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Apple stays on course, despite illness distractions [San Jose Mercury News, Calif.](San Jose Mercury News (CA) Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) Jun. 20--There is one constant throughout the saga about the health of Steve Jobs: Apple has retained its mystique. Analysts and marketing and public relations experts say that while the company should have been more forthcoming about the condition of its chief executive, Apple doesn't appear to have missed a beat when it comes to successfully making, marketing and selling products in a difficult economy. In January, Jobs, who battled cancer in 2004, took a six-month leave of absence to address what he said was a hormone imbalance. But rumors about the health of the visionary head of the Cupertino tech giant have consumed the blogosphere for the past year. The issue has given investors conniptions. The near information blackout from Apple has drawn criticism from corporate governance experts, who insist the condition of Jobs, the face of the company he co-founded in 1976, is perhaps as material as any other detail about the company's health. Even the latest revelation, a Wall Street Journal report that Jobs underwent a liver transplant two months ago in Tennessee, drew the usual bland -- pundits might say maddeningly opaque -- response from the company. "Steve continues to look forward to returning to Apple at the end of June and there is nothing further to say," company spokesman Steve Dowling said Saturday. Corporate governance experts, though, say Apple could face a legal reckoning from investors should they believe they were misled by management and the board. "When you become a CEO of a public company, you relinquish the luxury of privacy in regards to your health, and that is particularly the case when the CEO is an essential part of its brand," said Nell Minow, editor of the Corporate Library, a corporate governance research group. "There will definitely be lawsuits." The episode, though, has not damaged the Apple innovation and product rollout machine one iota, experts say. "Obviously, the company has bench strength, if not bench genius," said Steve Hayden, vice chairman at Ogilvy & Mather who was the lead copywriter on Apple's award-winning "1984" ad that launched the Macintosh computer. Since Jobs left, "there has been a new generation of the iPod, a new generation of the iPhone. You've got improvements across the laptop line. Things are working pretty well." On Friday, thousands of customers lined up at Apple stores around the globe to get their hands on the company's latest gadget, the faster iPhone 3G S. Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster estimates the company will sell a half-millon iPhones this weekend. "Most companies would kill to have that kind of loyalty and Apple has been able to maintain that throughout Steve's absence," said Bob Wynne, the former head of Oracle's public relations department who is now a consultant. Still, in an era of national distrust of big business, more information is better than less, said Peter Hillan, senior vice president of Fleishman-Hillard in San Francisco. Apple's reluctance to reveal more details about the health of Jobs, who is almost obsessively private about his personal life, is understandable, said Hillan, who was business editor of the Mercury News nine years ago. But, he added, "You should err on the side of being transparent. You are asking people to make bets without all of the information." Sources say Jobs never completely left the company. He is known to e-mail executives at Infinite Loop from home, has driven hard-nosed negotiations with partners and even visited the company campus. "The company has demonstrated that it can continue to do great stuff with Steve more in the background or out of the picture," said Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, a research director for the nonprofit Institute for the Future in Palo Alto. "Essentially, Steve's DNA has been transferred to the company -- the design sensibility, the obsession with interface stuff, the perfectionism." |