Why Steve Jobs Won’t Return to Apple

“I’ve got a feeling that Steve Jobs isn’t going to return to
Apple. I don’t have any inside information on the medical leave
that he announced on Monday morning. Just consider my thoughts to
be educated speculation based on watching the company for
years.

“Here’s my theory: Since returning to Apple in 1996, Jobs has
pushed the company to achieve one of his long-held goals—to
turn computers into mainstream appliances as ubiquitous and
easy-to-use as televisions, toasters, and food processors. He has
been stunningly successful in achieving that vision. And now he’s
probably done. The tech world, today, looks more or less exactly
like what Steve Jobs has always said the tech world should look
like, and Apple is one of the most valuable companies in that
universe. What more is there left for Jobs to do?

“With the launch of the iPhone in 2007, Apple showed that you
could build a powerful mobile computer without baking in the myriad
hassles that we’d all grown to accept in computers—the pain
of installing software, protecting it against malware, remembering
where you stored certain files, and losing everything when you
forgot to back it up. In 2010, the company proved that the same
concept could work in a tablet, a form factor that had long eluded
the rest of the industry.”

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