On Tuesday, twenty minutes before Apple's financial results conference call, the Wall Street Journal published a story concerning Steve Jobs' succession at Apple.
John Gruber, writing for Daring Fireball, comments on this at length:
Everyone wants this to be an interesting story, but it’s not. There is no intrigue. If Jobs steps down in the foreseeable future his replacement will almost certainly be Tim Cook. Utter credibility on Wall Street, and much respect within Apple. He’s already run the company while Jobs has been on leave. The knock against him is that he’s an operations and finance guy, not a product design guy. Ideally Apple would find someone just like Steve Jobs, but there exists no such person. There will not be a next Steve Jobs. There will be a next CEO.
Gruber lists in the piece several suggestions he solicited over Twitter yesterday. One of the people he named was Jack Dorsey, founder of Square and the brains behind Twitter, whom appears to be running the show at Twitter these days. I think Jack Dorsey has definite potential, and perhaps the only "outsider" from Apple that would be worthy. However, he's awfully young and inexperienced. And it would mean passing over a lot of very talented and respected SVPs at Apple to do so.
In the end, I think John is right.
