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Steve Jobs Resigns as Apple CEO
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That's it, the world apocalypse is nearing: east coast earthquake, hurricane, Steve Jobs resigning, what's next?
Seriously, I gasped in awe when I read the title. I wanna cry.
Long live Steve Jobs!
Seriously, I gasped in awe when I read the title. I wanna cry.
Long live Steve Jobs!
Sad
Purchased an Apple IIe in 1983 at a cost 1/8th of my annual salary (1st Class in the Navy). Two years later, sold it all for pennies on the dollar and purchased a Fat Mac with a daisy wheel printer and 10 Megbyte external Jasmine hard drive. Steve, I salute you sir! I have enjoyed the ride.
Purchased an Apple IIe in 1983 at a cost 1/8th of my annual salary (1st Class in the Navy). Two years later, sold it all for pennies on the dollar and purchased a Fat Mac with a daisy wheel printer and 10 Megbyte external Jasmine hard drive. Steve, I salute you sir! I have enjoyed the ride.
I would be more excited to see a Keynote where Steve Job is announcing an iPhone 4S than Tim Cook announcing an iPhone 5
Wow man that's old school. Gotta love those old pre-macintosh computers.
I bet you wish you still had that today....
I am a huge fan of Apple products, typing this on a 2011 MBP, and it saddens me to see him step down as CEO. He is a visionary in tech, and had reinvented the wheel in every area he has been a part of. With that being said, he is a human being like the rest of us and needs his rest. I wish him the best, and will continue to pray for him, his recovery, and health.
1990
I've been an apple owner since 1990, long time. I remember the countless debates with PC owners. It was us, this small creative company and the rest. IT was fun.
Think it's a good time tp put up MR. Steve Job's commencement speech. EXTRAORDINARY"!
'You've got to find what you love,' Jobs says
I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.
The first story is about connecting the dots.
I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?
It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.
And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.
It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:
Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.
None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.
Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.
My second story is about love and loss.
I was lucky I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation the Macintosh a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.
I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.
I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.
During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.
I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.
My third story is about death.
When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.
Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.
I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I'm fine now.
This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope it's the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:
No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.
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.
When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.
Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.
Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.
Thank you all very much.
I've been an apple owner since 1990, long time. I remember the countless debates with PC owners. It was us, this small creative company and the rest. IT was fun.
Think it's a good time tp put up MR. Steve Job's commencement speech. EXTRAORDINARY"!
'You've got to find what you love,' Jobs says
I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.
The first story is about connecting the dots.
I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?
It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.
And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.
It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:
Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.
None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.
Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.
My second story is about love and loss.
I was lucky I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation the Macintosh a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.
I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.
I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.
During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.
I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.
My third story is about death.
When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.
Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.
I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I'm fine now.
This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope it's the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:
No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.
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.
When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.
Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.
Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.
Thank you all very much.
But after the dust settles...
A new era of personal computing may start.
We just may be able to return to the days of functionality over beauty. Jobs will no longer be able to milk people for their money by selling his products for much more than they're worth. We can return back to the time before Apple had to make everything proprietary. Macs could possibly even compete with PCs some day.
This momentous day will go down in history, and will forever hold a place in my heart.
A new era of personal computing may start.
We just may be able to return to the days of functionality over beauty. Jobs will no longer be able to milk people for their money by selling his products for much more than they're worth. We can return back to the time before Apple had to make everything proprietary. Macs could possibly even compete with PCs some day.
This momentous day will go down in history, and will forever hold a place in my heart.
I can't believe this. But we all knew this day would happen eventually.
Thank you, Steve for everything you've done. You are truly one of the great leaders that many people look up to. What you've done for Apple will never be forgotten. You have lots of fans that are hoping your health recovers soon. I wish you all the best.
Thank you, Steve for everything you've done. You are truly one of the great leaders that many people look up to. What you've done for Apple will never be forgotten. You have lots of fans that are hoping your health recovers soon. I wish you all the best.
Man that's sucks big time, Steve is Apple. The man did such great things, coinsedence or not, yesterday I wrote this post on the iPhone section, read the second paragraph. We were talking about some other things but I wanted to mention, just for once, what a great man he is.
"That's why I think Apple should never ever ever release a cheaper version of the iPhone. Sure it will break sales again but for how long. One strong point of the iPhone's "hipness" is because not everyone can afford one straight away, still today you have to pay quite some bucks with a sovjet-union 2 year plan. Percentagewise it's just for the happy few, when there will be a cheaper version suddenly everyone owns an iPhone. Then it's probably bye bye with the coolness of the iPhone. I hope to god Steve Jobe realizes this to or am I wrong?"
"Speaking about Steve Jobs, in sports, music, movies even in some political fields you have people who are labeled as Heroes, Legends. They are put on a pedestel, why?! because they excel in their field. Why the hell does a man who was there at the beginning of the electronic revolution, who
single-handed picked up a company and turned it into this multi-billiondollar corp which influences so many lives also in a positif way, doesn't get any recognition. Fair is fair...this man did things where Michael Jackson's music or Jordan's moves are peanuts to in compared with. Never have I heard of any form of recognition for this man. Sure he is just a leader of a company but he did some things which can be labeled as "Greatness"."
"That's why I think Apple should never ever ever release a cheaper version of the iPhone. Sure it will break sales again but for how long. One strong point of the iPhone's "hipness" is because not everyone can afford one straight away, still today you have to pay quite some bucks with a sovjet-union 2 year plan. Percentagewise it's just for the happy few, when there will be a cheaper version suddenly everyone owns an iPhone. Then it's probably bye bye with the coolness of the iPhone. I hope to god Steve Jobe realizes this to or am I wrong?"
"Speaking about Steve Jobs, in sports, music, movies even in some political fields you have people who are labeled as Heroes, Legends. They are put on a pedestel, why?! because they excel in their field. Why the hell does a man who was there at the beginning of the electronic revolution, who
single-handed picked up a company and turned it into this multi-billiondollar corp which influences so many lives also in a positif way, doesn't get any recognition. Fair is fair...this man did things where Michael Jackson's music or Jordan's moves are peanuts to in compared with. Never have I heard of any form of recognition for this man. Sure he is just a leader of a company but he did some things which can be labeled as "Greatness"."
I believe you have already thanked him enough (judging by the self-promoting list of Apple products in your signature).
It's been quite a ride Steve, best of luck to you. Your vision and dedication is unmatched in the industry, and your legacy will live on for generations to come.
If anyone knows anything about Mr. Jobs, they know he will work tirelessly on the thing he loves until the day he dies; CEO or not.
If anyone knows anything about Mr. Jobs, they know he will work tirelessly on the thing he loves until the day he dies; CEO or not.
Apple Engineering makes the decisions not to have BluRay or USB 3.0, not Steve. Steve expressed an official position, but Engineering decisions are made by Committee inside Apple Engineering.
In short, no and no.
Thanks for demanding the best, encouraging competition and making the personal computer the hotbed of invention in the 20th century.
And thanks for kicking off the 21st century and always looking into the future.
Please take some time off and enjoy yourself
And thanks for kicking off the 21st century and always looking into the future.
Please take some time off and enjoy yourself
So how long is the non disclosure agreement active for Apple CEOs? Would be interesting to see Jobs start posting here at MacRumors.
When I first saw it news on Twitter, I thought it was due to his health, but it is good he still going to be with Apple. Maybe it was too much to be CEO, Chairman, and project being "Apple". One less thing to stress on.
Eat, sleep, and use Apple and stick a knife in the man's back....such people also goes by the name of "Judas"
I don't understand why people are so sad by this news. It is not like he is dead. He is worth billions and admired by many people. Anything or anyone who is popular will have as many haters too. The guy can spend time around in a pool and swim in money like Scrooge McDuck. He should be more than just feeling ok.
I understand younger posters getting emo because they probably became Apple fans after the success from the iPod/iPhone and Jobs is the only Apple CEO they've ever known, but Apple was still functioning before Steve Jobs returned. There was life in Apple before 1997 or 2001 or 2007. In fact, the Newton was a big gamechanger even if it didn't sell well and this was when Steve was already fired from Apple and started NEXT. Without the Newton, we wouldn't have the Palm Pilot. Then we saw a convergence of PDA functions put into later smartphones from the early 2000's.
Just be happy the man is still alive and still part of the company. Michael Jackson couldn't even make it passed 50. A CEO who is 57-years old is stepping down. This was imminent when he was absent from keynotes and he isn't GOD like some make him to be. A man approaching his 60's and has pancreatic cancer should NOT be stressed out and should NOT make others stressed out by running the most valuable company in the world. Running a company like Apple with such high, unrealistic expectations from people is not easy. I remember when Michael Jordan used to say getting to the top was hard. But staying there and maintaining that excellence was even harder. Sometimes complacency creeps in and there is a target on your back. More pressure to perform well if you are the king alone in the mountain-top.
There is a time to just slow down and pull back. Steve worked his ass off trying to make Apple what it is today and if that meant being an ass, so be it. Whether people hate his personality or not, he spent many sleepless nights thinking of the next projects and feeling that pressure of always performing to be the best. He deserves his rest whether in this life or in death.
I understand younger posters getting emo because they probably became Apple fans after the success from the iPod/iPhone and Jobs is the only Apple CEO they've ever known, but Apple was still functioning before Steve Jobs returned. There was life in Apple before 1997 or 2001 or 2007. In fact, the Newton was a big gamechanger even if it didn't sell well and this was when Steve was already fired from Apple and started NEXT. Without the Newton, we wouldn't have the Palm Pilot. Then we saw a convergence of PDA functions put into later smartphones from the early 2000's.
Just be happy the man is still alive and still part of the company. Michael Jackson couldn't even make it passed 50. A CEO who is 57-years old is stepping down. This was imminent when he was absent from keynotes and he isn't GOD like some make him to be. A man approaching his 60's and has pancreatic cancer should NOT be stressed out and should NOT make others stressed out by running the most valuable company in the world. Running a company like Apple with such high, unrealistic expectations from people is not easy. I remember when Michael Jordan used to say getting to the top was hard. But staying there and maintaining that excellence was even harder. Sometimes complacency creeps in and there is a target on your back. More pressure to perform well if you are the king alone in the mountain-top.
There is a time to just slow down and pull back. Steve worked his ass off trying to make Apple what it is today and if that meant being an ass, so be it. Whether people hate his personality or not, he spent many sleepless nights thinking of the next projects and feeling that pressure of always performing to be the best. He deserves his rest whether in this life or in death.
Well I really do hope his health recovers with out the stress of trying to hang on as CEO. It would be a really sad year if we lose Steve Jobs as well as Jack Layton.
I think we have good reason to see Apple continue strong for the next three to five years. When these strong product lines become stagnant is when they will really be tested.
I think we have good reason to see Apple continue strong for the next three to five years. When these strong product lines become stagnant is when they will really be tested.
