Despite concern over what the six-month absence of Steve Jobs will mean for Apple, “sales will be unaffected,” Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster said Wednesday.
Munster, known for his bullish outlook on Apple, told clients interim CEO Tim Cook will lead the company without a hiccup in product development.
Although Cook took temporary reins of Apple in 2004 when Jobs underwent cancer surgery, that episode lasted only one month, a fraction of the six-month absence Jobs’ announced Wednesday.
However, there is support for Munster’s optimism.
“The fact is that Tim Cook has been running day-to-day operations at Apple for some time,” writes Fortune’s Philip Elmer-DeWitt.
Prior to Jobs’ saying his health situation had taken a more complex path, Cook was also being mentioned as a successor to the emblematic Apple founder.
Ed Sutherland is a veteran technology journalist who first heard of Apple when they grew on trees, Yahoo was run out of a Stanford dorm and Google was an unknown upstart. Since then, Sutherland has covered the whole technology landscape, concentrating on tracking the trends and figuring out the finances of large (and small) technology companies.
