Steve Jobs Steps Down As Apple CEO

As the world learned yesterday, Steven P. Jobs will step down as Chief Executive Officer from Apple, Inc., the company he co-founded with Stephen Wozniak in 1976. Jobs will remain at the company as Chairman. Apple has grown from a small Cupertino, California-based computer company to one of the most valuable public companies in the world. With their innovative software and hardware designs, Apple has helped to disrupt, rethink, and re-ignite, often single-handedly, numerous industries.

What Jobs’ resignation means to the music industry may not be known immediately. With the introduction of the iPod and iTunes in 2001, Jobs set about changing the landscape of the music industry through the iTunes download store, though sometimes to the chagrin of an industry used to fat revenues from physical CD sales. With the announcement of Apple’s cloud technology this summer, the future of the music industry again looks to the vision of Apple. Apple has also empowered musicians to record on laptops, turning on many would-be recordists with programs like Garageband.

As the financial analyst and CNBC host James Cramer wrote on Twitter, Steve Jobs is “America’s greatest industrialist.”

Steve Jobs’ health issues have been a recurring theme at Apple for some time, so this most recent development in the unfortunate saga comes as little surprise. Jobs first announced his struggles with cancer in 2004, and briefly left Apple for an emergency surgery. Again in early 2009, he stepped down as chief executive amid health concerns, but after receiving a liver transplant, was back at Apple by the summer of that year.

Most recently, in the beginning of 2011, Jobs again went on medical leave, though did not step down as CEO, making appearances at Apple’s Worldwide Developer’s Conference in March to unveil the iPad 2 and again this past June to introduce the new Mac operating system, Tiger, and iOS 5.

People have used social media like Twitter to express their grief and discuss the future of Apple without Jobs, while the media’s handling of the announcement reads more like a Steven P. Jobs obituary.

The announcement came on Wednesday following the close of the U.S. stock market. Apple shares (APPL) are trading down as of this morning.

As is often noted, there likely will be little noticeable change at Apple over the next few years as Tim Cook, formerly Apple’s COO, takes over chief executive duties. News reports this week seem to finally confirm the arrival of the iPhone 5 in October, while Sprint will become the third mobile provider, along with AT&T and Verizon, to carry the game-changing smartphone.

And surely Apple has many other great new products up its sleeve. Perhaps a hardware Apple iTV product that will become the consumer’s all-in-one media center, say some whispers from those who closely follow the company.

But the question remains whether Apple will be able to sustain its dominance in the world of high tech. While Jobs’ methods and work ethic will be naturally a touchstone for the talented team at Apple that he’s built, Apple’s successes have been largely the result of one man’s uncannily savvy vision for the marketplace of the future.

In 1985, Jobs left Apple over disagreements with then-executive John Scullery, and for the 11 years that he was absent from Apple the company diluted its product line and marketing efforts. But within a year of Jobs return as an adviser in 1996, Apple introduced the iMac, a simple personal computer that would restart Apple’s reign of the tech world.

And despite the complexity of the Information Age, Jobs’ true gift is in creating elegant and simple products and tools for everyone.

As the great jazz bassist and composer Charles Mingus said, “Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity.”