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There was always going to be a time when their is no Steve Jobs at the head of Apple, it was not a matter of if, just when. The trick for the company was to decide when and how to handle this transition and how best to manage Wall St through the process.

Wall St is a fickle paranoid bunch of people who like to craft their perception of a company in the simplist terms. In the case of Apple, Steve Jobs is god inventor, designer, negotiator, artistian and weaver of gold. Without Steve Jobs, Apple is 40,000 people wandering around aimlessly. This of course worked well for Apple and they have done nothing to dispel this.

This of course is a convenient up til now. But now they have a problem. Steve’s health is a concern and the concern is real. In mid-2004, Jobs announced to his employees that he had been diagnosed with a cancerous tumor in his pancreas. The prognosis for pancreatic cancer is usually very grim; Jobs, however, stated that he had a rare, far less aggressive type known as islet cell neuroendocrine tumor. This nonetheless is serious and is the situation behind the current sabbatical. In a letter dated Jan. 5 to the Apple community, Jobs revealed that he was being treated for a hormone imbalance that had been causing him to lose weight, but said doctors had pinpointed its cause and were treating the symptoms.

However Steve Jobs has been unusually quite which is very unusual for him. One person who know Steve Jobs from the very early days, Bob Cringely adds:

Steve Jobs has stopped using his computer. He’s off curing himself of something he won’t name and in some manner we can’t know but I CAN tell you right now it doesn’t involve using his computer.

A friend of mine has for years been one of Steve Jobs’ Internet chat buddies. And as such his chat client has – again for years – shown as Steve came online each day and remained there for hours and hours as you’d expect a Silicon Valley mogul to do. And it’s a trend that continued well past Jobs’ announcement that he was taking a six-month leave of absence to get well. But then Steve started logging-on less and less. And several weeks ago he stopped logging-on at all.

Steve Jobs is also a master in creating an alternative universe and it would not be like Steve to simply hang up his hat and leave, there needs to be some drama to it.  Steve Job is going to leave the company, it is not a matter of how but when. It is very likely that Steve Jobs will not return to Apple in the capacity of CEO after his six months rest, indeed it is likely that this six months is a preparation for the inevitable statement from the Board that Steve Jobs will be in a consultant role as the company searches for a new CEO.

Wall St may in fact be distracted elsewhere after the six months, they indeed have short memories, and this transition will move through a normal course. What is clear is that this 6 months of no Steve news will certainly help the cause.

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