I appreciate your letter and would like to wish you the best in your recovery. I am relieved that you and your family have the medical answers that you need.

I would also like to offer my apology to you. Your health is your private matter and it should remain so. Like many people in the Apple community, when there was news of your health, whether truth or rumors, I listened, read and paid attention. So the media kept reporting it. I wish that I had the discipline to ignore the news related to you and Apple, but I don’t.

Since I was a young kid, Apple has been part of my life. From the Apple ][ that was in my classroom, the Macintosh Classics at college, my switch from PC to Mac in 1999 to today with my MacBook Pro, iPhone, iPod(s), PowerMac, etc. (I even had a NeXT Cube in the early 90s!)

It is obvious that your vision, design aesthetic, and desire to create products that are insanely great (not just really good) has left an indelible mark on Apple’s products and the expanding Apple community.

And beyond your work at Apple, you have transformed the world. We love and care about you because of it. I cannot apologize for caring about you, that would be disingenuous. My apology is for feeding the press reasons to invade your privacy.

At some point, nature will force you to retire from your position at Apple. That will be a sad day. But I know that I have forever been changed by you, inspired by your work.

Again, best wishes for your health and I am looking forward to Phil’s speech tomorrow at Macworld.

From A Member of the Apple Community

And for a few more thoughts on this, The Unoffical Apple Weblog has this comment.

And then Seth Godin has this to say about how to spend $20 million.

“You can’t just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they’ll want something new.”
- Steve Jobs

There are a few other good business quotes here that are worth reading.

But the point is innovation. You have to think about something that your customers will love before they are asking for it. Otherwise, they might ask someone else.

Author Seth Godin’s Really Bad PowerPoint post on this topic hits the nail on the head.

Business Week has a great article about how Steve Jobs is a master at giving presentations. He doesn’t use PowerPoint, rather a program for the Mac called Keynote.