We knew it was coming, but it's still a sad day: Steve Jobs is no longer the CEO of Apple.
If you were to pitch his story as a script, it'd be rejected for being too far-fetched: a man starts a firm in his garage, changes the world, gets kicked out of his own company, gets into the film business, becomes a billionaire, comes back, changes the world a few more times and ends up in charge of the most valuable company on the face of the planet.
It might not make a great movie, but as CVs go it's pretty good.
The internet, I'm sure, will be packed with speculation about what this means for Apple (short version: not much, because Tim Cook's been running it for ages, Jobs made a conscious effort to make the company think like he does and even without Jobs, Apple has more talent on its payroll than most of the tech industry combined), but I'm more interested in what it means for the tech industry as a whole.
It's just become a whole lot duller.
Meet The Beatles
They reckon that we'll never have another Beatles or another Rolling Stones: the world is too different, too fragmented, and the perfect storm that created them will not happen again. Jobs and Bill Gates are tech's Beatles and Stones. I'll let you decide which one's which.
Gates jumped ship a while ago, of course, and now its Jobs' turn.
We won't see their like again.
Seriously, who's left to root for? The Google guys? Eric Schmidt was fun in a creepy pantomime villain kind of way, but Brin and Page are utterly anonymous.
Steve Ballmer?
Zuckerberg?
As Jobs told BusinessWeek in 2004, "I did everything coming up - shipping, sales, supply chain, sweeping the floors, buying chips, you name it. I put computers together with my own two hands. As the industry grew up, I kept on doing it."
But the tech industry is all grown up now.
It's a place for patent lawyers, not product visionaries - a place for Olly Murs, not Exile on Main Street.
It's a good time for Steve to hang up his hat.
