An Apple a day…

Someone should have told Steve Jobs about the famous phrase contained in the title of the post… perhaps he could have kept the doctor away.

For better or for worse, Jobs is stepping down as CEO of Apple Computer for at least six months in the hopes of nursing himself back to health. Health is the most important thing, as in any case, so I wish him a full and speedy recovery. Of course, the aforementioned question still remains: with regards to Apple Computer, is his absence for better or for worse?

To anyone well-versed in all-things-Apple, the quick and easy answer is “worse.” Jobs seems to have a way with technology, such that the simple act of his holding a new product at (now-defunct) MacWorld and showing it off to the public increased its sales ten-fold. All he had to do was breathe on MacBook Air, for example, and it was all-of-a-sudden a good product in the eyes of many consumers… even if, in my eyes, it never was.

Can anyone fill Jobs’ shoes? The hope is that no one will need to. After all, it’s only six months. The problem here is the elsewhere condition: what happens if it turns out to not be just six months, and this is (again) the end of a Jobsian Apple Computer?

The world has seen what happened to Apple the first time Jobs left; it wasn’t pretty, to say the least, and it took Jobs, the iMac and the iPod to lift Apple up out of the hole it took 15 years to put itself in. We’ve seen some of what happens the second time he left: Apple stock plunged on the news that they would be without Lord Steve for six months. Thus, if that 6-month figure lengthens… we have a problem.

Realistically, I want to tell myself that Apple runs perfectly well without Steve Jobs. In fact, I am fairly sure that Steve has very little actual work to do at Apple these days, as he’s probably trained his massive Genius-Bar-army well enough to take care of themselves. There is always a lingering thought to me, though… what if I’m wrong? What if Steve leaves for good and it all goes to hell in a hand basket?

We could be left with Apple’s rotting corpse, in the form of another defunct tech company, or worse still: another Microsoft. If the latter should happen, I will – mark my words, I WILL – switch to Linux, no matter how much it sucks and how much I despise it.

Thankfully, for now, Apple is virtually unchanged (although the same cannot be said for its finances). They still make the only computers I will use on a daily basis, and they still beat out any other tech company on customer service.

Let’s hope it stays that way.