With the news that Apple co-founder Steve Jobs passed away Wednesday comes speculation about what will happen to the company, and the innovation it's known for.
Apple announced Wednesday evening that Jobs died after years of suffering from a host of health problems, including pancreatic cancer.
Jobs's former second-in-command, Tim Cook, has been at the helm of the company since Jobs stepped down as CEO six weeks ago. Cook is a 14-year Apple veteran who has run the company's day-to-day operations for years.
But the vision for the company and its products was all Jobs, and while the company's immediate future has likely been mapped out by the man himself, its long-term outlook is less clear.
CTV technology specialist Kris Abel said a man like Jobs has likely set out a plan for the company that looks as far as 10 years ahead.
"Longer term of course the company will have to have someone who can step up and provide that kind of insight and navigation," Abel told CTVNews.ca in a telephone interview. "And of course the mystery is whether that will be one individual, or whether he has merely started, for lack of a better word, a family of like-minded individuals who will take that role on in a collaborative sense."
Apple is known for having a deep bench. While Jobs was the personality at the centre of the company, he knew enough to surround himself with top talent. Among those employees, Abel says, is the company's main industrial designer, Jonathan Ive, who is responsible for the look of the iconic iPod.
The company also started an internal educational forum called Apple University, which experts have described as a way for the company to train employees to think like Jobs.
"When I think of other large empires that are built on one man's vision or one person's personality, I think of Walt Disney, for example. Those may have begun as the vision of one person, but over time became embodied in all the people who were brought together under that same dream," Abel said.
"We are going to have an entire group of people who are currently at Apple who will be able to answer the question of ‘What would Steve Jobs do?'"
Abel said the company will move forward with another iPhone and another iPad next year, but what the company's next big technological innovation will be is anybody's guess.
The company could feel it has gone as far as it can with platforms, Abel said, and move toward innovations such as its virtual assistant for the new iPhone 4S, known as Siri, which can be activated by voice.
BNN's Michael Hainsworth said Wednesday there may be a host of products that will come out in the coming years that Apple fans and tech experts couldn't anticipate.
"There may be a whole series of devices that we don't even know we want yet that are still in the back office and they're working on them," Hainsworth told CTV News Channel.
With a strong team of designers that have grown under Jobs's tutelage and a veteran at the helm in Cook, investors will likely keep their faith in the company, Hainsworth said.
While an initial "knee-jerk reaction" to Jobs's death may be seen when markets open Thursday, the company's share price will likely remain steady over the longer-term because investors have known Jobs was ill.
As for its future innovations, Abel said the onus will be on employees to continue creating products that allow for that personal relationship between the user and the device, "something that distinguished Apple right from the very beginning."
Abel also predicts that, despite the optimism, the company will always "be haunted to a certain degree" about what could have been.
"There will be articles five years, ten years from now that will try to hypothesize what Apple could have come out with had Steve Jobs still been around," Abel said. "And that's something they are going to have to tackle."
