There is no doubt that Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple, has made a massive impact on the world as we know it.  Now that he has gone we are finding out more and more about the man who was really a rather private person. 

He was a charismatic leader that's for sure.  Here is an excerpt from an article by John Markoff published in the New York Times:

Mr. Jobs was neither a hardware engineer nor a software programmer, nor did he think of himself as a manager. He considered himself a technology leader, choosing the best people possible, encouraging and prodding them, and making the final call on product design.

It was an executive style that had evolved. In his early years at Apple, his meddling in tiny details maddened colleagues, and his criticism could be caustic and even humiliating. But he grew to elicit extraordinary loyalty.

“He was the most passionate leader one could hope for, a motivating force without parallel,” wrote Steven Levy, author of the 1994 book “Insanely Great,” which chronicles the creation of the Mac. “Tom Sawyer could have picked up tricks from Steve Jobs.”

You can read the full article here: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/06/business/steve-jobs-of-apple-dies-at-56.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1

And will Apple suffer without Steve Jobs at the helm? Here is view of Brad Stone and Ashlee Vance in an article in the Bloomberg Businessweek.

Jobs was a total original. He was somehow able to blend iconoclasm, rock-and-roll, and chic industrial design with the nerd sciences, as well as the unseemly profit motive of the corporation. He made that contrary combination seem totally legitimate. His iconic products—iMac, iPod, iPhone, and iPad—literally changed the world, making people more connected in the virtual world and less so in the physical one. He had a knack for whipping customers and the media into frenzies of anticipation and adulation, and he often elevated the business of Apple with a touch of the poetic. “If the hardware is the brain and the sinew of our products, the software is their soul,” was one of the last things he said publicly, at an Apple event on June 6.

Apple will undoubtedly suffer without him. All the various aspects of his contribution have been chronicled since his resignation on Aug. 24, ad nauseam. Jobs harangued his employees into meeting the standards of his own lofty perfectionism, over and over. He canceled as many projects and prototypes as he approved, which ended up focusing Apple’s attention and resources on just a few game-changing products. He was relentless at manipulating the media, by alternately withholding access and then granting it, and with theatrical product reveals and occasionally belligerent interviews. He could turn a routine press conference to introduce a new gadget into something as anticipated as the Super Bowl.

At Apple’s presentation of the new iPhone on Oct. 5, Jobs’s absence was gnawingly felt. Apple’s new chief executive, Tim Cook, and his fellow execs exuded confidence and used a lot of the same intonations as Jobs. But they did not come near to expressing his vivacious spirit or his deepness of feeling about Apple and its future. It felt, in a way, like they were auditioning for something. Cook himself repeatedly used the word “momentum” to express the company’s progress. Apple surely has that—shares of its stock are up 4,000 percent over the last 10 years. But Steve Jobs never had to repeat a word like that.

Jobs believed the best-looking, easiest-to-use computers and devices were seamlessly integrated products where both the hardware and software were created by the same company. That conviction was wildly out of fashion in the 1990s, when Microsoft ruled the land and companies like Dell  and Hewlett-Packard packaged computers around Bill Gates’s operating system and Intel’s microchips. Jobs tenaciously stuck to his principles and his revival of Apple—beginning in 1997 but really gathering steam with the 2001 release of the iPod—was not only a triumph of his vision, but a wholesale rejection of the previous decade’s conventional wisdom. “Steve was among the greatest of American innovators—brave enough to think differently, bold enough to believe he could change the world, and talented enough to do it,” said President Barack Obama in a statement.

Silicon Valley will now be a different place. 

Read to article at http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/steve-jobs-departs-a-world-he-helped-transform-10052011.html

Questions are undoubtedly going to be asked on the future of Apple and we can only trust that Steve Jobs made the best of his time left by placing the best people in charge of his legacy. He will be missed.