Steve Jobs speaks out about his health
apple.com
apple.com
I certainly agree that Apple without Jobs isn't as good. But this treatment is morbid.
The note at the end about saying more than he wanted is really sad.
As with athletes, and like it or not, CEO health information is often quite valuable. Vilifying those who seek to ferret it out is just shooting the messenger.
Vilifying those who seek to ferret it out is just shooting the messenger.
I disagree with this last bit of your comment though. My comments aren't about the messenger. I don't mind TechCrunch posting it. It is news when a CEO posts a message like this. I don't like the segment of the audience whose motivations I question who made him post it.
From any number of articles that I have read, Steve has set up his company to be centered around him. As CEO, he gets involved in minute decisions regarding the design or function of a product. I've seen his management style described as "controlling" or "micromanageing" a number of times. He has created a public persona of the hipster CEO dressed in black who presents every year to throngs of amazed people, "Oh, and one more thing...".
So, when he creates himself to be a single point of failure, his health becomes a big news. He should have figured this out 4 years ago when he was trying to cure his cancer homeopathically, and his board of directors had an intervention with him to get him to go to the doctor.
Media companies have a similar systems when they work with stars. When the success of a multimillion dollar organization depends heavily a single person's performance or health, you better believe that that person's health has a very large insurance policy. And, there's a lot of tabloid interest in that person's health. Just ask Oprah.
Further, Jobs is wasting away in front of everyone's eyes. That makes wonderful press, just like the opposite tends to do: CNN tells me that Oprah has gained her weight back.
I guess I don't really judge anybody for being curious. I certainly don't judge Jobs for being jealous of his privacy. It's a human tragedy and one that we'll all face one day ourselves (those of us who aren't lucky enough to have our heart give out unexpectedly while on top of a 17-year-old mistress in a seedy hotel that is). Man is mortal and all our works perish.
Kind of like my program doesn't work because the characters aren't lined up correctly...
My father in law has a variety of this. He lost something like 70-80 pounds before they got it under control, but has been doing well for years now.
The issue with vegetarianism is that humans are not meant to eat just vegetables. Therefore, great care must be taken to get certain nutrients which are not found often in vegetables. Protein is the big one, but there are others.
However, with a properly crafted diet (an issue that most? vegetarians run into) you should be able to get everything. (possibly with the aid of supplements).
Cancer treatments typically deplete the body of protein and lean tissue, and most doctors agree that eating meat is just the fastest/easiest way to recover.
Its possible/probable a macrobiotic diet could contain enough protein and still be 100% vegan, but if there's another "imbalance" (say GMO Soy or Legumes which contain Estrogen) that could create issues he's had to deal with during his recovery.
Also, statistical outlook data for cancers, surgeries, etc, are based on statistically average populations. Vegan people deviate that from that population, and that could mean their outlook/treatment be different.
Jobs' whipple surgery drastically changed his digestive system. And because it's at least sort of rareish, I am not sure any good data exists for proper procedure on vegans who have undergone a whipple surgery.
In the fourth paragraph: "Jobs is a pescetarian (not a vegetarian or vegan as is often claimed) — although he does not eat mammalian meat, he reportedly eats fish from time to time."
www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1R-jKKp3NA
It was quite interesting and spoke deeply to me.
http://money.cnn.com/2008/03/02/news/companies/elkind_jobs.f... (Scroll about 1/4 of the way down)
If he's going to talk about his health, he should be more straightforward than this.
I think once you're the CEO of a Fortune 500 company, your responsibilities to your shareholders mean that you need to be more forthcoming about your health than he has been.
The fact that Apple's board hadn't take any action was (to me) a clear indication that he was A-Ok. Steve might be exceptional, but the rest of the senior management has Sarbanes-Oxley to contend with -- meaning they could face jailtime for any intentional falsification or misleading statements given to the board of directors. And the board/stockholders have been extremely watchful ever since the backdating options/SEC Probe scandal a year or so back.
I can understand his position though and hope he makes a full recovery. But can't help thinking that if he released more details, an army of both qualified and unqualified Mac fans would have spent countless hours researching the problem and possibly come up with a solution sooner.
You can get second opinions, but generally it's smart to stick to doctors for them.
Apart from you privacy the worst you are risking would be to waste some of your expert doctors time in considering some additional possibilities.
http://gizmodo.com/5120687/steve-jobs-health-declining-rapid...
I'd say he is in fact implying that his decision was related to learning about his health problem.
Why is it your business to know about every detail of his personal life? And don't give me this 'I'm a stockholder, I deserve to know' BS. Apple isn't going to magically fail overnight.
3%+ shift in Apple stock since this press release hit. 100% decline in Steve's dignity.
My thoughts and wishes are with Steve and his family.
Or are you saying that that you don't think less of him, but believe that everyone else will view him has having less dignity.
The call for him to do this came from above him. Not from a single person above him, but the thousands of Apple fans and stockholders demanding this information. I think anyone who demanded to know every piece of Steve's life should feel ashamed for forcing a good man into this situation.
This wasn't about sacrifice for the company. This isn't Jobs working a week without sleeping to get a product launched, or his leaving his own company because he thought it was going downhill. This was rumormongering. Jobs had a history of cancer, so people thought the worst; while that's partly understandable, the people who accused him needed to assume that Jobs was enough of a dick to just not tell people about a life-threatening disease for short-term growth. This continued after Jobs called that one reporter, insulted him, and then promised to tell him about his health condition off the book.
As such, it's pretty shameful that Jobs had to come out and tell everybody about the state of his health. Media types, even tech media types, care more about a dramatic narrative than they do about accurate reporting, and that showed itself here.
Jobs will go to extremes for his sense of justice. He could have stayed at Apple the first time, but he quit instead to make a new company that did what he felt he ought to do.
Really?
In John Scully's biography he made it clear that Steve was told he would have to leave in no uncertain terms, by both the board and John Scully.
They wouldn't even allow him to stay as the janitor because John couldn't trust that Steve wouldn't go around undermining him.
That I always assumed meant he left for something else, but rereading I can see that he does specifically say fired. Huh! I don't know where I got the impression that he left voluntarily, though it's one that I've had for a while now.
When Steve dies Apple's stock is going to drop no matter what and it may not recover. Whether this info is given out months before or immediately after it makes no difference.
Slow and painful or quick and painful, take your pick.
Really? Why?
to at least give people a small idea of what is going on with him, so they can gauge risk
That's not in his best interest. It is in the stockholder's best interest, the company's best interest and (perhaps) that market's best interest.
I fail to see how it is in Jobs's best interest.
It's not, but people are rather reasonably concerned given the typical survival rates of pancreatic cancer.
Can I use my get out of jail free card now?
Anyway, I just thought it was a funny word to use there, and people have been modding this comment probably more than any other comment I've made. Inverse importance/modding relationship for the win!
i don't know if it's just because it's so out of character for him or what, but i don't like it.
apple's refusal to follow trends comes right from the top. yes, it can be construed as arrogant that jobs hasn't commented on his health before now. but that's his way. this methodology has downsides, but it keeps the company from slogging it out in the sewers with all the other commodity manufacturers.
this announcement is a reaction to outside pressure, which is the opposite of what makes apple great.
They did exactly this a year before Jobs came back. In spite of Jobs's claims to the otherwise, the experiment did not last long enough to indicate whether it would have been viable in the long term. What is clear is that the clone makers where releasing computers more expandable and powerful than what Apple actually had on the market.
"Completely uninteresting" in exchange for "expandable and powerful" is not a good one for Apple to make.
I believe what Jobs has written here is substantially true -- the identifiable incentives for him and the company are to reveal the smallest amount of true information possible to assuage fan and investor fears. But there always remains a nonzero chance he's using his famous 'Reality Distortion Field'. So sabat's point in the grandparent post is fair.