Steve Jobs' Latest Remarkable Act

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Apple Computer is now boring, and that's very good news.

Yesterday's Apple Special Event featured scenes to which every Apple enthusiast is completely familiar; Steve Jobs walks onstage in a black turtleneck and jeans. He paces like a caged, skinny tomcat. The event premiered Apple's new line of laptops. The new stuff breaks some ground. The clicky buttons are gone on the MacBook Pro. The trackpad is now glass. Neat stuff, all. The press, however, is somewhat bored. Stocks go up slightly. Ho-hum. But something hugely different did happen yesterday at that event.



Steve Jobs was on the stage for 51 seconds. Then he walked off leaving Tim Cook, another Apple executive in a black shirt, to occupy the stage. What this signals to us is that Steve Jobs is leaving Apple. Soon. He's got cancer. He's tired. He's been at this for a long time. Jobs knew that there would be panic, were he to simply announce he is leaving Apple. This was proven in August when Bloomberg accidentally posted their obituary for him. The obit was being updated, as most news media outlets do frequently. Someone accidentally made it public. Apple stocks dropped sharply, in spite of the fact that Bloomberg immediately released a statement admitting the accident.

For so long, people have come to think of Steve Jobs as synonymous with Apple. As though Apple will disappear without him. For year's he has been content to let that notion flourish. Yesterday saw something new and, in a weird way, a radical shift. Yesterday, we witnessed Jobs gracefully making his way toward the door while he steered us toward the notion that Apple will survive quite nicely without him.

Will it work? Of course it will. Apple is infused with the philosophy of Jobs. The person of Jobs is not nearly as important to the company as it once was. Without him, Apple will continue to grow and break down barriers and take more marketshare. That's what they do. If anything, the sheer inevitability of this fact will make Apple a more stable and boring and successful company.

It took a giant ego to make Apple what it is today. Quite often, that same egotism threatened to destroy the creation. Yesterday, Jobs showed that he is capable of letting others take the lead. He showed something we don't often see from him; the humility to allow us all to realize that Apple is bigger than Jobs, and Apple doesn't need the man who caused Apple to happen in the first place. It takes a real leader to do that. Even when the Jobs icon drops off our desktop, the operating system will be fine, and Software Update will continue to function.




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