Apple said Steve Jobs submitted his resignation to the board of directors on Wednesday and "strongly recommended" that the board name Mr. Cook as his successor. Mr. Jobs, 56 years old, has been elected chairman of the board and Mr. Cook will join the board, effective immediately, the company said.
Art Levinson, chairman of Genentech and an Apple board member, said in a statement that the board "has complete confidence that Tim is the right person to be our next CEO." He added that Steve Jobs will "continue to serve Apple with his unique insights, creativity and inspiration."
The announcement likely marks the end of one of the most extraordinary careers in U.S. business history. Steve Jobs not only co-founded Apple—and the personal computer industry along with it—but decades later played a central role in reshaping the music, movie, animation, and mobile-phone businesses.
"Steve Jobs is the world's magic man. No compromises," wrote John Sculley, who led the company from 1983 for a decade, in an email. Mr. Sculley was recruited by Mr. Jobs in 1983 as CEO, but ousted him in 1985 after a power struggle.
In the late 1970s, Steve Jobs, with Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, Mike Markkula, and others, designed, developed, and marketed one of the first commercially successful lines of personal computers, the Apple II series. In the early 1980s, Steve Jobs was among the first to see the commercial potential of Xerox PARC's mouse-driven graphical user interface, which led to the creation of the Macintosh.
In August 2009, Steve Jobs was selected the most admired entrepreneur among teenagers on a survey by Junior Achievement. On November 5, 2009, Jobs was named the CEO of the decade by Fortune Magazine. In November 2009, Steve Jobs was ranked No.57 on Forbes: The World's Most Powerful People. In December 2010, the Financial Times named Steve Jobs its person of the year for 2010, ending its essay by stating, "In his autobiography, John Sculley, the former PepsiCo executive who once ran Apple, said this of the ambitions of the man he had pushed out: 'Apple was supposed to become a wonderful consumer products company. This was a lunatic plan. High-tech could not be designed and sold as a consumer product.' How wrong can you be".
Saturday, October 8, 2011
Jobs Resigns as Apple CEO
10/08/2011
News Staff
