Honestly, I think that if Steve Jobs had lived, he would have continued to push the industry in a direction more aligned with his tastes, others would have followed suit, and whatever hot topics we'd be discussing today, they would be very different from the ones we are discussing now.
I think he would have been all over AI, and would have pushed Siri ahead instead of letting the product stagnate. I suspect he'd have pushed into robotics as well, especially home automation robots. Home automation in general, in fact.
His whole thing was being the smartest, most tasteful, and most creative person in the room. There was a lot of illusion/delusion there, but even with his failures he was absolutely focused on product design, user experience, and aesthetics in a way that Cook's Apple isn't.
Cook's Apple is a hugely successful predatory and cynical cash extraction bureaucracy, with a world-leading hardware division and a shockingly mediocre and failing software division.
The goal is penny-pinching acquisition, so we can expect more and more of this from Apple until there's a change of leadership. (If we're lucky...)
The magic of Jobs is/was he truly was a self-starter and self-taught man; he had the rare mix of traits necessary to be a visionary.
Frankly I think Jobs saw Cook as a key operator to ensure the firms future survival and future growth; I'd imagine Jobs foresaw the tremendous impact the smartphone would have and all Cook had to do was be a shrewd operator as Apple had built such a huge advantage over competitors by the time he was dead.
He seemed very content in the end that Apple is on the right track and set up correctly for the future. I don't think he was talking about profit margins, but rather about the soul of the company, if there is such a thing.
Sad but probably true. I hadn't really considered that aspect. Anyone so influential no doubt changed the whole Zeitgeist, not just their own company's course.
