Since I don’t believe for a minute he would leave the company he created as a vehicle to change the world, it’s easy to conclude that he is leaving because he is closer to death than he would say publicly. How’s that for keeping plans secret?

I don’t care too much about succession and company plans. But I do care about and have interest in what Apple has meant for me.

I came to the Mac because of a job. In 1987. After working through and hacking Commodores and VAX and DOS, to me it seemed a toy. I hated the slowness of it. The job also involved backing up an Apple IIe. I hated that machine too. And then, I did my first layout in Pagemaker on a black and white 8″ Mac screen and printed to 1200 DPI. Mind blowing. A Laserwriter came soon, and before I knew it, I was in business for myself – on the side – doing layout. Intro to pre-press and production. Suddenly networking came into the picture, content management, and then…the Internet. All done through Macs. DOS, then Windows, when needed. A Newton, bad software choices and an oath to leave it behind as punishment.

Then Jobs came back. I resisted until the iPod lured me in. It worked better than all the alternatives. I know, I tried them. And I’m picky about music. Then the iPhone 3G. And it all made sense again. Suddenly, Apple was the absolute best in laptop hardware – I know, I looked – and music players and phones. I standardized on iTunes and its ecosystem of categorization tools. I moved to Logic. An iPad came home to get me off my ass and read whenever, wherever, while flipping into synth mode when creativity struck.

And I didn’t have to waste time learning useless info about formats, and drive speeds and networking protocols, and deliberately arcane command lines. All of that was behind me. I could focus on the important stuff again. Meaning. And so I did.

Thanks Steve. This was the note I wrote several times because I enjoyed all the stuff you made and it did change the world. I just never sent it. I don’t believe in an afterlife or a beforelife, but I do believe in a meaningful life. And yours was.

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For the past 6 months, I’ve been informally observing the surge in eReader usage everywhere I go. Whether it’s in an airport, on the subway, standing in line at Starbucks or even lounging in a public park, the explosion of Kindles everywhere is undeniable.

Amazon reported that they had sold 5 million Kindle units in the second half of 2009. That was twice as many as had been sold for the entire previous year. They now sell 6 Kindle books for every 10 paper books. Those kind of adoption curves are what product managers live for.

So it isn’t surprising that Apple recognizes this and wants to get into the market before it gets truly defined. Remember that the iPod was not the first MP3 player? Like Amazon, they already have an online store that sells media and software, linked intricately to their devices. And it finally appears that consumers are embracing the digital medium for reading in addition to music and movie watching.

What I have noticed is that users are almost always female for the Kindle. They use it in positions that are not comfortable for typing, such as standing or sitting in a location where a keyboard would not be accessible. They don’t multitask while using the device. And they don’t appear to need any peripherals for it.

A use case could be built around a persona that is a passionate consumer of media, without a need to create or interact with it. Organization is important, being able to easily find content either in a personal library “bookshelf” or online. Battery life and ease of use are important. Something even the most technically phobic could use and not find difficult.

Kindle does this quite well, and its connection to airwaves for access to Amazon’s online store is brilliant. Apple needs to make sure that the iPad can work as seamlessly with their iTunes store for users. Unique magazines published as electronic “apps” could possibly spark a new direction for publishing houses.

At today’s Apple iPad unveiling in San Francisco, Steve Jobs casually noted at the end of the presentation that the iPad would use the epub format. While the twittering masses were busy dissing its lack of multitasking – and who multitasks on their TV anyways? – they missed this really important piece of info.

The epub format is an open source, XML-based structured text format. It’s like an MP3 file without the licensing requirements. It reflows easily, which means that Apple can make their book reader software do almost anything. You can change fonts and sizes easily to suit your own vision requirements.

Best of all? epub files of current books are traded in lots of places on the web for free. While embracing the commercial marketplace of publishing houses and magazines, Apple is also giving space to those who will stuff their iPad with hundreds of downloaded books from the web for free.
Stunning. What the iPod did for music, iPad is poised to do for books. Who but the kit geeks will care if it runs email and your movie at the same time?

Price points seem right for an intro product. $499 for 16gb will cover a lot of books. It will be interesting to see if the New York Times will download in an epub format or if some DRM forced proprietary format will be used, like their Windows client pushes.

What is surprising is how quickly that changed. 2 months ago, I spent some time making sure the URLs were canonical, and that I had properly linked everything. Now I see that there is some movement on the page rank thanks to that internal sculpting.

Fascinating to tinker with the results using some standard link and tag language.