Predictions: what happenes when Steve dies?

[Unspeaked]

So, as an off-shoot of the "Has Steve lost his touch?" thread, this has been on my mind for quite some time:

What happens when Steve Jobs retires or dies (whichever comes first)?

What happens to Apple?

What happens to the product timeline

What happens to OS X?

What happens to the stock price?

What happens to the iPod/iTunes monopoly?

(Assuming all of this stuff is still around at that point...)

Personally, if Steve died suddenly, I think the company will coast for a short while and then begin to dry up with new products. As for the stock price, it will TANK like you've never seen tanking on Wall Street before. That day several years ago when it went from $40 to $20 in one day? That'll be NOTHING compared to a Steve Jobs death.

A retirement might be a little more subtle, but the company will still be hard hit.


PS - Apologies for the morbid under-pinnings of this thread, but, you know, some questions have to be asked...

 

[spicyapple]

Betrand will be the new Apple keynote speaker.

This discussion about Steve dying always comes up the day before any big keynote event. It happened last MWSF and WWDC the previous year.

 

[yellow]

Yeah, there's a couple of (lenghty) threads on this topic already.. no real need to rehash it.

 

[Applespider]

PS - Apologies for the morbid under-pinnings of this thread, but, you know, some questions have to be asked...

No, they don't. It's incredibly tasteless speculation - at least rephrase it as when Jobs retires if you must. I'm sure that Apple have their succession planning model in place.

 

[jsw]

I don't think that it's incredibly tasteless - as users of Apple products, it's something we'd be affected by, and as a human, it's something that will eventually happen to him, so it's not unreasonable to discuss what will happen to Apple when the inevitable occurs.

However, that said, I agree that there have been (too?) many of these discussions, including some over the past few days. Please find one of those threads and continue it there.