By now you must have heard that Steve Jobs, founder of Apple Inc., has decided to resign from the post of CEO. If you haven't, you should be checking the New York Times on your iPad a little more often — welcome to the modern world. Over the past 15 years most have showered Jobs with superlatives like innovator, visionary, genius. None of these can be denied. I, more than anyone else, believe in the fact that Jobs has reshaped not just the tech industry but also the music, movie, cell phone and cloud computing industries. I personally believe the tech industry at its core is about making lives easier. No one has done that better than Steve Jobs.
That said, I disagree with the post-Jobs aura that has been developing and being reflected in the stock market. I'm not denying the role Jobs has played in bringing the tech industry to where it is right now, but I do feel that a fresh change is vital to ensure that the tech industry's growth, and more specifically Apple's growth, continue.
The tech industry in particular is incredibly dependent on change. The growth of the tech industry has been driven by the rapidity of such change. The ability of a company to cope with change is one of the key markers that determine a company's success in the industry. I may purchase a top-of-the-line cell phone today, but within six months it is considered old and outdated. While leadership does not become outdated as fast as the industry's products, I believe new leadership will help the industry much more than it will hurt it.
The generation preceding ours has a kind of arrogance regarding the level and pace of the growth and innovation that the tech industry has achieved over the past 30 years. People feel that our generation will be unable to maintain the speed and quality of this innovation and creativity. I feel that Jobs' resignation and Apple's performance in the upcoming years will serve as a key step in proving them wrong. It is a vote of confidence in that fact that a change in leadership is as important as change in products to drive the growth of the industry.
I have had numerous discussions with my father about how the tech industry will change when the likes of Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Larry Page of Google and Pierre Omidyar of eBay (E '88) resign and retire. He has always held the opinion that this will severely impact the industry. He claims it is members of his generation who have driven and are driving the current tech growth, and that as soon as they pass on the reins of the industry to us, it will soon be negatively affected. I disagree. The resignation of Steve Jobs, a man with historically tentative health, really shouldn't come as a shock and should not have a negative impact on people's perceptions of Apple Inc. It is merely the beginning of a period of resignations. Over the next 10 to 15 years, many more of the founders-turned-CEOs will be resigning and passing on control of the companies they love so dearly to others.
This beginning of resignations shouldn't be interpreted as the beginning of the end of the phenomenal growth of the tech industry. Just look at Mark Zuckerberg. He founded Facebook, the site that revolutionized how people use the Internet and social media, while still attending Harvard and made the company official in 2004. At 27 he clearly belongs to the up-and-coming generation and serves as a strong counterexample to the belief that the growth and innovation of the tech industry is dependent on the old guard.
Andrew Mason, founder of Groupon and tech entrepreneur, is another vivid example of someone from our generation changing the tech industry. Groupon is the world's largest deal-of-the-day website and is projected to hit a billion dollars in sales faster than any other business, a remarkable feat achieved by someone who is merely 30 and graduated college less than 10 years ago.
The tech industry still has a lot to offer, and our generation will be at the forefront of this new growth. While Jobs has made Apple the leader of this rapid growth, there is no reason to think that new leadership will not continue Jobs' legacy. In fact, the growth of the tech industry has been fueled largely by the emergence of new players. The resignation of Jobs should not be interpreted as an omen of the end of the expansion of the tech industry, but as the beginning of a new era of expansion driven by people who have grown up during the original expansion. As with everything else in this world, we will have to wait and see, but I for one can't wait to see how the tech industry will evolve under the leadership of our generation.
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Arnav Garg is a junior majoring in quantitative economics.
