Apple without Jobs: Can it succeed?

The charismatic CEO may well leave in 2009. But with or without Jobs, Apple will remain a major force in the technology industry.

You don't usually see a stock gain 4 percent on news that the CEO is ill, but that's exactly what happened to Apple this week. As we all know by now, Apple CEO Steve Jobs disclosed that he is being treated for a hormone imbalance that caused his obvious weight loss. Anyone familiar with Wall Street's often twisted logic knows that the stock bounced because the news wasn't worse. After all, there have been plenty of rumors that Jobs is suffering a recurrence of pancreatic cancer and may have to leave the company.

I'm glad that Jobs isn't sicker. But sooner or later, he will leave Apple, and it may occur in 2009. What will happen? The stock will tank, no matter how the news is spun. Many investors are convinced that Jobs is Apple and Apple is Jobs.

But Wall Street has it wrong.

The company will be just fine without him. Partly through the genius of Jobs and the team he built, and partly because his tenure coincides with the industry-wide shift away from proprietary computing dominated by Microsoft, Apple will remain an important and successful force in the technology industry.

[ The Mac is getting ever more popular in business. Find out why. | Track the key IT-oriented developments from this year's Macworld Expo in InfoWorld's special report. ]

Not your father's Apple
When Jobs rejoined Apple in 1997, the company was headed for the recycle bin. It remained stuck in a customer niche of graphics-oriented users and Microsoft-hating fanboys. It was even in danger of losing its hold on the education market.

In part, that sad state of affairs was due to unimaginative management by COO-turned-CEO Michael Spindler and then CEO Gil Amelio, a technology executive who understood chips -- he ran National Semiconductor for five years -- a lot better than he understood consumers.

Those two followed the chaotic reign of John Sculley, whose marketing savvy from his tenure at the disciplined PepsiCo didn't translate well at undisciplined Apple, resulting in a chaotic product line that confused customers and spread Apple's strengths too thin. Engineers' pet projects ran amok, leading to lots of half-baked technologies and a confused direction for the Mac. (Ironically, the Sculley-era chaos led Apple's board to choose first Spindler and then Amelio as more focused technocrats in a pendulum swing gone too far.)

But in a larger sense, the company appeared doomed because such strengths as it had (a knack for design and a computer that was easy to use and didn't crash every 10 minutes) were at odds with the industry's demands.