Was WWDC’11 the first “post-Steve keynote”?
9 Jun 2011 | in Steve Jobs news
He’s here, but this is the first post-Steve keynote.
This is what every Twitter follower of Mac uber-blogger John Gruber read during Monday’s WWDC keynote.
Quite a surprising statement — one could on the contrary argue that seing Steve back on stage, even though he is still officially on a medical leave of absence, is a supplemental affirmation of his enduring commitment to Apple.
But this is one more of several indications of his possible progressive departure:
- in the Fortune piece Inside Apple, Adam Lashinsky wrote about the so-called Apple University, a program that Steve Jobs put Yale professor and management guru Joel Poldony in charge of. Its goal is to make business cases on Apple history for future Apple leaders — in short, to codify Steve’s management. In a way, it is reassuring that he thinks about the future of the company without him… but obviously it means he has his departure in mind already. For some time now, because the program was started in late 2008.
- second of course is the upcoming authorized biography, iSteve: The Book of Jobs, available in March 2012. Steve has been super-secretive as Apple’s CEO, and one can wonder whether this sudden publicity is not a testament that he’s slowly accepting his (overwhelming) place in history, and stepping back as a day-to-day leader of Apple to become more of an old wise genius watching over his baby. Who knows?
- the third is more anecdotal, but quite telling to me. If you watched carefully on Apple’s homepage, you noticed this change just as I did:
I chose the October 2008 keynote because during that show, Steve also shared the stage, with Tim Cook and Jony Ive. But WWDC 2011 is the first time I see the other keynote participants (including recurrent ones such as Scott Forstall and Phil Schiller) being put front and center on apple.com like this. I am certain this is no coincidence — Steve Jobs really must be preparing the press/the community/the world for Apple’s future keynotes, without him as master showman.
Only time will tell, but perhaps 2012-2013 will see the departure of Steve Jobs as official Apple CEO.