“There are few chief executives who are as closely identified with a company as Steve Jobs has been with Apple Inc.,” Yukari Iwatani Kane and Nick Wingfield report for The Wall Street Journal. “Now that he is stepping down as chief executive— although he will be chairman—it will largely be up to his deputies to make sure that the company continues to stay ahead of the competition with trend-setting products and services that impress consumers.”
“Since Mr. Jobs returned to Apple in 1997 after being ousted in 1985 from the company he founded, he has brought the company back from the brink of bankruptcy, revived its Macintosh computer business and played an unusually important role in the introduction of ground-breaking products like the iPod, iPhone and iPad,” Kane and Wingfield report. “As CEO, he provided a charismatic persona and sharp instinct for knowing what consumers want. But his bench is considered a strong management team that has largely stayed out of the limelight until now.”
Kane and Wingfield report, “His likely successor, Tim Cook, 50 years old, is the chief operating officer to whom he handed the reins of the company three times – once in 2004 when Mr. Jobs was recuperating from pancreatic cancer surgery, once in early 2009 when he took a six month medical leave of absence for a liver transplant and again in early 2011 for another unexplained medical leave. Mr. Cook isn’t the showman that Mr. Jobs was, but people who know him call him an “operational genius” who was responsible for crafting Apple’s current supply chain system and helping to transform the company into one of the most efficient electronics manufacturers today.”
Much more in the full article here.
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