns-a-honda
Maybe he's just a guy with cancer who doesn't want to spend his last days dying in the public eye while they discuss how to best profit from his passing?
You forfeit your privacy rights when you sign that "rich AND famous" contract.
And a part of your human rights goes down the drain when you turn yourself into a brand.
You don't get to be in the spotlight and not take in some heat from the lights.
Think about it. Would Woz, in a similar situation, be facing the same privacy problems as Jobs? How about Paul Allen?
That is why I keep my wishes simple. I just want to be rich. Someone else can be famous. E.g. the getaway driver.
He can have all the fame in the world as long as I'm free to keep and use the money. In fact...
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Are you seriously saying that it'll be great when a man dies because you prefer a slightly different type of gadget?
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
He never "pretended to invent multitasking." Holy shit is there a flood of anonymous anti-Apple trolls in this article, even more than usual.
Except Mark Zuckerberg
He deserves to have every facet of his life known and subjected to Liking or DisLiking.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Apple's #2 manager is Timothy Cook, Apple's chief operating officer. He's a cost control and outsourcing guy. He came from Compaq, where he turned them from a manufacturer into a distributor of products made offshore. That's what he did at Apple, too - closed all the Apple factories and outsourced manufacturing to FoxConn. He's good at managing low-cost outsourced manufacturing. He's running Apple now, and will probably succeed Jobs.
Apple will survive. Cook will hire some low-cost design firm in Beijing to do the next products. There's good design coming out of Beijing now. Check out PER design group's work. FoxConn in Shenzen already does the manufacturing. All Apple US has to do is manage the deals with other parties. Cupertino will probably be downsized to a marketing and IP rights organization.
I can't find his personal Facebook page. You can't "friend" him. He has a "public figure" page where someone posts news snippets and you can "like" it. Hypocrite.
How is that hypocritical? It's not like he's forcing every single human to be on Facebook. Everyone has the right to not have a Facebook page, including him.
Now it might be bad advertising to not use your own product, but the truth is that people use Facebook because they want to, because they want to share all these details that you are so aghast at exposing. It's not hypocritical to provide a service people want while not using it yourself - it would be if he had spoken against something like Facebook, but plainly he has not.
My guess is that he's actually on Facebook under a pseudonym that just his closest friends know.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Because unlike with other CxOs Steve Jobs has purposely built a cult of personality around him that will seriously affect the stock.
That's bullshit. He's already left, the stock took a small dive but is higher than ever now. Most people at this point (except for Apple Haters) are pretty much assuming Jobs is not really coming back.
The fact is that Apple as entire markets that they drive, Jobs leaving will not affect the momentum of the company for many, many years to come - if ever. Rather that building "a cult of personality" Jobs built an approach to thinking about consumer electronics, and he's shared that with everyone at Apple - as much as anyone could share it.
You know who would have more impact leaving/being ill than Jobs right now? Ives. Because even with Jobs gone Ives will present a consistency of products such that at first glance you will not even realize Jobs was not involved.
Between momentum and a stable of people with considerable design and product skills, Apple will do just fine without Jobs.
The reason why Apple Haters are so insistent that Jobs will be back, is that they will have no-one to attribute success to without Jobs there, will have to actually admit Apple might have built a few products people like to use because they are well designed. To an Apple Hater this is the end times.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Actually that's only partially true, his profile page is here, which is accessible by the ID 4. His public figure page is different. You can't friend him, just send messages (and "Report/block this person"). Every user can do the same under their privacy settings.
The way Facebook is designed (and, for that matter, its popularity) means you can't. Or at least, probably shouldn't.
The main reason why is the photo sharing feature. On facebook or not, there's a good change that quite a few photos of you have been made public (yes, including that embarrassing one from last year when you had a bit too much to drink), tagged your name against it and it's there for all to see. There have been instances of people losing their jobs because of photos on facebook - well, you could (at least in theory) lose your job because of a photo of you someone else put up even though you've never used the damn site.
About the only thing you can do to try and prevent this is to sign up, make sure any photos of you are tagged and associated with your login then either remove those tags yourself or set your privacy settings so photos including you aren't public. Until the next time Facebook change their privacy defaults - which they'll do all they like because the users aren't the customers.
It's the electronic equivalent of graffiti on the bridge over the main road into town saying "kiwimate is a tosser!" except it comes with photographic evidence and it's much more likely to get distributed to anyone around the world than a bridge is.