Its been a difficult two weeks for one of the largest consumer electronics companies in the world. Here’s a summary.
- End of Macworld Expo: Apple Computing cuts its affiliation with the Macworld Conference and Expo, leaving this year’s 50,000 dedicated show attendees without the chief drawcard for next year’s expo.
- Steve Jobs Takes 6-Month Leave of Absence: In a letter to shareholders, Steve Jobs writes that he underestimated the seriousness of his medical condition which he revealed a few weeks ago, and has will take a 6 month leave of absence to recover from his ‘hormone imbalance’.
- Apple Dealing with Hackintosh: Steve Jobs replacement Tim Cook has had to deal with a resurgent Hackintosh, a version of Mac OSX which is installed on normal PC hardware against the end-user licence agreement or EULA which says that it can only be installed on Apple hardware.
- Apple Shares Plummet: Apple shares have plummeted, with the share price at the time of writing now down from US$96.18 at the start of Macworld to just US$82.33 at the close of trading on January 16th.
Clearly this hasn’t been the best fortnight for Apple, and the leadership team are going to have to overcome these major hurdles in order to continue revolutionising the computing world in 2009.
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crazy that Steve Jobs had to leave for a while, hopefully there’s somebody to hold up the fort while he’s gone
Tim Cook’s done it before when Steve Jobs had his cancer scare. Probably we won’t see too much be impacted too quickly since I’m sure that Steve has planned out the company’s direction in the short term. If he doesn’t return in June, perhaps then we all really should begin to think about the future of Apple.