I dont want to **** on anyone's parade, but even if Jobs had a multi-year plan already drawn up, such plans may very well prove to hold very little value in the rapidly changing environment that technology is. One can use the work of Lucy Suchmann to make this point clearer. In one of her brilliant pieces of work she speaks of plans in the context of situated action, using the metaphor of a canoer in action.
in planning to run a series of rapids in a canoe, one is very likely to sit for a while above the falls and plan one's decent. The plan might go something like "I'll get as far over to the left as possible, try to make it between those two large rocks, then backferry hard to the right to make it around that next bunch." A great deal of deliberation, discussion, simulation, and reconstruction may go into such a plan. But, however detailed, the plan stops short of the actual business of getting your canoe through the falls. When it really comes down to the details of responding to currents and handling a canoe, you effectively abandon the plan and fall back on whatever embodied skills are available to you.
Jobs was a brilliant canoer. In fact, while many think of him as the great visionaire it was not so much his vision* that made his brilliance, but his ability to draw upon the embodied skills that was available to him - what BillG once summarized in terms of taste. Much like a great canoer, Jobs had wicked gut-feeling. Like few others he was able to navigate the rapids of technology, effectively finding his way through the rapids. This was his forte, this was what made Apple as we now know it.
That said, i am sure that there are many brilliant people working at Apple. However, having brilliant employees is hardly enough. Nor is the right "enterprise DNA". To highlight the importance of Jobs is not so much to downgrade the brilliance of others. Its merely a recognition of his (somewhat) unique touch.
Will Apple live on? Surely. But without Jobs there to navigate the rapids, well... it might just get rough. It may perhaps not happen tomorrow, perhaps not even for years to come, but surely he was "more than a man".
This is not to mean that others could not take his place. Rather, my concerns are with "Jobs-like people" being able to reach a position where they can have enough influence. Jobs in many ways started an era, and as such he was self-written as a leader in many ways. Such fortune is however exception rather than norm, and, with Jobs gone, it may take long until someone is able to fill his shoes.... or rather, allowed to even try. This, the latter, if anything, will be the downfall of Apple.
The day Apple becomes "just another corporation" they have lost their soul. And unfortunately, i think that day will come sooner than most here would expect. Its simply far to easy to just "run the show", ignoring that the show of today may be obsolete tomorrow. And once you go down that path, change usually doesnt happen until its way too late.
* guess i might expand on this before the downvoters join in. Vision, in a sense, is easy. In fact, most visions implemented today are ones that were made decades ago. Imagining what something could be is quite easy. Rather, Jobs skill was in marketing. Not marking as "making a bs-product look good", but rather "taking the available - the currently possible - and making something great out of it, at a point in time where it makes sense doing so".
(ironically as i was just publishing this Wozniak came on TV speaking of Jobs marketing skills...)
