Larry Ellison, the Oracle CEO, billionaire and longtime friend of the late Steve Jobs, said that Apple will struggle without its co-creator and chief visionary.
Ellison spoke with CBS This Morning’s Charlie Rose and was asked how he sees Apple moving ahead without Jobs, who died in 2011. “We already know,” Ellison said, reports Mashable.
He brought up Apple’s troubled period in the ‘80s and ‘90s, after Jobs had been pushed out of the company. “We conducted the experiment,” he said. “I mean, it's been done. We saw Apple with Steve Jobs. We saw Apple without Steve Jobs. We saw Apple with Steve Jobs. Now we're going to see Apple without Steve Jobs.”
According to CNet, Ellison also recalled Jobs’ final days and said that there is no way anyone can replace him.
He said that he used to go for walks with Jobs and they continued to get shorter during his final moments. “...You just watched him getting weaker. And this is the strongest guy I knew,” Ellison recalled. “This was absolutely the strongest, most willful person I have ever met. After seven years, the cancer even wore him out. And that's was what it was. He was just tired of fighting. Tired of the pain. And he decided, shocked Lorraine, shocked everybody that the medication was going to stop. He just pulled off the meds-- I think on a Saturday or a Sunday. And by the following Wednesday he was gone.”
As the Huffington Post notes, Apple’s fate without Jobs has been a major topic of conversation. The company hasn’t released a major new product since 2010’s iPad, but even with major competition, the company still sold 31.2 million iPhones in the past quarter.
You can watch Ellison’s interview here.
image: Wikimedia Commons
