Steve Jobs’ Successor

Ever since the news of SJ’s medical problems, I’ve been thinking long and hard about who could potentially succeed him, should he ever decide to step down.

I started with a list of usual suspects and began narrowing it down rather quickly. In a nutshell, there were several that once worked for Apple, but haven’t been with the company for ages, so I don’t think Jobs would be interested in them. Crossing those two out leads to a handful of possible candidates that are currently on Apple’s management team.

Of that handful, the group consists of former NeXT executives that were brought over from the Apple acquisition in 1997, and the rest are industry veterans from other major companies.

Keep in mind that SJ’s brain trust is not entirely known to the public, and for good reason (preventing his team from being poached away by other companies). These guys don’t even have bios on the Apple website. Pretty clever if you want to keep your crown jewels intact, and out of the limelight.

Recently, he was seen running the iPhone OS 3.0 media event. And no, I don’t believe it’s Scott Forstall.

My bet, is on Greg Joswiak.

(If this were to happen, it’d be great to have Steve Wozniak back as well, for the sole reason of having similar last names, Joz and Woz! )