No no… not talking about employment, but rather Steve Jobs.

Apple’s annual World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC) is always highlighted by a keynote speech from Steve Jobs. I’ve been a Mac developer for quite a while, and I remember the days when WWDC was explicitly about developer-only stuff and the keynotes were explicitly devoid of product announcements and horse-and-pony show stuff. It was a developer conference after all, so it was all focused on us geeks. That’s changed over the years, and so has WWDC in many ways. The WWDC keynote tends to be a big hype event now, so Monday morning is always a madhouse. And this year, one change will be the lack of Steve Jobs at the keynote.

IMHO, that’s fine. Jobs has well-known health issues and he needs to care for himself first. I think it’s also good because too many people pin Apple’s success upon Jobs. In some ways that’s true, but they have to remember that Apple isn’t just Jobs, but a lot of other talented people as well. Apple will go on without Jobs.

Of course, I’d like to see how Apple’s stock does today, as this word gets out, and then how the stock does during the keynote. It’s always been amusing (sad?) to watch the by-minute changes in the stock price. Steve sneezes, price drops. Steve announces the expected hyped-up gadget, stock rises. The gadget doesn’t live up to the ludicrously inflated dreams of the fanboys? stock price drops. It’s all so amusing to watch.

But in the end, get well Steve.