waffle

Everyone’s writing about Steve Jobs, everyone’s worrying about Apple, everyone’s defending Tim Cook.

It’s not so much the case that Tim Cook’s qualities aren’t interesting and the points about their usefulness weren’t made. History shows that Steve Jobs made a big deal about inventory just as much as profitability and product focus when he came back to Apple. Steve Jobs knows that every company that can get their hands on a Tim Cook is lucky. We know that he knows that, and we also know.

It’s also not that people really expect Steve Jobs to tweak every pixel, even if he’s into gradients. Viscerally, Steve Jobs does a great job of representing all of Apple, but everyone knows that if the company would fall apart without him, they wouldn’t have gotten this far. He can’t stare thousands of people in the eye, and that way of motivation wouldn’t last.

The kernel of truth that remains in the unease about Tim Cook, CEO, isn’t about Tim Cook’s lack of acumen; isn’t about the lack of great people with Steve’s values; isn’t about the lack of leaders around those ideas; isn’t even about those leaders not being credible public figureheads. Phil Schiller, Scott Forstall and Craig Federighi can keynote on Steve’s level and they aren’t even all on the same depth of the organization chart, flat as it may be.

So what is it? Steve Jobs’ remaining role was as a lightning rod. Everyone else ran their own house just fine, but Steve made the calls. I’m sure people are writing Scott and Phil in droves, but Steve is a bigger target. It is a deep comfort for some people to see a position like Steve’s, and someone like Steve in it. It is the image of security and stability, and those who cherish it are loathe to see it go.

Maybe something else is afoot, though. Look back over the year to date. iOS 5 is filled with, and I have on a qualified hunch that it may be “the release of”, stuff you couldn’t believe they hadn’t gotten by now and had almost given up on. Lion’s whole message is “let’s readjust”. iCloud was the only part of the WWDC keynote that Steve handled himself, and it incorporated both revising his “computer as a digital hub” strategy from the turn of the century as well as redeeming MobileMe.

2011 for Apple is about tying up their past as if to prepare for something. Maybe it is the case that we’re on the way out of a transition to something else. Maybe that transition perpetuated, or was perpetuated by, a more flexible way of working inside Apple itself, where the various divisions are now freer to do their own thing. Curtly, maybe taste is now in less need of centralization than operations are because it permeates the whole organization, or at least the parts where it is in dire need.

As with everything else, it’s all a fuzzy theory. Like the theories of how Apple or its stock will crash because it’s not Tim Cook’s job or interest to set the default arrangement the dock icons in new Mac OS X versions. Everyone’s writing them and everyone’s refuting them.

The one thing I haven’t seen is a theory of Steve Jobs, although deeply appreciated, being made redundant by his own organization. While there isn’t any evidence of a future crash, there is some evidence of Steve Jobs backing off on the micromanagement.

The cherries are picked. The preemptive multitasking Mac OS, the reliant Apple retailer, the Intel Mac, the Apple Phone and Tablet and why not the commercially enormously successful Apple itself. All once thought impossible myths, all now facts of life. The only future substantially improved Apple product that I can predict is an iPad with a higher resolution display.

The field is wide open for the future and while the past can guide you, its impact seems so quaint compared to where you can go. Steve leaves what he started, where he started, when he started.

Steve Jobs has resigned as Apple CEO.

If there’s anything Steve loved doing, it was being CEO of Apple, and he’s resigning because he has to. Most likely, the medical condition that has merited an indefinite leave since January has either turned sour (sharply or slowly) or simply taken too long to resolve for the leave to be sustainable. Looking inside the company, there’s no part of it that doesn’t work the way Steve wants, or perform less than Steve expects.

So, dear Steve, I wish you all the best. You don’t have to disclose it, but please take the time and effort to manage your condition, whatever it may be, if this option persists. Your two legendary spells at Apple will always live in business, technology, usability and design history. There will never be another Steve Jobs, but 1 Infinite Loop is filled with people who see what you see, and the future of Apple is in good hands.

After Apple, Pixar, NeXT and Apple again, we now know for sure: A universe that has seen Steve Jobs at his best is a universe with a dent in it.

HP turned 70 two years ago and — like IBM and other long-lived tech giants that have veered outside of engineering — are now tossing it completely to the birds, as far as I can tell. I’m sad, but I can’t say I’m surprised. It doesn’t take a genius to realize what happens when you bring in a former SAP head.

I’m sad about WebOS, naturally. The TouchPads and the Prés might not have taken the world by storm, although we can only wish to know what would have happened had they arrived each 18 months earlier. I saw WebOS as a good and necessary competitor to iOS and Android, although to my great dismay never a real thorn in anyone’s side (except for jwz). We know what would have happened to a spun-off WebOS firm and we know what would have happened to a de-emphasized WebOS inside HP; WebOS’s second chance at life was with the full might of the Battleship Hewlett-Packard behind it, and that chance has been cut short.

I’m sad about HP’s other hardware. They started a hardware company and they have made very good hardware, including quality printers, over the years. I’m not entirely sold of the quality of every single product that they’ve made, but their name has been largely un-sullied, and I can’t honestly fault them for anything that I’d rather attribute to the whole inept industry.

I’m sad about HP’s deep research. The jury’s still out on whether this gets to stay or not (as in truth it is with their servers and printers), but when a company that’s discovering a fourth basic building block of electrical circuitry announce that they’re going to sell enterprise things to enterprises and divest some things that aren’t related, I wouldn’t automatically count on this remaining a sufficient priority. I’m guessing there’s plenty of market value in the idea, but I’m worried about such interesting things in the hands of “IP” trolls.

But mostly, I’m sad because it’s such a perfect opportunity for me to be sad. While they may not have infallibly upheld it, HP represented a lot of what I value: research, engineering, quality, ingenuity, determination and grit. HP went deep with technology and it went deep with me, and now the bits I like most are being forcibly removed not because they’re doing poorly or aren’t needed, but because the former head of a company whose products are reviled for breeding highly paid consultants, worker confusion and crashed systems reintegration projects thinks that they need to do more of that sort of stuff.

The world moves on, and progress sometimes means shedding things that have worked for you in the past but won’t sustain you going forward. But I’ll be damned if this is actually progress.

Jonatan Castro’s Lion UI Kit Preview mockup PSD. Along the fistful of controls is a familiar-looking fella in the bottom right, and the layer name confirms it; it is a control for “shortcut input”.

I don’t know that I’ve been involved in anything that has left such a distributed impression than Shortcut Recorder has. Maybe it needs remaking now (and I have attempted to start over with some parts of it), but it’s amazing to see it in some corner of apps you didn’t even know about. The Shortcut Recorder team that’s really been writing the code for the past few years while I’ve been off pretending has done a fantastic job.

If you want to be more involved in a programming project, if you want to learn, if you want to help other people solve their problems and if you want other people to help you solve your problems, I implore you: start an open source component that solves something that’s not well documented.