Robert “I like yogurt” Scoble interviewed Steve Jobs’ yogurt purveyor, asking him if the wizened CEO had been in lately. The answer? Yes. So Steve is well enough to eat yogurt. Smack 32 cents onto Apple’s stock price.
This frenzied speculation about Jobs is quite sad indeed. As we all know, Jobs is the driving force behind Apple’s innovation but, last time I checked, Apple has 32,000 employees all dedicated to making the products we love. Just because he might not show up this year is no cause for alarm. Heck, based on this +5 Turkleneck of CEO Charisma Correlation Effect, you’d expect Windows 7 to suck with the figurehead Bill Gates out of the picture. Apparently it doesn’t because even I’m interested in Windows 7.
Think about the average Apple keynote: stats, some products, and some John Mayer-esque musician shambling out on stage and playing a guitar. It’s basically open mic night at a Berkeley coffee shop and Steve is the guy in sandals who studied at Iowa, man. While I don’t want things to go the way of Microsoft – WOW BANG ZOOM HOT NEW BAND POW *fizzle* – Jobs understated delivery is not for us anymore. It’s for an earlier generation of journos who reveled in the calm majesty of Jobs delivery: the slow reveal, the roots-influenced musical guests. His are the Prairie Home Companion of press conferences.
So he’s gone. Good. Give someone else at the company a try. If they screw up – and they will – we’ll tell them about it, they’ll quietly fix it and claim it was never an issue and we’ll go on buying their products. We don’t need a mercurial computer god to bow down before anymore. We need consistently good products. Want to effect Apple’s stock price? Release dubiously sourced but compelling stories about iPod Touch Tablets. Leave Steve alone.