Jobs owes Apple and its customers more than a hormone imbalance

Now before any of the Mac crowd or the warm and fuzzy bunch start jumping down my throat brandishing words like soulless or heartless or that’s it’s none of our business let me clarify a few points. One - I think Steve Jobs is an incredibly brilliant businessman that I have the utmost respect for. Two - as one who suffers from an condition that could see me not waking up in the morning or falling dead in the street I have a sincere compassion for whatever health problems that Jobs is suffering from. Unlike him though I don’t have a company that can lose billions of dollars based alone on what he says or does.

The fact of the matter is that during the time that Steve Jobs wasn’t a part of Apple the company was almost driven into total collapse. It is the charisma – if you can call it that – plus the incredible marketing and design acumen of Steve Jobs that saved Apple from extinction. Sure they can try and bring in a executive team to replace him but notice I said team because I don’t believe there is a single person that can drive Apple with the same vision as he does.

The marketplace knows that Apple is Steve Jobs and Steve Jobs is Apple. The very success the company is experiencing even now is due entirely to his management and ideas. Yes it would be nice to say that it’s a private matter and we have no business asking for clarification but that isn’t the case. While it may seem a silly comparison we expect full health disclosure from the President of the United States and so we should expect the same from a man who can single handily cost Apple billions if he breaths the wrong way.

I agree totally with Mathew Ingram when he said today

As John Byrne of Business Week noted on Twitter today, there is a premium of anywhere from 15 to 25 per cent built into Apple’s share price because Steve Jobs is the CEO. If he were to disappear, it would remove billions of dollars in market value overnight. If that doesn’t qualify as a “material fact,” then I don’t know what does.

If it’s material, then Apple has to disclose it. And the statement from Jobs is effectively an admission of that. By extension, when the company said he wasn’t sick — and got CNBC to repeat this assertion — it was putting itself at risk of breaching SEC disclosure rules. But now that Steve has come clean everything is settled, right? Hardly. If anything, Apple’s wishy-washy approach to this whole issue over the past few months raises more questions about the company’s credibility than it answers.

I’m sorry but when billions of dollars and a company’s reputation is at risk giving us a hormone imbalance doesn’t cut it.