Apple Inc.’s CEO Steve Jobs announced on Wednesday that he will be taking a leave of absence from the business scene, as he is currently dealing with some health issues. The medical leave will keep him away from the job until June the soonest.
"In order to take myself out of the limelight and focus on my health, and to allow everyone at Apple to focus on delivering extraordinary products, I have decided to take a medical leave of absence until the end of June," Jobs said in his statement.
Last week, Mr. Jobs said that it was only a hormone imbalance that made him lose all that weight and that everything was under control. Unfortunately, over the past several days, the matter became more complex and demanded this type of rather drastic action.
The man put in charge to cover Jobs’ role over the next few months is the company’s chief operating officer, Tim Cook, who will be handling Apple’s day to day operations.
Rumors about his health have been going around for quite some time, as his physical form got worse with each passing month. Until now he refused to address the issue, saying that everything was all right and all the information filling the blogs and the reports is false.
This change scares some of the people involved with the company, and by this I’m referring to the investors. Jobs’ image is often associated with the company’s identity and some people might thing that the current situation could affect the business. His competitive drive and clear vision of what Apple’s products should be like have made devices such as the iPod and the iPhone massive worldwide successes. Still, Tim Cook is surely a great choice for this position and the entire executive and administrative team will continue business as usual, meaning that everything should continue at its normal pace, developing and delivering great products, just as Jobs said in his statement.
One rather troubling aspect of this entire situation is its financial weight. Last week, the company’s share price rose 4 percent, as soon as the announcement was made about his hormone imbalance, as initial reports noted that it might have been a remission of cancer. In December, once the company announced that he was not going to attend Macworld, the stock fell by ten percent. At the time, the company sent marketing chief Philip Schiller to take care of the presentation and answer all the questions. These ups and downs have been a constant for quite some time, all related to the news about his health condition.
People should be wishing him to get better out of respect and love for the kind of man he is, and not to put an extra dolar to their share price.
Hopefully, he will receive the needed medical attention and get back to his old self over these five months. Also, it would be nice to announce from time to time the treatment’s improvements, especially for the ones genuinely interested in his condition.
