Eideard

February 24, 1955 – October 5, 2011

After 14 years as Apple’s CEO, Steve Jobs resigned his post on Wednesday and was replaced by Tim Cook, who previously was the company’s Chief Operating Officer. Jobs, in turn, was elected as chairman of Apple’s board of directors.

“I have always said if there ever came a day when I could no longer meet my duties and expectations as Apple’s CEO, I would be the first to let you know. Unfortunately, that day has come,” Jobs said in a letter addressed “to the Apple Board of Directors and the Apple Community.”

“I believe Apple’s brightest and most innovative days are ahead of it. And I look forward to watching and contributing to its success in a new role,” Jobs wrote. “I have made some of the best friends of my life at Apple, and I thank you all for the many years of being able to work alongside you.”

“In his new role as Chairman of the Board, Steve will continue to serve Apple with his unique insights, creativity and inspiration,” board member and Genentech chairman Art Levinson said in an Apple press release. “Steve’s extraordinary vision and leadership saved Apple and guided it to its position as the world’s most innovative and valuable technology company. Steve has made countless contributions to Apple’s success, and he has attracted and inspired Apple’s immensely creative employees and world class executive team.”

Jobs had been on a medical leave of absence since January 2011. He continued to hold the CEO title while Cook oversaw the day-to-day operations of the company. At the time, Jobs told Apple employees he was taking a leave from his day-to-day duties to “focus on my health.”

The full text of his letter of resignation and the board of directors’ statement are here.

It’s been six years since I bought my first Apple computer. The shiny new Mini had just been introduced and offered me an affordable way to experiment with Apple’s OS X operating system Like any longtime geek, I had spares of monitor, keyboard, etc. to hook up.

I credit Steve Jobs for what he did to make that change so easy for me. As someone who’s spent a long and varied career involved with commerce around the planet, I also appreciate the cultural and social boundaries he’s set aside in the process of building Apple into one of the most successful firms on the planet.

Ray Ozzie, Microsoft Corp’s departing software chief, has asked the company to move on from its roots as a computer-oriented company to imagine a ‘post-PC world’ that relies on wireless devices and the Internet to function.

The call from Ozzie, who announced his retirement from Microsoft last week, is meant to galvanize the company, which has fallen behind Apple and Google in the rapidly growing phone and tablet computer sector that many now see as key to the future.

“Close our eyes and form a realistic picture of what a post-PC world might actually look like, if it were to ever truly occur,” wrote Ozzie in a memo posted on his personal blog on Monday. “Those who can envision a plausible future that’s brighter than today will earn the opportunity to lead.”

The message comes almost exactly five years after Ozzie made his initial mark on Microsoft with his ‘Internet Services Disruption’ memo, which is regarded as Microsoft’s manifesto for moving toward “cloud computing,” where data and software are supplied over the Internet rather than installed on machines…

He goes on to praise competitors for “seamless fusion of hardware and software and services,” which appears to be a nod to Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android phone system, which are proving more popular with consumers than Microsoft’s own offerings…

Chief Executive Steve Ballmer said there are no plans to appoint a new chief software architect when Ozzie retires.

Is that supposed to be a surprise? Ozzie must have driven him round the bend every day.

BTW, wander through some of the development notes and suggestions from Windows 1.0 in 1985 – at Ozzie’s blog.

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Sheila Bair, chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, is one of the few women in the generals’ tent of the nation’s economic war.

Forbes magazine calls her the second most powerful woman in the world, after German Chancellor Angela Merkel but well ahead of both Oprah Winfrey and Hillary Clinton…

By day Bair keeps the nations banks stable. But by night she wears a second hat — writing children’s stories about saving and investing money. She’s regularly published in the children’s magazine Highlights and has written two books: “Isabel’s Car Wash” and “Rock, Brock and the Savings Shock…”

Her once staid agency is now in the middle of the Obama administration’s gambit to bail out the banks and sell troubled assets. The latest move is agreeing to guarantee some of the Treasury Department’s toxic asset sales. Critics say she’s putting the agency’s solvency and taxpayer dollars at risk.

Bair says “the challenge of the program is finding that magic price where banks would be willing to sell and buyers would be willing to buy.”

But she believes the plan will work, explaining, “the prices you’re seeing in the market right now are far below what the actual cash flow is being produced by these assets. So we think by providing some credit … we can get the price up a little better and get to the point where you have a more realistic market value and banks would actually be willing to sell.”

If TARP and the Bailout was forced to match FDIC standards and regulation, there would have been no golden parachutes, incompetent adminstrators would have been fired on the spot, lousy banks would have been folded – and we’d be further along towards resolving the results of a decade or so of sleazy, neocon, deregulated theft.

If Geithner is ever pushed out the door of Treasury, she should take his spot.