By now you probably know that Steve Jobs has stepped down as CEO of Apple. Apparently his bouts with cancer have left him unable to continue his life’s work.

What none of us can know, however, is what his absence will mean for Apple going forward. You see, Jobs was quite rare as a CEO because he was a founder and Apple’s visionary. Every single device or piece of software that carries the Apple brand had to meet with his approval before it came to be. Because he wasn’t at the head of Apple just to make money, he wanted, from the outset, to change the world.

And he did. I won’t list all the milestones that Jobs laid down, other web sites have already done that, and better than I could. But chances are that you own one or more devices with a lower case “i” in the name.

I don’t think we’ll see how Jobs’s absence will affect Apple for at least 3-4 years because a company the size of Apple already has their next 4 or 5 products in the pipeline. One tech pundit has said that we might even see an Apple that takes more chances, and tries different things, because there won’t be one man through whom all ideas must flow.

Whether that will be good or bad for Apple, of course, remains to be seen.

Like Apple and their products or not, you can’t deny that Steve Jobs changed our world. And this is a sad day.

I’d like to close with some words from Steve, this is an excerpt from a commencement speech he gave at Stanford in 2005. The full text is here.

“No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”