In Why Apple Will Be OK Without Steve Jobs, Leander Kahney bucks the trend and suggests the Cupertino giant will be fine, even if Jobs never returns to the company. He notes that Jobs is hardly alone in dreaming up and refining products (they’re not suddenly ‘discovered’—they come through a process of robust iteration and prototyping), that Tim Cook’s been a fine ‘acting CEO’ before, and that Jobs has turned his personality into Apple’s business processes.

He gets one thing wrong though, stating the following in his conclusion:

Apple will be fine without Jobs, although it won’t be the same. It won’t shine quite as brightly. It’ll be like the Rolling Stones without Mick Jagger.

Apple won’t shine as bright without Jobs, but it won’t be like the Stones minus Jagger, which would be nothing. The only musical analogy I could think of is unfortunate, in that it involves a death (which I surely hope doesn’t happen to Jobs), and it’s Joy Division.

When Ian Curtis left this world, the band suddenly found itself without its charismatic, amazing front-man. No-one really knew the other guys, and everyone in the press predicted disaster. One of the band (Bernard Sumner) got the ‘job’ of taking over, a new recruit (keyboardist Gillian Gilbert) came in to bolster the team, and they set to work. The first album was shaky (although I like it) but within a couple of years they’d put out Blue Monday, the biggest-selling 12″ of them all, and this was followed by critically acclaimed album after critically album.

There’s no reason to think that an Apple without Jobs couldn’t find itself in a similar place, especially if the company finds its own Blue Monday without him.