Fortune: Dragging up a 5 year old story on his health is nothing more than a smear campaign because you're bored and/or too lazy to do any real stories on the products, the inside forces who are the up and coming superstars at Apple, and what really is coming next.

... and I suppose that : Flying in a jet, breathing the planet's polluted air, driving to work in traffic, eating out in restaurants where the food could be poisoned, and being expose to the venom and mindless cry baby mentality of all this mindless scrutiny of everyday life and crap that we're reading and being exposed to daily,just to name a few, definitely put us all at risk too!!!

Who in their right mind has any justification for perpetuating this crap???!!!

Steve Jobs is a brilliant, competent, smart, educated and qualified visionary and is second to none in all his endeavors. If anyone of the detractors and mindless critics feels that their second guessing and bashing is with merrit I challenge them to show us in reality how good their ability is to think, develop , administrate, and run a public company that is the oracle of technology. Does anyone of the mindless morons that cheer this venom and mentality care to put their money where their moth is and back up any of this with hard cash investment money?? I seriously doubt that they would or could - in fact I say: that yellow belly mentality is chicken...

Could have. Should have. Would have, but didn't.

Nothing here folks, move along.

The part they don't divulge, which my sources close to Steve Jobs have been telling me, is that he was secretly using his own Reality Distortion Field to treat his cancer! The RDF was quite effective, just not terribly precise. It managed to grow him an extra liver and improve his girth. While Mrs. Jobs hasn't told friends she could see much of a difference, she is much more satisfied these days. Kinda makes up for Steve's paltry salary.

Nobody is entitled to personal health information about anybody besides that person and whoever they choose to share the information with. Anybody who says anything otherwise - no matter how critical or not Steve Jobs is to Apple's success - is simply full of baloney.

If his performance as CEO was under expectations, then it would have been the responsibility of the Board of Directors to hold him accountable. If they did not, then the stockholders hold the Board accountable. This is like saying that Apple is responsible for divulging every product in R&D so that stockholders know how well their investment may fare. There is information that a company must divulge; health status of their executives, as far as I know, is not one of them.

"he chose not to pursue surgery because of his skepticism of mainstream medical science" not he chose to delay surgery because he was in the middle of some critical work the company needed finished. that would be drive. instead he delayed surgery until people could convince him that it was the only thing that could save his life. this is just typical of his personality and how he handles his personal affairs. delaying surgery because you don't trust modern medicine has nothing to do with drive, just ignorance.

No serious analysis could suggest that Steve Jobs' business decisions, since his return to Apple, have put either Apple or its investors at risks, except for two decisions: (1) The manner in which Apple backdated the grant of options to certain senior employees, and (2) Jobs' decision to not timely disclose his diagnosis of cancer in his pancreas. However, because the results of both decisions harmed no one, while benefiting both Apple and its shareholders and because Apple and/or Mr. jobs made amends for its wrong doing, it is fitting and best that Mr. Jobs and Apple be sent forth with the admonishment to go forth and sin no more.

Apple's backdating of options was wrong and a violation of law, but there is no evidence on the public record that any current member of Apple's Board or management committed a crime in Apple' backdating of stock options. Apple, as did many other companies, used option to retain essential talented employees. In an effort to enhance the value of those employees' options, it appears that Apple improperly issued backdated options by failing to publicly disclose the backdating and account for the backdated options as an expense. Because Apple needed to retain the employees, such as Avie Tevanian and Jon Rubinstein, it compensated them with improperly backdated options. Had Apple loss an employee such as Tevanian or Rubinstein at that critical moment of its turnaround, it could have jeopardized Apple's successful renaissance. Rather than take that risk, Apple compensated certain of its valued employees with improperly backdated options.

Business necessity is no excuse for breaking the law, but Apple's shareholders have receive a vast net benefit, so much so that a judge in New York dismissed a shareholders' lawsuit because he couldn't find that shareholders had suffered any injury; Apple has repaid the IRS its past due taxes, with penalty, for the backdated options; Steve Jobs did not personally benefit from the backdating; Apple blew the whistle on itself, informing the authorities about the improper backdating, before they discovered it through their own investigations, and Apple has put in place effective measures to prevent any repetition of improper backdating. In short, Apple has made a full amends for the improper backdating.

The second issue of Jobs' diagnosis of cancer is disturbing not so much because Apple failed to disclose, but because it indicated a serious flaw in Mr. Jobs' judgment. The law is unsettled on the issue of whether the circumstances of Mr. Jobs' illness required disclosure as a material fact pursuant to the securities laws. Be that as it may. What is disturbing is that Mr. Jobs choose treat his tumor with an alternative remedy that had utterly no supporting evidence to suggest that it could effectively treat his cancer, while evidence clearly showed that there was a relatively safe and high effective surgical treatment. As is true for any a patient, Mr. Jobs was free to choose his treatment and to even decline any treatment, yet adopting a treatment that has no demonstrated efficacy and no medically sound basis for believing that it would be effective is irrational. If Mr. Jobs in his significant business decisions rejected low risks options of proven effectiveness in favor of highly risky options that had no basis for believing that they would be effective, the Board would have no choice but to remove him as CEO of Apple, Inc.

However, I am confident that we can view Mr. jobs' lapse of sound judgment in deciding on how to initially treat his cancer as a sui generis event, occasioned by the extreme stress and terror of a life threatening illness. Mr. Jobs, after all, is a man like us all. Fortunately, for Mr. Jobs, his family, Apple, and Apple's many customers and fans, medical tests were able to demonstrate to Mr. Jobs the folly of his decision before it costs him his life, and once observation proved his folly, Mr. Jobs' judgment reassumed its command and guided him safely to the successful surgical treatment of his cancer.

No, CEO is perfect. And the forgoing lapses of judgment, though serious, are, I think, well within the range of acceptable CEO error; when weighed against Mr. Jobs' successes, the foregoing lapses of judgment leave the scale of benefits tipped heavily in Apple's, its customers, and its shareholders favor; and, thus, they do not come close to disqualifying Mr. Job as Apple's CEO, nor do they suggest that Mr. Jobs' tenure as Apple's CEO places either Apple, its customers, or its investors at any undue or excessive risks.