what mr phreaky feels about this, personally i wish him good health

but does anybody else think that at this stage Apple might be better off without him? The way I figure it, a lot of the Apple turnaround was the influx of the entire set of NextStep employees and the establishment of a design-oriented culture. Jobs brought the employees with him and was instrumental in the the culture, but surely it's impossible that he's doing so much for the company that it possibly wouldn't benefit more from having a less smug personality on-stage for product announcements?

You mean the apples were turning sour?! Boom boom!!

Ahem.

Well someone had to say it - although on second thoughts....

Mine's the one displaying a total lack of imagination!

Of course no decent person would ever wish cancer on their worst enemy - and that includes me. I too wish him the best of health and long may he live. He's achieved some remarkable things at Apple.

But I can't help thinking that the cracks in the Apple empire are starting to appear / widen ever so slightly recently.

iPod, iPhone... it's already starting to tire a little - whatever comes next will have to be something very special indeed!

Mr Phreaky's thoughts have gone unrecorded ever since someone saw fit to deduce (by whatever means) his password and post a bunch of Apple fanboyism in his name. Either that or he has retired in the safe knowledge that his one-man crusade has to smash Apple has succeeded, what with Apple's woeful financial results and diminishing market share announced this week... oh, wait a second...

@Thomas

RE-establishment of a design-oriented culture, shurely? Slashing the product line, ditching software projects that weren't delivering, pushing the company into new areas and fully exploiting them (AppleTV excepted, natch), those were Jobs' real contributions to sorting out the stinking mess that Sculley and Amelio had made between them. The company would certainly benefit from losing the perception that losing Teh Steve would kill Apple stone dead, not least to prevent the sort of stock market stupidity we've seen this week. The very real point is that Apple needs to have a workable succession plan in place: nobody lives forever, RDF or no.

Smugness normally comes with Inside Information, Thomas. ...aka ForeSight PreCogniscence.

amfM Pinging Apple Cores for AI Cloud Dead Head Control Lever ..... for Future Use :-)

Hey Jude, Let IT Be. IT is Inevitable when IT is True.

As we seem to be so concerned about the likes of Jobs, has anyone popped round to Bill & Mels place to see if they're ok in retirement?. Remember, if their letter box is full of free newspapers and pizza menu's Do Not presume they're on holiday.

Mine's the one with 'Clock Watcher' printed on the back.

Welcome our cancer free Apple overlord.

So now the stock price is directly linked to his health level ?

I suggest they get a stool analyser installed in his office and tie it directly into the stock exchange. Call it iCrap.

Oh , he's had corn yesterday : time to up the stocks ...

> Of course no decent person would ever wish cancer on their worst enemy - and that includes me

Well, I dunno, I doubt Steve Jobs has ever heard of you, let alone regards you as his worst enemy.

Besides, he's about as far from decent as you can get.

Why so coy about the name of the infection?

I'm guessing an STD then. Not syphilis, since the symptoms don't match. Wait, I got it! Microbial intestinal parasites!

I'm hoping a good time was had by everyone involved. However many that would be.

I really don't think so. I'm a fairly big fan of Apple as a company; I converted to the Mac system a long while back and I really couldn't contemplate going back to Windows hell. Not only that, I got switched onto programming because of how simplistic and well thought out the dev environment for OS X is. I think I have a good handle on why Apple is so popular, both technologically and socially. And part of the magic equation, along with design-focussed engineering and an emphasis on quality over cost is the Steve factor. When the engineers that design the great products you know and love think they're finished, every single thing, from the smallest charger to the Mac Pro, gets sent to Steve for testing. And if Steve doesn't like it, it doesn't go. Even if it's a week from Expo and it's ready to ship. Even if everyone else in the company thinks it's amazing. And that's important, believe it or not. Not because Steve has some magical ability to instantly tell a winner from a loser (although he's usually pretty on the money), but because in most companies, no-one can stop the ball rolling once you get to the late stages. Very few CEO's have the balls to say "So what if it'll cost us $150 mil in dead stock to scrap it now, do it anyway". Very few can, since there's always another shmuck ready to smooth-talk the board and get in there. Even Steve was replaced once.

But no-one, no-one would replace Steve as CEO of Apple. Seriously, he could go on a murderous rampage (and he's the type to from all accounts), and he'd still be giving MacWorld Keynote's from his cell. Hence, any product anyone does in Apple has to pass the Steve test. If it doesn't, bye-bye product, and probably bye-bye job as well. Hence it spurs the developers on to greatness far more than raises and bonuses can. The fear of Steve is all-encompassing.

In the early days of his return to glory, he went on a streamlining binge; people were afraid to get on a lift with Steve in case when they got off it'd be to collect their things. He's cold, ruthless and absolutely willing to do anything to guarantee a good product, including canning things a week from launch, sacking the entire team, and killing your first-born too, if needs be.

For the hope of the Apple stock I hope to purchase when I have the cash, I hope to hell the evil git's with us for a good couple of decades yet.

Ok some had to say it

Steve's one of the lucky ones. These tumours are so rare and variable that very little data exists on appropriate therapies.

Once you've finished sucking up to iGadgets and big cat operating systems, you find out more about the condition here: http://www.netpatientfoundation.com/?page_id=2

Doesn't one need to be alive in order to get cancer?

I wouldn't think an animated mechanical reality distortion device would be able to get such a tissue-based disease.

Ok, first of all, Best of luck to Steve, I truly hope all his health problems are behind him now, and that he grows strong and lives long.

But secondly, some commentors here are missing the point. A company doesn't need great people behind it OR great products to be succesfull. Just look at MS, led by (until recently) Bill Gates and Steve Balmer - and with windows et al as a product range, but yet still the most successful brand on earth, and the richest company in the world. Nuff said.

.... because my last piece-of-shit Mac portable, a still in mint condition last series G4 iBook which I rarely used, mostly because OS X sooooo sucks, just had it's Firewire port die for no damn reason other that its an Apple piece of shit. This after a perfectly good G4 1 Gig TiBook had premature death by piece of shit LCD design. Another piece of shit Apple design flaw like ALL the other ones that are historically fact and are fully documented all over the internet.

Well Stevie asshole, if you don't have another bout with pancreatic cancer, then at least I hope you catch Dengue Fever and you tiny dick falls off before you drop dead, you limousine liberal piece of shit making, er selling since you MAKE nothing, arrogant asshole.

Now you know .... the rest of the story.

Much as I'm not a fan of Apple's design-based philosophy, I'd also like to wish Steve the best of health in the future and hope that he recovers fully from this common bug or whatever he's got.

It's the horrendously sentimental "get well soon" decal on the back

iWishhimwell

i'll get me coat....

no entry here then http://www.deathlist.net *sigh*

I thought Steve Jobs was vegan. If so, I wonder if maybe this ailment was before he became vegan. If he's not...then he should be. It will fix all his problems I'm pretty sure.

_rey

the trouble is, the last time they tried, to two idiots that took over basically ran the company into the ground because they thought it would be a great idea to run Mac OS on generic looking boxes, and then on cheap clones (which is just one step from running it on generic pc hardware)

if Jobs hadn't come back, there would be no Apple any more

sure, that's not to say that no one could replace him as do as good a job (ha ha) but the guys that tried it before failed completely. seems a bit blaze for a company to pin it's future on the theory that "3rd times a charm"

That explains a lot.

Vega's emission spectrum is characterised by lines from the Hydrogen Balmer series. I now understand the recent El Reg icon confusion.

@Rey Ortega

He's a pescetarian. And veganism? Surely it beats the average US-citizen diet, but I doubt if it's healthier than pescetarianism.

Frankly I'm súre it's healthier, but hey, don't let facts get you in the way.

You don't need to have cancer to be sick ... as evidenced by Webster Phreaky who clearly has a diseased bile duct.

.....cos yes, that's right, 5 year old PC based laptops all work swimmingly don't they.

Christ you couldn't use a 5 year old PC laptop for anything other than a doorstop these days, let alone put the companies latest OS on it....

But hey.

Vegans that don't eat apples?

'Doesn't one need to be alive in order to get cancer?

I wouldn't think an animated mechanical reality distortion device would be able to get such a tissue-based disease.'

I did wonder why that mechanical general in Star Wars (general Devious? nafc actually) - who was quite ok to survive in space, but hacked, wheezed and coughed his way thru the movie.

Here's a sure fire way of making a quick buck on Apple shares: The day after a press-release or quarterly review, buy APPL right after the Wall Street panic dip. When they recover a week later, sell or hold them for the next roller-coaster.

If you kept them, sell the day before an earnings report, use the cash to buy more back the day after for the same cash.

If you're going to buy Apple stock, you should apparently wait until the next time they announce record profits. That seems to drive the stock down.

OS X is quite clearly much closer to NextStep than the Classic OS, and I'm sure Steve is directly involved in a lot of final product release decisions, but I can't help feeling that a lot of what we perceive to be true about him is probably spin designed to reinvigorate shareholder interest in the company post-1997. Everyone could see that the company was a mess, so it was important to be able to say "the new CEO can see the problems and is fixing them". Most of Apple's moves have been the right ones at the right time, but it is a company that is remarkably good at burying its failures. The G4 Cube is the most obvious example, possibly the AppleTV and, to a much lesser extent, the Mac Mini are set to join it.

@the-person-who-is-pretending-to-be-Phreaky:

That doesn't even sound like Phreaky. He's doesn't usually swear and his vitriol is traditionally strongest against Apple users. So it seems odd that he'd suddenly admit to being one.

"Mr Phreaky's thoughts have gone unrecorded ever since someone saw fit to deduce (by whatever means) his password and post a bunch of Apple fanboyism in his name."

I've just changed my name to Webster Phreaky to see if it'll allow multiple people with the same name.

If this comment appears with Webster Phreaky as the author then that's a bit pants.

Well it's good news that he's in improving health.

Nevertheless, every company has to think about continuity, and ensure that there is a depth of leadership able to run with what is best in the organisation.

The last thing they want is to go Sun's way, and replace the charismatic (if irritating to some) leader with a Web 2.0 fanboy who confuses slogans with strategies.

I'll send him an iCard wishing him all the best.... hold on, can't do that because Apple STOPPED ICARDS when they changed .mac to mobileme!!!!!

if he had been ready to pop his clogs they'd have had to be sure to nail the lid down well to stop him rising again on the third day....

Terrible taste I know....I wish him and Fisher-Price ^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h Apple well.

How uncommonly apposite is your name, Master Bates!

Although I don’t disagree that Sculley made a mess, but who brought him to Apple? Jobs – and it was him who persuaded Sculley that not knowing anything about technology was no problem him being the Apple CEO… it was all about the marketing (What was the thinking? Apply the Pepsi taste test to computers?). Of course, the goodwill didn’t last long and maybe if Jobs hadn’t acted quite the petulant child and not acted as a disharmonious force within the company, before flouncing off maybe Sculley’s stewardship of the company wouldn’t have set up so many long-term problems.

With regards to Amelio (and why no mention of Spindler?), although the guy wasn’t a powerhouse, he was brought in to sort out Apple’s finances and – according to him – Jobs merely continued with the plans he had started. What isn’t in dispute was that Amelio did return the company to profitability… there was a massive loss towards the end of his time of his company, but arguably this is partly because of various plots to take over the company, such as the person who denied he wanted the top job, but unloaded all his stock save one share…. Now who could that be? Losses did continue after he left, though.

Amelio says that a lot of the credit Jobs took for turning around Apple, should have gone to him… well, he would say that, wouldn’t he? However, some have made the point that a project like the original iMac wouldn’t have been started and completed between the time that Jobs came back and the product was launched. Very likely the work started in Amelio’s time.

One mistake that Amelio did make was paying for too much for NeXT… but I can’t quite remember who sold it ;)

Is that like matter and anti-matter? If they meet, will the world implode or something?

I appear to be in some strange place where Webster Phreaky is actually Spartacus.

I need a drink.

"Christ you couldn't use a 5 year old PC laptop for anything other than a doorstop these days" - this is not true. I use an eight-year-old laptop as a bedside table; it keeps books and things at just the right height. Also, it makes a handy flat surface for lines of cocaine, etc.

No, I'M Webster Phreaky!

I hereby demand that El Reg substitutes "Webster Phreaky" for "Anonymous Coward" when anonymous comments are posted. Purely because it amuses me very much indeed.