That's why I think having him not do this year's keynote is probably a good thing. The media and Apple's customers need to be weened from papa Jobs if the company is to thrive whenever his inevitable demise does happen. And don't get me wrong. I believe Steve Jobs is a visionary who rescued a dying company. But in doing so, it was more like saving his own child than turning around a failing enterprise. I am hoping, having been faced with his own mortality at least once, that he too, is learning to ween himself from Apple.
Recent Apple History - A Personal Perspective
I'd like to go down memory lane for a moment with you, if I may. I bought my first Mac in 1985 and haven't looked back since. From 1994 to 1997 I was privileged enough to work for Apple as their Small Business Evangelist. When I joined the company, it was in a regime change from Michael Spindler to Gil Amelio. Mr. Amelio was faced with a daunting challenge, and he got a lot of things right. I won't go into details here (as this is about Steve Jobs, not Gil Amelio), but if it weren't for the things he did, Steve Jobs could not have achieved so much success so quickly.
Shortly after Mr. Amelio brought Steve Jobs back to Apple - at first, as a consultant to the CEO - I was walking with some co-workers at Apple's Infinite Loop campus. I was asked what I thought about Amelio bringing Jobs back into the company. I replied "you wait and see, Steve Jobs will be running this company again before too long."
I don't know how many of my co-workers disagreed with me at the time, but one in particular thought I was nuts. "Why on earth would he want to take control of a dying company?" she asked. At the time, Apple was bleeding money not unlike the auto industry is today. Conventional wisdom (and strong rumor) was that Apple would be bought out and swallowed up by someone like Sun Systems.
"Here's the deal," I said, with everyone listening in. "Right now, Apple is like the New Orleans Saints. Losing seasons, coaches coming and going. But Ditka has coaching in his blood. If he takes a team like the Saints and turns them around, he becomes a hero. If he doesn't, he can always claim the team was too far gone when he got there." (Sometimes, in football, coaches are hired to rebuild a team, with little expectation that they will make the playoffs.)
"Steve Jobs is in exactly the same position," I continued. "If he succeeds in turning Apple around, he becomes more than a hero - he becomes a near god-like savior of a company with an immense cult following, unlike any other. If he fails, he can always claim the patient was already on life support and too far gone. But if he wins - if he wins, he saves his baby. What parent wouldn't take that shot?"
The Cancer Scare
In mid-2004 Apple announced that Steve Jobs had survived a brush with Pancreatic cancer. At the time, they said it was an extremely rare, less aggressive form of this normally fatal disease, known as an islet cell neuroendocrine tumor.
Ever since then, the media has taken every opportunity to fear-monger whenever he catches a cold. His keynote address at WWDC in the summer of 2008 gave rise to further speculation, as it was obvious he had lost a lot of weight, and even looked as though he had aged more than he should have. Apple's announcement that Steve Jobs would not give the Keynote address for the 2009 Macworld Expo was like gasoline to a smoldering fire. The flare up caused Apple stock to dip, and reports of his imminent demise starting surfacing again.
This latest scare, is nothing more than a hormone imbalance, if we are to believe the latest press release. And to be honest, it doesn't need to be believed by anyone. They either have found the problem or they haven't. He will either gain weight in the coming months or he won't. But one thing is inexorably true: he will eventually die, as we all will.
Who Cares?
Well, it looks like most of us Apple fan-boys do. And that's the problem.
People forget that before he returned to Apple, Steve Jobs ran two other companies: NeXT, which was acquired by Apple, and Pixar, which was acquired by Disney in 2006. I am sure most of us would find it silly to presume that box office returns for movies such as Toy Story or WALL-E might suffer due to Steve Jobs health rumors.
"But Chuck," you might say, "those are movies. Not companies. There were a lot of people involved in making those movies to whom the credit for success belongs." Very true, but by saying that, are you suggesting that Apple's success has little or nothing to do with anyone except Steve Jobs?
See, that's the problem - and Steve Jobs himself is partly to blame for allowing it to propagate for this long. Yes, he rescued Apple. But he didn't do it single-handedly. He already had a great team of people working for him at NeXT and those people were integrated into Apple. Steve Jobs didn't single-handedly engineer and design the iMac. As for engineering, Gil Amelio had as much to do with it as anyone. And it was Jonathan Ive who has designed so many of those wonderful tools Apple has produced in the past few years.
Here's another perspective: we know Steve Jobs is far and away the single largest shareholder in Disney, thanks to the Pixar acquisition. But the success or failure of Disney isn't tied to Steve Jobs' health. Why is that?
Because however relevant Pixar might be to Disney's future business, it will not be the hand of Steve Jobs that brings Disney from death's door. Not just because they aren't at death's door either - even if they were, most of us would not expect Steve Jobs to breath new life into the company simply by paying attention to it. (And if he did, we probably wouldn't give him the credit he deserved for doing so.)
Nope. The reason we tie Steve Jobs to Apple so tightly is because he is Apple, in much the same way Bill Gates used to be so tightly associated with Microsoft. Unlike Steve Jobs, however, Bill Gates has moved on, allowing others to take the limelight. To be fair, Microsoft already had an obvious second-in-command in the person of Steve Balmer.
Steve Jobs on Death
On June 12, 2005 Steve Jobs gave the commencement address for Stanford. During his speech he said the following about death:
Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
You can get a glimpse of the man Steve Jobs has become from that paragraph. There can be no doubt he has had the courage to follow his heart and intuition. But if Apple is to be his legacy instead of just something he ran well while he was alive, he needs to take a step back and allow others in the spotlight, as he has done for Phil Schiller in the 2009 Macworld.
So What Happens Now?
Exactly what is happening, believe it or not.
Whether by choice or because of health issues, Steve Jobs has taken that all important first step towards insuring Apple will be a legacy that survives him well into the future. Just as Bill Gates has taken a step back, so must Steve Jobs.
It will be tough, no doubt. But to put a stop to the incessant clamoring about his health, it is an absolute necessity. To remain a healthy, vibrant force in technology, Apple must make it clear to the media and its customers that there is more to the company than Steve Jobs. Their effects on the company and its products must be known as we move forward.
I wish Steve Jobs a long and healthy life. Make no mistake, I want him to remain CEO for as long as he is able. But for the sake of Apple's future, maybe it is time we see more of his more-than-capable first tier of lieutenants, if only to give the media and the investors the assurance they need that Steve Jobs health need not concern them.
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