There were Mel Karmazin and Tom Freston and even his own daughter, Shari -- each one at first lauded by Papa Doc Redstone, then humiliated on their paths out of favor. And who can forget the thrill ride staged by Disney's Michael Eisner, who stretched out his retirement saga for more than two years?
Unlike those cases, Jobs' departure isn't anticipated by investors with glee.
No American CEO is more intimately identified with his company's success. Jobs is deeply involved in every facet of Apple development and design, and he's justly admired for his instinct for the human-factor engineering of Apple products. He is Apple's visionary and carnival barker.
If you want a taste of the latter persona, watch the video of the original iPod launch event in October 2001. Jobs' dramatic command is astonishing -- viewing the event recently on Youtube, I was on the edge of my seat, even though I knew how the story came out.
The Jobs role that Apple may find hardest to fill is that of one-man Supreme Court, settling disputes between warring engineering camps by decree. There have been countless battles at Apple over such things as how many buttons a mouse should have and what keys should be on its keyboards. The ultimate authority belongs to Jobs.
Many Apple watchers say the executive team backing up Jobs will have no trouble carrying on without him. Several internal candidates for leadership look like partial Jobs clones. Tim Cook, Apple's chief operating officer and head of manufacturing, is said to embody his perfectionism and competitive ferocity. Jonathan Ive has been responsible for the physical design of such trend-setting products as the candy-colored iMacs of the late 1990s and the sleek version of today, as well as the iPod.
"Jobs' way of doing things has been institutionalized there," Leander Kahney, news editor of wired.com and author of three books about Apple, told me recently. "He could go away for several weeks, even a year, and things would work. He's created a machine that will keep ticking over."
That sounds like wishful thinking. There are signs that the company is nearing inflection points in several of its product lines that could make it especially vulnerable to management turmoil.
Mac mavens are starting to grouse about the computer's lengthening product cycle, meaning that the time between upgrades is getting longer. The iPod in its traditional form has pretty much run out its string. Speaking as the owner of four iPods, I must say it's been more than a year since I've seen a new version I felt I had to run out and buy, and that's an eon in iPod time.
