Apple will, of course, survive and in the short to medium term keep producing interesting, innovative products but the passion from the top will be gone. Steve lived and breathed Apple. He sweated the small stuff. I don't care how fanatical an Apple fan you are, if you have an Apple logo tattooed on your ass and you named your kid Newton, no one loves Apple more than Steve.
As cult figures go he was a pretty unassuming one but there was never any doubt about who was at the controls. He was brilliant, yes, but brilliance in Silicon Valley is fairly common. Where Steve was at his best was finding people who were also True Believers who could bring to fruition his vision of simple, elegant, utilitarian design melded with graceful functionality.
In the Church of Apple there were, of course, heretics, myself among them. We bemoaned the lack of proper integration with Active Directory, the poor Exchange support, the general lack of any kind true enterprise vision.
At the end of the day Apple doesn't need enterprise because they own the hearts and minds of employees who are already using Apple products at home. Any company with a "Windows only" mentality is finding it increasingly difficult to keep Apple products out. Apple has entered the enterprise environment from the bottom up. Employees are demanding that the products at work are as easy to use and fully integrated as the ones they use in there personal life. Locking employees down to a Windows World that with every passing day seems more anachronistic is not a good idea if you want competitive, creative people working for you.
Not saying that you can't be creative on a PC but people are used to the full integration of the Apple ecosystem. Companies that are not able to provide the same functionality within their infrastructures look like lumbering relics of a pre-broadband world.
Apple has long been criticized for being a religion not a computer company. However, I think the analogy is closer to that of a home-town sports team: you celebrate their triumphs, agonize over their screw-ups , complain about their management decisions and the price of hot-dogs at the games but when all is said and done, you still wear their jerseys and call them "my team".
Now the manager is retiring after a long and successful run and of course things will never be the same- nothing ever is. The past 20 years will probably be remembered as "the good old days" and all of us geeks of a certain age will bore the next generation with our stories of the mighty Jobs who hit for six each time he stood at the crease.
What we must not lose sight of here is that Steve Jobs is a very ill man. One can assume that nothing less than impending doom would cause him to leave Apple. Pancreatic cancer is a death sentence for almost anyone and the fact that Steve has been struggling along since at least 2004 with the disease is a testament to his fortitude and determination to remain at the helm. Surely this must have been a crushing decision for him because apart from stepping away from the company he loves it also acknowledges his own mortality.
I cling to the sanguine expectation that the predictions of his demise are not true, that Steve finds a way to rally and produce a turn around like he did all those years ago with Apple. This time however he is up against tougher competition than Microsoft, HP and Google combined. This is the fight of his life, for his life and he will probably need a miracle to pull it off. I hope his hat is not out of rabbits.
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