This month, a horde of Apple fans and developers crowded into San Francisco’s Moscone conference center to witness the company launch its new iPhone model. Usually the event would be headed by Apple chief executive Steve Jobs, but with their talismanic leader on medical leave — recovering from a liver transplant, it turns out — the task of demonstrating the new products on stage was left to one of his lieutenants, Scott Forstall.
And the demonstration went wrong. Not once, but twice: First a balloon-inflating experiment failed embarrassingly, and then a guitar-based demo struck a bum note. It’s hard to imagine that happening with Jobs, known for his grueling preparations for his keynote speeches. Jobs, one could guess, wouldn’t have included the balloon or the guitar demo, dubbed “most botched demos at an Apple keynote” by one blog.
A simple mistake — or a portent? Whatever it was, get used to it. For months, most Apple staff — and its fans and investors — have rolled along happily in the expectation that Jobs, its co-founder, chief executive and chairman, would be returning to work some time around now, back from fixing “health problems” that had turned out “more complex than I originally thought,” as Jobs put it in a rare press statement.
It’s unlikely to be that straightforward, however. Jobs’ liver transplant means that unless he has the rarest and most robust of constitutions, he will not be back at full-time work as chief executive of the company by the end of this month.
Recuperation from such a grueling procedure takes months — and even then there remains the question of whether the pancreatic cancer that necessitated Jobs’ liver transplant will have been suppressed. Medical opinion suggests that in the most successful transplants, basic recovery takes at least three months, and that “strenuous activity” can only be undertaken after six months. Additionally, patients will spend the rest of their lives taking immuno-suppressant drugs, which increase the chance of cancer returning.
The most likely outcome is that Jobs will have to accept that his medical needs will require him to take a reduced role, probably focusing on his role as chairman of the board, which he has been since 1997, rather than full-time chief executive.
“He’s a creative genius, without question,” David Pearl, an investor with Epoch, told Bloomberg. “At the same time, the company is building itself for the day Steve isn’t there, whether it’s next year or in 10 years.”
The reality is that Apple has to begin preparing for life without Steve. And the question for the technology industry — and for Apple itself — is whether the company will be the same as a result. Can it continue to command the adoration of its fans and make inroads into new markets in the same way that it has since he returned a decade ago? His absence from Apple in the 1990s marked a time when, in Jobs’ own words, the company missed its best chance.
In a key interview in 2004 in Newsweek, Jobs said: “Who ended up running the company? Sales guys. At the critical juncture in the late 80s, when they should have gone for market share, they went for profits. They made obscene profits for several years. And their products became mediocre. And then their monopoly ended with Windows 95.”
Who’s going to be running Apple? Possibly not “sales guys.” The expectation from outside is that Tim Cook, who has been acting as chief executive in Jobs’ absence, will take over and that the company will proceed from there.
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