Apple's CEO, Steve Jobs, responded on Monday to months of rumors about his health, making the most detailed disclosure about the medical condition that has caused him to lose weight. However, the brief announcement failed to halt criticism that Apple is not being sufficiently forthcoming.

Jobs told the media that he is suffering from a hormone imbalance, but he wanted to reassure everyone he would keep running the company. There was a certain fear Steve Jobs will step down as Apple CEO, but this decision pushed up Apple's stock price more than 4 percent. 

Anyway, analysts criticized how the company has dealt with this sensitive issue, which it has previously described as a “private matter”, stating the board owed shareholders more details about Jobs' health and his ability to remain CEO of the company. Jobs should have come forward with this announcement sooner, but it's pretty clear he's not a typical CEO.

He is considered an important piece, maybe the most important, of its company's innovative success. What caused Jobs to respond now? Perhaps it was the rumors that he is dying, which ricocheted around the Web last week. He wrote an open letter to investors and consumers on Monday, saying that a hormone imbalance is robbing his body of proteins, causing him to drastically lose weight.

Jobs also said that is has begun a treatment and that he will remain head of the Cupertino-based company. This treatment, a simple and straightforward one, will enable him to regain his weight by spring. Steve also fought pancreatic cancer four years ago but, fortunately, he told the company's board last year that he was cancer free.

Apple also announced recently that Jobs will not participate at the Macworld in San Francisco, and that also caused rumors about Steve's health that spread across the Internet, sending Apple's stock price down. Instead of Jobs, Apple has sent Senior Vice President Phil Schiller to take his place on the big stage. However, Jobs' announcement looks more like a marketing decision that one to soothe investors.

At Macworld, Apple will most likely show off its redesign to Mac Mini, its upgrade to iMac desktops and, most importantly, glimpses of Snow Leopard, the next-generation Macintosh operating system. It was pretty clear for everyone that without Jobs' reassuring decision, anything Apple presented at Macworld would have gone to waste.