In the hours since it was reported Steve Jobs had resigned as Apple CEO, reaction has been mixed. Apple’s shares are down, as investors panic, despite Apple being in the strongest position it’s ever been in, and commentary ranges from APPLE IS DOOMED through more sensible takes on Apple’s future. Since the internet is prone to hysteria in return for page hits, I’d like to buck the trend and offer a post dedicated to smart, savvy commentators that talk about how Jobs positively affected Apple, the current transition to new leadership, and what the next few years might hold for the company.

Something that’s now commonplace in tech reporting is an ability to understand Apple’s disruptive influence on the tech industry. Saul Hansell for TechCrunch notes that recent events starkly highlight Apple’s impact:

As recently as 2002, personal computers were seen as such a commodity business—dominated by high volume and low costs—that Hewlett Packard paid $25 billion to buy Compaq and vault past Dell to be the No. 1 in the market. Last week, HP, still the leader, said it is considering abandoning PCs altogether, at least partially a concession that Apple was taking an increasing share of the market and most of the profits.

However, what’s less common is an appreciation that Apple rarely comes up with new things. It’s a company of refinement, as journalist Kenny Hemphill explains:

Some saying that ‘predicting the next big thing’ is where Jobs will be missed. Apple never predicted next big thing. It created it though not always from scratch. Often it just takes existing ideas and builds products the way they should have been built [the] first time.

And there’s no reason why such savvy refinement can’t continue with Cook as CEO. As Ian Betteridge points out:

Looking at Apple’s [senior management team], it’s still the most talent you’ll get in a single room in Silicon Valley.

Regardless, people worry about Cook. They think he lacks that spark of creative genius that Jobs has, or fret that Apple in his hands will somehow nosedive when he finds himself in control. As John Gruber of Daring Fireball says, they forget that Cook’s effectively been running Apple for some time now:

The thing to keep in mind is this: Apple tomorrow, a week from now, and next month is the exact same Apple from yesterday, a week ago, and last month. Tim Cook wasn’t named ‘CEO’ until today, but he’s been the chief executive at the company since Jobs started this — his third — medical leave back in January, and probably even before that. Whatever Steve’s role is going forward, it’s only different in title than what it has been, in effect, for some time.

And developer Wil Shipley warns against underestimating Cook’s role in Apple’s current success:

Years ago, when I was still invited to sit in VIP section of Stevenotes, Apple was introducing a new product. […] The audience was shocked at the performance AND the price. I turned to the Apple executive next to me, and whispered “What? How is it so cheap? That’s better than competitors! Apple’s never been cheaper. How did this happen?” Exec said two words: “Tim Cook”.

Of course, Jobs isn’t actually gone, although as designer Tom Muller says, you might think otherwise from some of the reports on major websites today:

Interesting to see people equate a stepping down in one role to take up another with being jobless or retirement.

Harry Marks also points out that, really, while we’ve seen a change at Apple this past day, it’s not as big a change as you might think:

Steve Jobs stepping down as CEO doesn’t mean he isn’t going to be a part of the company. It means he won’t be dealing with much of the bureaucratic bullshit that goes along with the title. Jobs is still (for the present time) going to be an active part of Apple.

Marks echoes Betteridge in also noting the strength of Apple’s executive team:

Steve Jobs is a very smart man who has surrounded himself with very smart people, like Tim Cook, Phil Schiller, Scott Forstall and Jony Ive. I have complete faith that no matter what happens, we’re still going to get the same great products we always have

Speculation continues regarding the reasons why Jobs stepped down, though, and his health must be a factor. So what happens if Apple one day soon finds itself totally without its visionary leader? Potentially, relatively little, according to Gruber:

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.

Cult of Mac’s Leander Kahney agrees with this viewpoint:

Steve’s resignation will have no effect on Apple in the short term. There’re a couple of years of products already in the pipe. On the one hand, he’s obviously irreplaceable. But he’s also molded Apple in his image. His DNA is so firmly embedded in the company, it will run like clockwork without him.

Kahney admits that he could be wrong, but his guesswork seems reasonable. And Macworld’s Jason Snell thinks due to Jobs’s hard work, there’s little to worry about regarding the company’s future:

The Apple of today is hugely profitable, with tens of billions of cash, a 90 percent share of the tablet market, a rapidly growing smartphone business around the world, and the only truly profitable personal-computer franchise left. This is where Steve Jobs leaves Apple as CEO: on top, with momentum to carry it further up.

That said, he does add a splash of harsh reality:

No company is guaranteed survival. The technology industry is ruthless and the pace of change keeps accelerating. But if there’s a company that’s in a position to survive and thrive even without Steve Jobs as the CEO, it’s Apple. Now it’ll be up to Tim Cook and his team to make sure the company sticks to the playbook.

And the best tribute any Apple fan can make to Steve Jobs’s tenure as CEO of one of the most brilliant companies to date? I’ll leave that to developer Duncan Wilcox:

In life everything eventually comes to an end. We stand on Steve’s shoulders, we’ll make him proud of us. Now go design, innovate, disrupt.

The Wall Street Journal has revealed that Apple CEO Steve Jobs has resigned. The CEO position will be filled by former COO Tim Cook and Jobs has been elected as chairman of the board.

Two things will now happen: idiots will say nasty things about Jobs and speculate on his health, and Apple’s stock will nose-dive. Here’s what I think:

• Jobs was a visionary for Apple. Twice. And he was a visionary for NeXT. For all we know, he may still have many more products to be involved with and inspire Apple on to further greatness.
• If Jobs has pretty much no further role in Apple, the company pretty much is Steve Jobs. Jobs has turned the company into a gigantic version of himself, demanding quality and innovation and the best for the consumer. With Jobs gone, that is not going to change.
• Cook has pretty much been the CEO of Apple since January. In that time, AAPL has gone from lows of $322 to highs of over $400. Apple is now battling with Exxon Mobil for the prized position of the world’s largest company. This was under Cook’s watch. He has already proved himself in the industry, although I suspect the market won’t—initially at least—see it that way.

Regardless, I’d like to say a public thank-you to Steve Jobs. Much of my working life has been heavily based around Apple and while I bitch and moan about all kinds of Mac- and iOS-related issues, I truly love technology and the potential it brings to improve life. I strongly believe Apple is the finest company in its field, and that Steve Jobs was instrumental in making that happen.

I’ve no idea what the future holds for Steve Jobs and I don’t really care to speculate on his health; but whatever it holds, I sincerely hope he has time to see Apple’s continued success and also to spend his days doing what he loves best, whatever that may be.

FOSS Patents reports on a truly bizarre curveball in the Samsung/Apple case:

Ever since Apple started to assert the design of the iPad against other manufacturers, many people have been wondering whether there’s actually prior art for the general design of the iPad in some futuristic devices shown in sci-fi movies and TV series. And indeed, Samsung’s lawyers make this claim now in their defense against Apple’s motion for a preliminary injunction.

Samsung then offers a picture of iPadish designs in 2001: A Space Odyssey. I’ll be amazed and slightly horrified if Samsung gets away with this, because it appears pretty damn clear Samsung ripped off Apple and is now using every tactic possible to try and distract everyone from that claim.

And what if Samsung is successful? Will every tech company accused of copying another company’s products have its legal team sift through classic sci-fi movies and 2000 AD comics, just in case something similar exists? Will it totally obliterate the ability to patent anything remotely futuristic, because it’s all been seen somewhere before? (As Stuart Alexander Arnott wryly pointed out on my Facebook page: “In today’s news, Paramount Television sue Motorola for their Razr phone copying the ‘clamshell’ Star Trek communicator.”)

Still, this could be a shot in the arm for the beleaguered Hollywood movie industry: rather than spending time suing the pants off of people downloading movie torrents, or, for that matter, making movies, studios could instead trawl through their back catalogues for sci-fi and spend the rest of their days in court, claiming prior art on everything from TVs and electric cars to the internet and robot pets. I CAN’T SEE HOW THIS CAN GO WRONG AT ALL.

Via Harry Marks, AllThingsD reports on BlackBerry Music:

Five dollars a month.

Well, that’s not too bad.

Fifty songs

Sorry, what? 50 songs? For five bucks? The same price as you get thousands of songs from Spotify for? Are you MENTAL?

you can share with your friends.

Aha. And there’s the possible non-stupid of this idea. See, one thing’s pretty obvious when bumbling about in cities: the kids love their BlackBerries; also, kids love sharing and they rather enjoy music. A low-cost service where you can easily share your favourite songs with your friends actually sounds pretty interesting.

There are just two snags:

1. Most kids don’t see any value whatsoever in music. It’s online and ‘free’ via torrents, and so why pay?
2. Isn’t BlackBerry primarily a business-focussed company? What’s with trying to compete with Apple all the time? JUST STOP.

Add to this the hardly surprising revelation that the music is trapped on BlackBerry devices and won’t be accessible to any other hardware and you have the music service equivalent of so much RIM output: a nice idea realised in a ham-fisted manner. Here’s hoping someone gives it a wee boost before it’s revealed to the general public, or it’ll be yet more ammo for the ‘RIM is out of touch and directionless’ crowd.

Slightly odd article from the BBC, with Rory Cellan-Jones asking if Apple is now winning too often in the tech industry. It’s safe to say Apple’s doing rather well of late, but it’s easy to forget that it is a marginal player in desktop and notebook computers (even if its savvy business methods ensure high profitability) and has a scrap on its hands regarding smartphones; only in tablets does Apple look to have an iPod-style lead as its rivals flounder and find it nigh-on impossible to beat so-called ‘rip-off Apple’ on pricing.

Nonetheless, Cellan-Jones asks if Apple’s success is now destroying the industry. He notes Google’s patent land-grab and suggests Apple won’t be worried about that; he mentions HP’s tablet fire-sale and PC spin-off, and offers this:

Apple executives – like the England cricket team – must be asking themselves “where did it all go so right?”

Strange quote there. It’s not like success has come as a surprise to Apple in the spaces it’s doing well in.

It’s only 18 months since Steve Jobs told us that the iPad was part of a revolution that would take us beyond the PC – and now HP is not only agreeing, it’s throwing in the towel.

In particular, the axing of its Touchpad tablet computer, just weeks after a hugely hyped launch, is not only a humiliating and expensive setback for HP, it threatens to sap the confidence of consumers in all rivals to Apple’s device.

I’m not sure most casual buyers will distinguish between WebOS or Blackberry or Android tablets, seeing them all as just potential iPad alternatives.

This neatly sums up the problem with Apple’s rivals—they don’t offer anything new. None of Apple’s rivals has sought to be like Apple and be truly disruptive. With the iPad, Apple didn’t look at what existed and rip off the leading product; instead, it created an entirely new market.

So if a product like the Touchpad can die within weeks who’s going to want to invest in any of the other iPad killers?

Here’s where Cellan-Jones starts to slide into the gravel trap. No-one has yet invested in any kind of ‘iPad killer’, because no-one has done anything other than look at Apple’s product and try to create some kind of facsimile. Every tablet on the market right now tries as much as possible to look like an iPad and then offers some feature or other that Apple deemed unnecessary in the tablet space. Thus, you have the ‘iPad with Flash’ and the ‘iPad with a USB port’; what you don’t have is any real innovation, nor anything that will do to the iPad what the iPad did to desktop and notebook computing.

In short: you don’t create an iPad killer by ripping off the iPad; you create an iPad killer by doing something totally amazing that Apple itself hasn’t thought of yet but that makes the iPad look as archaic as the iPad made most notebooks look.

Cellan-Jones then says the one tablet that could give the iPad a scrap is the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1, but there’s a problem:

Apple is in the middle of a legal battle in a German court over the alleged similarities between the Tab and the iPad, which saw Samsung’s device temporarily banned from most European countries.

The ban has been lifted, outside Germany at least, but the whole affair has not helped market the tablet.

Who will go out and buy an iPad rival if all they are hearing is that it’s a copy of the original, and no cheaper?

Well, quite. And here’s the thing: it more or less is a copy of the original, and no cheaper.

Whatever the merits of Apple’s case may be, patent and intellectual property disputes now appear to be harming the interests of consumers and innovators in the computing industry.

SCREEEEE! THUNK! And there’s Cellan-Jones, in the wall, with a crumpled bumper. I fail to see how Apple is harming the interests of consumers by blocking a device that wholeheartedly ripped it off, allegedly to the point of intentional confusion. As for harming the interests of innovators… really? Let’s take a look at that, courtesy of SockRolid at MacRumors:

Yeah, just feel the innovation. (Additional handy images: Daring Fireball’s shot of a pre-iPhone Android device, which didn’t at all look like a BlackBerry, and @Dooderoo’s ‘before and after’ of Samsung tablets.)

Steve Jobs and his company have enjoyed win after win over the last couple of years.

But many consumers – as well as rivals – may be hoping that on Thursday when the German court rules again on the copycat case, Apple suffers a rare defeat.

Not me. I’m sick of companies just riffing off other companies and it needs to stop. Microsoft of all companies has shown that you can innovate in the touchscreen space (although, sadly, Ballmer’s ‘Windows everywhere’ idiocy has stopped Windows Phone already appearing on tablet devices; instead, we’re told to wait for the Frankenstein’s monster that will be Windows 8—neither optimised touchscreen environment nor traditional desktop computing OS, despite trying to be both).

I don’t believe the Apple device designs were ‘obvious’, otherwise someone else would have got there around the same time, not many months later; and I also believe that if you’re going to copy rather than innovate, you’ve only yourself to blame if you, like Samsung, go as far as to rip off the bloody icons of your rival’s system.