The iPhone 5 rollout and release date are now known to be closer than had been expected. Steve Jobs just resigned his Apple CEO position, and on a Wednesday no less. The aftermath produces the strongest evidence yet that Apple will send out invites for an iPhone 5 event as soon as next week.
The two items are tethered only in as much as they’re the two biggest announcements to come out of Apple this fall, with one being great news for the company and the other being something it hopes to quickly bury. The remedy for getting the Jobs news out of the tech headlines, then, is to put out the iPhone 5 news quickly thereafter so that attention shifts as quickly as possible. Classic PR strategy says that bad news should be dumped out on a Friday afternoon so can dissipate over the weekend, with perhaps a lone fading round of press stories on Monday before attention spans move on. But Jobs opted to make his announcement on a Wednesday, and that points to the iPhone 5 release date wheels being in motion sooner than later. Perhaps really soon.
Jobs and his PR team likely decided to hold this news until the iPhone 5 was just about ready to be announced, so as to deliver the two in a one-two counter punch which would cancel out the former with the latter. The fact that the news was pushed out mid-week means that Apple is looking for this news cycle to have fully dissipated by the end of the weekend, with no Monday carryover. That in turn suggests that by Monday, Apple will be looking to turn attention elsewhere. The next move is to send out press invites for the iPhone 5 introduction event. That suggests that those invites could go out early next week. Of course that leads to the real question, which is whether Jobs himself will lead the product introductions at the event…
If Jobs does show up and unveil the new iPhone 5 and announce its release date himself next week, it would actually be an interesting strategy: resign the CEO position in order to ensure perceived stability on the part of Apple shareholders (which is always was this was about, going back to Tim Cook’s “interim CEO” days), then show up on stage a week later to personally introduce Apple’s next big thing. It would make clear that Jobs isn’t imminently dying, and would make clear that the transition from CEO Jobs to CEO Cook is a fully smooth one.
By all accounts, Tim Cook is a quiet guy who, while likely to participate in earnings conference calls and such, probably won’t be the guy introducing the new products to the public come showtime. At the iPad 2 event this past spring, Jobs led a carousel of varyingly charismatic Apple employees of various rank who collectively unveiled the new products. He did the same this summer for the iOS preview event. If he does the same again for the iPhone 5 event, it’ll paint a picture of positivity and stability. The question marks created by his CEO resignation instead become a net positive as the world sees that Steve is still alive and still involved in Apple’s big picture.
If this were any other CEO from any other company, the prescient strategy would be to get out of the way and allow the new guy to use the new iPhone 5 release date event to stake his own ground. But this is Steve Jobs, who is perceived to be a crucial part of Apple in nearly inordinate measure. And this is Tim Cook, an operations guy who cracks the production whip even as Jobs cracks the innovation whip. Sending Cook out there wouldn’t make sense, and the lead headline would be “Jobs absent from iPhone 5 event” instead of “Cook unveils iPhone 5.” So instead Jobs runs the event, Cook makes a cameo so the public can at least figure out what the guy looks like, and the headline becomes “Jobs unveils iPhone 5″ which is a win for Apple.
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Source : beatweek.com
I really don’t think the iPhone 5 release depends on steve jobs being present or not – the plan is in place and can be executed without jobs at the helm.
Whatever his flaws, Steve was an exceptional man. RIP Steve