By SteveJack
I was going to call this article, “What happens when Steve Jobs retires?” or “Apple after Steve Jobs,” in deference to taste, but then I decided that I wanted as many people to read it as possible, so… I succumbed. I just want you to know that I felt a pang of guilt typing that headline on a Mac.
Steve Jobs is Apple. Apple is Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs without Apple still managed to produce the foundation for what Apple became NeXT (after they paid him $400 million) while, in his spare time, heading a movie studio that only produces runaway box office hits. Apple without Steve Jobs produces Performas.
As a very minor Apple stockholder, I get the proxy statements, I check off the “yes” boxes to give Steve jets, millions of options, jet fuel, more options, whatever he wants, and I wonder what in the hell happens if Steve gets hit by a bus biking on over to the Palo Alto Apple Store some Saturday.
Steve Jobs is 48 years old. Reportedly, he is a vegan and in very good health. May he live to be one hundred! May he live forever, but that’s probably unlikely. So, I’m back to the beginning; what happens when Steve Jobs dies? Or, a bit more hopefully, when he doesn’t feel like leading Apple Computer, Inc. anymore and decides to kick back and relax? Since Jobs returned to lead Apple, every Apple shareholder, employee, and avid company watcher has asked themselves this question at some point, “whither Steve Jobs?”
Pixar has John Lasseter and a crop of young, talented directors to carry on post-Steve. But, who will lead Apple? Is Steve grooming someone, yet? Is it too early to worry about it? And what about that bus, God forbid?
I mean, come on, we all lived through the Scully, Spindler, and Amelio years; Apple barely did. On the face of it, the closest Apple has to a successor-in-grooming is Phil Schiller. No offense, Phil, but the RDF hasn’t rubbed off. Leading Apple is a very tricky proposition. Only one man so far has pulled it off successfully. Twice. The key ingredients seem to be a quest for perfection, a passion for the technology and the company, and the ability to relate Apple’s ideas to the world with style. Jobs is truly the charismatic force that propels Apple forward in the face of tremendous odds.
Right now, it looks like Apple’s best hope, and a very good one at that, is Jonathan Ive, Apple’s Vice President of Industrial Design, the London Design Museum’s “2003 Designer of the Year,” and chief designer of the original and current iMacs, iPods, iBooks, PowerBooks, Power Mac G5, and more. He seems to work well with the engineers responsible for the hardware. He is obviously a meticulous genius. And he has “that certain something” which, importantly, comes across on camera and in person. Whether he has the extremely rare “vision thing” that Jobs possesses; well, that’s still an open question.
Watch Ive in the Power Mac G5 intro video. Ive first appears about 40% in, at the 2:50 mark of the 6:33 minute video. Note that he is almost wearing a black mock turtleneck already. Contrast his presentation style and enthusiasm with the other Apple presenters. Can you sense the almost Jobsian, call it Junior Jobsian, aura? Ive has “it” while all of the other Apple employees in the video are just nice people talking about a computer. And Ive should only get better with time. Could we be watching Steve Jobs’ successor, Apple’s future CEO, in the 31-year-old Ive? Watch and see if Ive begins to join Steve on stage during keynotes soon.
Jonathan Ive, Apple Computer CEO circa 2025. It has a pretty nice ring to it, doesn’t it? You heard it here first. I think Mr. Ive could pull it off. And I think Jobs thinks so, too; in about twenty years, bus drivers willing.
SteveJack is a long-time Macintosh user, web designer, multimedia producer and a regular contributor to the MacDailyNews Opinion section.
BR – this is for you:
Apple irrelevant? No one cares what they do? Pffffffffffffft
Show me ONE “I love my PC” website…
YOU CAN’T so just shut up please.
Well, see, that’s not entirely true. There are lots of sites about PCs, and lots of users that love their PC. Just because I don’t understand them doesn’t mean I’ll deny their existence.
Heck, there’s even a guy that loved his PC so much that he wanted to make it beautiful — he took a Sawtooth G4 case (the blue front) and put his PC in there!
Oh yeah, and BR didn’t say “irrelevant”, he/she said “in the mainstream no one really cares what Apple does.” Since 94% of people use Windows, I would suggest that it’s a valid statement. I wish it weren’t true, but I can’t deny it.
-Jake
Had to try this one out. “I love my PC” gave me 659 results on Google, “I love my Mac” 1910.
That’s interesting, especially when you consider that PC users outnumber Mac users by around 30 to 1. Could the Mac really be NINETY TIMES more lovable than the PC?
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-Jake
Some of these “I love my PC”-pages don’t actually say so, they just quote Bill Gates saying so. So it might even be more than 1:90.
On the other hand, “I love my Computer” gave 5000 results.
Regarding the Prophecyof Steven P Jobs our savior, it simply states:
If he does die then it will be for windows users sins.
He will then rise seven days later and lay waste to all windows users worldwide.
Microsoft facilities and production facilities of the evil shells that carried micorsoft software will be set ablaze and the evil faces of the devils behind the microsoft empire will be revealed to all.
After the evil devils are vanquished – then and only then will peace and brotherhood reign.
Then the prophecy will be complete.
Burp
http://sanjose.bizjournals.com/sanjose/stories/2003/08/11/story6.html?page=2
interesting… put macs and pc side by side and see how they do. I wonder if apple can keep up with Best Buy demand if they are successful.
I believe that one of the key important recent decisions that Apple has made was to develop OS X. That is to migrate to UNIX (BSD). This has opened the door to running a great deal of open source software that was previously only available to UNIX users (i.e. Linux). Yes, a lot of open source software has been ported to run under Windows, but not much of it was available to Macintosh.
This was a smart move, but a smarter move would be to take this a step further and incorporate more of the original NeXT Step ideology of having a system that isn’t focused around the hardware architecture. Yes, this means having “fat binaries” (executables that contain both G3/4/5 binary code as well as x86/etc binary code).
Let’s not forget another VERY important question: What happens when Bill Gates dies?
oyyy!
what if Ive dies before Jobs? saying it does (not) makes it so! hope not. let em loong loong lives…
why are you playing god?
ah..well when Bill Gates dies some other idiot like Steve Ballmer or some other fat wierdo will take over Microsoft and make it even worse than it already is.
Steve Jobs Die? Ha! didn’t you ever see the film called Lawn Mower Man? Steve took back command of the company so he could work some of the most insanely progressive deals to increase the level of technology that Apple and IBM currently have to such a zenith that you won’t understand what he is up to until we hear his birth cry of every telephone ringing on the earth at once. The G5 is just a red herring. Yes, this is a great microprocessor, but wait until you see the SJ-02 microprocessor that IBM is working on! This processor is Steve�s secret baby that you and I will never get our hands on. Why? Because it is designed to emulate the synaptic network of Steve’s brain so he can perform a “Bio-Memory backup” of each day so Steve 2.0 can go online as soon as his Steve 1.0 “Wet-ware” version crashes. Steve has purchased a cave in the Rocky Mountains to house the cluster of SJ-02 computers that will be the home of his very being and has cut a deal with Honda to purchase 10,000 ASIMO robots (not the one you have seen dancing, but the one that can build a G5 with one hand and fire a light armor weapon with the other at the same time) to be his eyes and ears. Apple stock prices will go through the roof when it is announced that he has fired his entire computer construction factory and is replacing them with 3000 units of himself to perform all of the work. This plan will only work though as long as Honda can create an ASIMO with a long enough neck to accommodate black turtleneck sweaters.
he stops breathing, i guess
“Steve Jobs is Apple. Apple is Steve Jobs.”
people who spread such rubbish is a criminal, a fraud. what happened to Woz? Steve is just a pretty boy mascot for Apple. Give credit to the real players in the game man!
HEAR HEAR.
Bring back the true innovator of Apple, Wozniak.
Create an artificial intelligence and call it Virtual Steve.
No… call it… Siri
When Steve Jobs dies, his body decomposes and becomes part of the earth.
Apple and the rest of us continue living and enjoying life with our Macs.
What about Mike Matas, the co-founder of Delicious Monster?
Steve is only upset in the above post because he has just found out that he has cancer… your article, Steve Jack, was more pertinent than you realized.
I know it’s cheating to comment on this with ten years of hindsight (and I hadn’t even heard of Steve Jobs back in 2003), but Jony is no CEO. He’s not good enough at public speaking. He’s fine when talking to a camera, but when he had to introduce the aluminium Macbook to a smallish crowd in 2009 he showed the symptoms of stage fright. And whilst the speech he gave at Steve’s funeral was moving, he was clearly just reciting lines.
Jony is best off doing what he already does – hardware design. The jury’s still out on his skills as a software designer, but he’ll never run the company.