DigitalSandbox

The news is burning up the tech news wires right now, but it appears that Steve Jobs is taking a medical leave of absence. He has released an internal email about it citing the intense scrutiny from the media regarding his health and saying that the situation is more complex than initially thought. Tim Cook will be taking over the day to day operations, but Jobs will still be involved in strategic decisions. This is temporary, and he plans to be back in June, but if he isn’t…c’est la vie.

I must say that I am a bit surprised by the news. I was one of those that believed that Jobs was not as bad as most people wanted to believe. To me he looked thin, but in reasonable health. I felt that if his health was bad he would let us know. It would seem that the situation may be worse than I thought.

I want to wish his Steve-ness a full and speedy recovery. But I also want to say that I am not going to be a Chicken Little declaring that the sky is falling in the Apple-verse. I agree with something I read today on John Gruber’s daringfireball.net saying that Jobs does not need to be replaced. Cook is very capable in handling the operations side, Ives has the design side nailed, and Schiller is a pretty good pitch man. Jobs is too much of an anomaly to be replaced by any one man.