Steve Jobs Resigns

"Tim Cook......continue to serve Apple with his unique insights, creativity and inspiration."

I see the future more like the situation with MS and Steve Ballmer.

Like Grishnak said somewhere else, Tim Cook is likely a suit and will run the company like all the other large companies without a visionary leader, purely with profit and greed in mind.

I'm not an Apple fanboi by any stretch of imagination, but Apple will be poorer as a company for the lack of Jobsy at the helm.

Good point, and I used to be a real Machead in the '90s and early oughts, drank the Kool-Aid, etc. In fact, when I converted to Linux and FOSS it was on PowerPC before I warmed up to Intel- and AMD-based hardware. Be that as it may, you and Grishnak are right about Apple being poorer for not having Jobs in charge.

Like him or not, Steve Jobs did change the face of consumer computing and, agree with his vision or not, he still provided some pretty inspired hardware. Not all of it, of course -- the Cube and the iMac G5, what dogs! -- but much of it.

Of course, I've never forgiven Jobs for his only mistake, in my opinion: Dumping the Newton. Every Palm Pilot sold afterward could have been a Newton, but since it wasn't one of Jobs' creations, he canned it. I still have my MessagePad 120 and it still works, thank you.

I was a Machead once. For one year.

Then I got bitten by a forced upgrade. Decided to dump the Mac and buy a stand-alone Commodore 64 rig. (That should give you a time frame...) It served me better, for longer, than the Mac could have.

That dastardly outfit no longer uses "Mac only" on their network.

Apple is going to be fine. Jobs has been planning for succession for years, and he is staying on as chairman. He'll still be involved at a high level, while Tim Cook and the rest of the management team do the gnarly grunt work. Which they have been doing during Jobs' leaves of absence since he found out he had cancer. Apple is not Microsoft; it is run by people with taste, talent, and ability, making products that people actually want to buy. Microsoft has always been a bully and protection racketeer, relying on lockin and collusion to drive sales. Not many people buy MS because they like their products.

@tuxchick: I agree, mostly

I do hope that you right.

Apple's release of their iPhone really put the cat among the pigeons so to speak, and has made the industry incredibly volatile and innovative as a result. It's an exciting time in IT and no mistake. I would hate for a major player to fall back to the usual management credo of minimising risk and avoiding anything new.