Steve Jobs Resigns from Apple

[Joshua Dorkin]

Here's his resignation letter:
Steve Jobs’s Resignation Letter to Apple

Thoughts?

[Jon Holdman]

Jobs stepping down as CEO won't stop innovation. There are lots and lots of smart people with lots of ideas who are doing lots of interesting things that will appear on store shelves and web sites in the days to come.

What I worry about is that Apple and Apple's products go the extra mile. I'm typing this on a five year old HP PC. At work I have a mac, though, and a newly built Linux box built for a specific purpose. This old PC does well for surfing the web and doing e-mail, but my next PC will certainly be a mac of some sort. My next portable will be a Macbook air even though my day job only buys PC laptops. I like macs enough that I will buy it with my own money, just like most auto mechanics own their own tools.

But with Steve Jobs gone, will that remain the case? Will the geniuses and the genius bar still be able to actually fix something in a matter of minutes? Will an iPhone still be worth waiting for (now a year, waiting for an iPhone 5 with my slightly flakey iPhone 3G.) I worry that they won't. That, just like Sony, the products will trend toward mediocority. I surely hope that Tim Cook, or the people that work for him, have the same magic touch that results in "gotta have it" products and "I cannot believe you just did that" customer service.

Would the world be a worse place with the innovations you mention, Jason? IMHO, very definitely yes. These may seem like just frivolities, but for fishermen in third world countries who were beholden to a single buyer, they're a very big increase in their income because they can check prices at several ports. Many women in villages in these same countries have turned a single cell phone into a living wage by selling calls on that phone. And the people in that village have a communications line they never had before. Closer to home I can visit an unfamiliar place and have numerous reviews of restaurants at my fingertips. Perfect? Hardly. Can the systme be gamed? Yes. But is it better than a year old guidebook that reviews only one tenth of the available choices? Absolutely.