PCWorld - It's official: Steve Jobs is stepping down--temporarily--from his post at Apple Computer, taking a medical leave of absence to deal with a health problem that has turned out to be "more complex" than the celebrity CEO had originally disclosed prior to the Macworld Expo event earlier this month. On a personal level, I can't help but have a great deal of sympathy for Jobs and his family at this undoubtedly difficult time. But as a longtime Apple observer, Mac user, and general technology wonk, I can't help wondering what might come of Apple if and, inevitably one day, when Jobs eventually retires permanently from his role as the company's spiritual and temporal leader.
A whole lot of notions come to mind when you think of Steve Jobs. He's a charismatic figure, of course, one of the true tech visionaries who saw the role that computers would ultimately play in our personal lives many years before any given computer was capable of living up to his vision. He's an innovator, pushing incessantly to bring new ideas to market, sometimes for the worse (like that toilet-seat iBook), but often for the better (iPhone, anyone?).
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