Leaving the Stage

In 2011, at the age of 56, Steve Jobs died due to complications from pancreatic cancer. A few months earlier he had stepped down as CEO, telling the board, “I have always said if there ever came a day when I could no longer meet my duties and expectations as Apple’s CEO, I would be the first to let you know. Unfortunately, that day has come.” COO Tim Cook was named CEO.

In 2013, Steve Ballmer retired as CEO of Microsoft. The company had been struggling to find its way in recent years, failing to secure a significant market share in the new product categories. Satya Nadella, a 22-year Microsoft veteran, would become only the third CEO in Microsoft’s history. Tellingly, Microsoft turned to cloud computing to lead it into the future.

In 2014, Oracle’s Larry Ellison stepped down as CEO of the company he founded. Many of the companies that had helped to define the personal-computer era were gone now, including Sun Microsystems, which Oracle acquired. In Silicon Valley there was a pervading sense that the old guard was gone and that the industry was in the hands of a freshman class of bright young hackers. And in terms of products, those bright young hackers were driving the vehicle of technology to a new era.

In this new era, handheld devices have become wearable, and are moving past wearable to embedded. We’re in that era now. From a device that you can put down when you’re done with it to a device that you take off like jewelry to a device that would require outpatient surgery to disconnect, smart devices are going beyond the personal, to the intra-personal. At the same time, these devices are deeply entwined with the Internet, talking to other devices in a new “Internet of things,” bypassing their slow fleshy hosts.

The two trends of smaller and more intimate devices and of an increasingly ubiquitous network are coming together to produce something that transcends either individual technology. The results will be interesting.