Steve Jobs

Ken — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 09:56:43 +0000

From Steve Jobs, yesterday:

Team,

I am sure all of you saw my letter last week sharing something very personal with the Apple community. Unfortunately, the curiosity over my personal health continues to be a distraction not only for me and my family, but everyone else at Apple as well. In addition, during the past week I have learned that my health-related issues are more complex than I originally thought.

In order to take myself out of the limelight and focus on my health, and to allow everyone at Apple to focus on delivering extraordinary products, I have decided to take a medical leave of absence until the end of June.

I have asked Tim Cook to be responsible for Apple's day to day operations, and I know he and the rest of the executive management team will do a great job. As CEO, I plan to remain involved in major strategic decisions while I am out. Our board of directors fully supports this plan.

I look forward to seeing all of you this summer.

Steve

There are a panoply of irritating responses to this memo.

1. "We'll SUE Apple for not disclosing this earlier!" Give me a break. You'll sue someone for not disclosing a personal, private health concern that he didn't know about until this week? And inflict further harm on the company that you're so heavily invested in? Good luck with that.

2. "What will happen now that Jobs is gone?" Jobs is not gone. He'll be back in a few months. He didn't announce his death, he announced a leave of absence.

3. "How will Apple survive without Jobs running it?" It's funny how Jobs is perceived unlike every other CEO in the country, as if his 24-hour-a-day job were to sit in an ivory tower and magically generate innovative ideas for his underlings to produce. No, he has to deal with operational budgets and capital expenditures and contract negotiations and management structures; i.e., the ordinary management tedium that every company has. That's his day-to-day work, and the other executives at Apple are just as good at that stuff as Jobs, if not more so. Jobs can still axe bad product ideas while lying on a hammock in Cancun, and trust me, he will.

But you know what? Shareholders: please, go ahead and panic about this. I've got a bunch of cash that's waiting to jump on Apple stock once it's dirt-cheap.