The other players in the field of Consumer Tech must wonder how Mr. Jobs gets so much attention.

Is everyone in the press in Steve's Reality Distortion Field?

I love Apple and Mr. Jobs does seem to be pushing all the right buttons lately.

But we better hope that Steve stays healthy (and inspired) for another 30 years.

Sour grapes!

Whatever the "truth" is about what kind of person Steve Jobs is on a person-to-person level, one can not help but admire his creative and motivational abilities. Beginning with the first iMac he has certainly guided Apple from the brink of obscurity to perhaps the most innovative force in the computer market today.

When I first heard that he had a form of pancreatic cancer, I thought "well, there goes Apple, down the drain". I still wonder who at Apple has Steve's creative vision and drive. I really hope that they are grooming someone to take over when he leaves, because it would be depressing to live in a world without the kind of great hardware and software coming out of Apple right now.

So Steve, whatever your're doing right now, - keep it up!

And PLEASE find someone with your kind of "magic" to take over after you're gone.

I love Apple and Mr. Jobs does seem to be pushing all the right buttons lately.

Great Mighty Mouse pun. Prior to that revolutionary pointing device, Jobs just control-clicked his way to success.

I might be totally wrong, but in my experience (10+ years of software development, most of that on a functional architecture level) the really good idea's don't tend to come from the guys like Steve Jobs. The quality of the Steve jobs kind of guy is to find and acknowledge and take crazy risks with the real visionaries in a company... and sadly his job is also to take the visions as his own and steal the show with them and add believability on a management level. The last part is important as who will put lots of money on developing some crazy sounding idea from a young pimple faced 'worker bee'... These days visionaries seem to require at least a few gray hairs to be believable. While in reality the real visionaries are the pimple faced youngsters that are crazy enough to believe in their own crazy idea's to stick their heads up high enough for the Steve Jobs kind of guy to notice.

I've had the crazy/amazing/frustrating experience to be one of those pimple faced youngsters some 8.5 years ago... and I was 'lucky' enough to have a manager that was crazy enough to allow me to develop that my idea's and later a development group was created to develop it as well.

Anyway, this is probably the only way this kind of development can work so I'm (no longer) complaining (not even after seeing other (grayer haired) guys get rich). I for sure didn't have the experience, wealth and power to develop it on my own... so at least I got to develop those idea's and see them grow and prosper (and make a decent buck out of it at the same time)...

So I don't think Apple would die without Steve Jobs... the real visionaries are still going to be in that company hidden somewhere behind the curtains...

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eogold wrote:
When I first heard that he had a form of pancreatic cancer, I thought "well, there goes Apple, down the drain". I still wonder who at Apple has Steve's creative vision and drive. I really hope that they are grooming someone to take over when he leaves, because it would be depressing to live in a world without the kind of great hardware and software coming out of Apple right now.

So Steve, whatever your're doing right now, - keep it up!

And PLEASE find someone with your kind of "magic" to take over after you're gone.

'The Man Who Always Seems To Know What's Next'... funny, a few years ago, that title seemed to belong to one Bill Gates. Now it appears that Steve's stolen it.

Just as well, really. After all, Gates never deserved it. He is, after all, the guy who called the Internet "a fad".

Gotta luv

One reason I figure Apple get so much attention in the media is that they gave media people the machines they wanted - and that's not been forgotten to this day. Plus fast growing companies are a story, and comebacks are always a story.

While it's obvious it's the backroom guys who are responsible for much of the innovation, it does take good management to liberate your company to work that way. The good news is that is the kind of thing you can lock in - I always think of Apple as like German auto manufacturers (BMW, Audi, etc) and they have locked in the values of good engineering for decades - without a celebrity CEO.

Whether anyone else will have the flair and connection that Jobs has for selling those products - I don't know - the Jobs/Gates story is a good one. Ballmer/Ellison is funnier but no one outside IT and finance knows who Ballmer is, while everyone still knows who Gates is. But I'm sure they'll find a way - hell, get celebrities to do the Keynotes off a script.

very true: ' . . .he doesn't want it running on hardware built by a bunch of dudes he doesn't know and can't fire.' Doesn't just go for computers alone! Everything else about the business. . .

. . . and that's the CEO. Good and bad ideas are developed every day in business and the primary responsibility for their development and success (or failure) will always be at the CEO level.

The key with Steve J is that he knows when to say "yes" (the iPod) and when to say "no" (the PDA) and he's prepared to stand behind it. Not all new products are fantastic successes (can we say iSight?), but they can be profitable and add to the "Mac experience". For this Jobs gets a pat on the back.

One only has to look at Apple when Steve wasn't there to get an idea of how important he is to the company. (And remember that he didn't have grey hair when the original Mac came out.)

To some extent Jobs superintendence may be in a lot of ways Apple's success but I think the media overstates this. Let's face it, Jobs' past is certainly synonymous to control but I think Jobs appears to have come down to earth in many ways. He appears to be friendlier, more approachable, certainly entertaining and even funny at times, but these are my observations over the years and I would attribute this to his experience, albeit short, to death.

In the end I would not discount the extraordinary talent at Apple. They have a winning team and a very charming and charismatic leader, a hit team.

I think the preview of the article to come out is in many ways generally true but the Apple team is definitely not a one man show…though it's hard to deny Steve. We all love him.

"Jobs is into control," wrote Mr. Grossman. "In itself, that is of no real importance, except that in a lot of ways, Apple is an expression of Jobs' personal ethos.

I'm happy to be one of his customers, not one of his employees. But Apple wouldn't be the same without him. MBAs might be able to follow his lead, but remember what happened to Atari when Nolan Bushnell sold it to Time-warner.

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Guest wrote:
I'm happy to be one of his customers, not one of his employees. But Apple wouldn't be the same without him. MBAs might be able to follow his lead, but remember what happened to Atari when Nolan Bushnell sold it to Time-warner.

Amen to that. I'd hate to be screamed at in the horrid, soul-shriveling way that I've heard Jobs is capable of. I'm the kind who'd probably punch the boss in the face and quit in that situation, and I'd be mega-bummed to lay Steve out. Go ahead and sue me, its not like I own much.

I agree that the company won't be the same when he finally leaves. But I don't think that'll be for awhile yet. The man's what... 50? And I think he's having too much fun to quit. Go Steve!

so let's see, he probably din't start messing with electronics till he was what, 15?16? He started his own company, got fired, started another, got back at apple only a few years ago.........and he's just fifty!!! man, he's not even halfway where he want's to be!!!!! Just think about the short time,(in relative terms) he's bben back at Apple. And what he's done with the company. To me, I think the whole Apple experience is coming straight from the guy's heart. it is exactly what he had envisioned he wanted the coumputing experience for all of us to be. Imagine if he had never left Apple??!!!

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aleks wrote:
so let's see, he probably din't start messing with electronics till he was what, 15?16? He started his own company, got fired, started another, got back at apple only a few years ago.........and he's just fifty!!! man, he's not even halfway where he want's to be!!!!! Just think about the short time,(in relative terms) he's bben back at Apple. And what he's done with the company. To me, I think the whole Apple experience is coming straight from the guy's heart. it is exactly what he had envisioned he wanted the coumputing experience for all of us to be. Imagine if he had never left Apple??!!!

But the thing is, he wouldn't necessarily be the same Steve if he hadn't had the experience of being fired from Apple and 'wandering the wilderness' for a few years.

For example, I doubt he would've bought Pixar if he had stayed at Apple. And NeXT seed of OS X, wouldn't have happened either.

Hate to say it but its possible that being fired from Apple was the best thing that ever happened to Steve. Apple probably would've made many of the same mistakes in the late '80s early 90s with him aboard (who can argue with fatcat margins?), it just would've made them with somewhat more interesting products.

I find it very funny that Gates and Jobs had a run in back in the day and Jobs being the freak he is got his sorry butt fired. To me that funny. I hate apple and I hate everything they make. GO MICROSOFT!!!!
Oh yeah and btw even wonder how it came to be that Microsoft ownes a chunk of Apple?

hahahahahaha figure it out boys and girls

Sincerly a dedicated Microsoft employee,

Annon