Apple’s products are replete with Apple-like features and details, embedded in Apple-like apps, running on Apple-like devices, which come packaged in Apple-like boxes, are promoted in Apple-like ads, and sold in Apple-like stores. The company is a fractal design. Simplicity, elegance, beauty, cleverness, humility. Directness. Truth. Zoom out enough and you can see that the same things that define Apple’s products apply to Apple as a whole. The company itself is Apple-like. The same thought, care, and painstaking attention to detail that Steve Jobs brought to questions like “How should a computer work?”, “How should a phone work?”, “How should we buy music and apps in the digital age?” he also brought to the most important question: “How should a company that creates such things function?”
Jobs’s greatest creation isn’t any Apple product. It is Apple itself.
Yes, Steve Jobs is irreplaceable as CEO of Apple. But the company doesn’t need another Steve Jobs — it simply needs to stay on the path he has carved for it. With guys like Tim Cook and Phil Schiller at the helm, the Apple Steve Jobs has helped create over the last decade will remain intact.
Don’t forget, Jobs isn’t leaving Apple — he is changing roles, to Chairman of the Board. In this role, he will still be able to help shape and focus Apple’s vision, while letting the team of people he selected and train carry that vision out. This move is calculated and precise, just like almost everything the company dopes.
Yes, AAPL will probably take a hit (in fact, it already is), but longterm, Apple will continue to be a stable, growing company that releases great products and enjoys huge gains.