Yup – any CEO for any company, particularly when the CEO and company pretend that there isn't an issue and dismiss investors' right to know.

If you worked for the owner of a company, would that person have a right to know why you wanted to take off some extensive time? Of course. Even asking the question seems idiotic. The owner wants to know how to plan for the future. Well, Steve Jobs works for the investors. They have a right to know what's going on. Disclosure comes with the territory, as does the wealth, power, and privilege. If Jobs wanted a completely private life, then he should have stayed with completely private companies that he owned outright. Once you sell off large amounts of the company to investors, then you have an obligation greater than your own personal preferences.

However, those same things that made them “evil” also ensured that they never reached the kind of market-share that Microsoft has in the PC business, so no one ever really cared (until the iPod started to get popular, and everyone who wanted one was forced to install iTunes).

The theory there, of course, bringing the concept of enlightenment into the 21st century — is that it’s DNA. You could say that (if you believe in reincarnation) how many hundreds of thousands of lives you have to live through to achieve it — but look at that statistically — one in a million people have this DNA. Enlightenment is very real, and it’s DNA. Most of us don’t know how to handle it. Many of us have very big heads (physically, that is). Large hat sizes, as it were. Most of us don’t know how to fit in (and most is really not very many, is what I’m saying). It’s hard to handle it. It seems like a curse. Like a spider without a web. No train of thought. Seeing everything clearly.

Anyway, Jobs looks to me, at least according to this theory, that he is what eastern religions would call “enlightened”. I doubt he’s a narcisisst. He just lives in a world full of them (as we all do to greater or lesser extents, and so it’s like the if you can’t beat them join them thing). That would explain (at least in part) how your bonuses get handed out at or near the lows — when your brain is a big zero, everything else can be seen very clearly. And I don’t mean “zero” in a bad sense, obviously, eastern religions wouldn’t have such a high respect for enlightenment if it wasn’t a significant thing.

Anyway, if the DNA theory of enlightenment is true, then you can meditate ’till your blue in the face and you won’t get there — it’s DNA, you’re born with it. Of course, WHY you’re born with it — that’s another story.

As such, as an enlightened being in this crazy world, Jobs needs to be careful in ways that no one can really expound upon, because so few people have had to deal with it. I’d say the trouble here is something akin to the lines of transparency — what’s transparent to whom.

Has the ipod changed the world when Jammie Thomas just got fined almost $2 mil? What good is the iPhone if I can’t have Verizon? All electronics — look at what happened with Seagate drives just recently — all electronics are prone to having quality glitches. Putting a nice fancy aluminum case or 10 thousand temperature monitors doesn’t change that — again — what’s transparent to whom?

The man is special — the man is one in a million. He’s enlightened. He was born that way. That’s my theory, anyway. As far as computers and ipods and iphones and so on, if you line up your transparency (or make what’s transparent to Mr. Jobs transparent to yourself), it’s totally awesome. Approach it from a realistic standpoint, however, look at it from a different point of view, and it ain’t “all that”.

It’s certainly not too late — it’s never too late. One, is the DNA theory of enlightenment true (I’d say it is) and Two — will he ever realize it. And there’s no documentation on how to deal with it, either. It sucks.

I’d say focus on the inner. A good kernel. An elegant userland. A framework for building GUI apps that gets folks up to speed quickly. An environment where good ideas don’t have to encounter barriers that make them disappear. (Lotus Improv).

It’s the inner, not the outer. Maybe it’s the outer that sells, maybe selling the outer is what’s necessary to keep the inner on life support, but things change — we’re in a world where Linux is taking on steam, a world where FreeBSD is coming back from the dead. I’m not going to go any further here, you can probably figure out what I’m driving at – but the beauty of an OS — given as a gift (at a nominal fee) to the world — the beauty of creating a larger marketplace for ideas expressed as software — software that “just works” on an os that “just works”, while also creating a larger marketplace for hardware, while still “just working”.

Apple could easily, by my estimations, grab upwards of 30% market share for the OS, but not if they keep insisting on focusing on the outer — you have to wonder why this transparency of the real world occurs – it’s totally unnecessary.

Anyway, that’s what I think.

I don’t whether you will make a better CEO than Jobs, maybe you will be more visionary than him and give us far better stuffs than what has been dish out by Apple thus far. Maybe you as the CEO will give us the iPhone with the works and the Mac which can work at 4ghz.