Let’s say Steve Jobs retires next year. So what?

I’m one of those in the lonely camp that doesn’t believe Jobs is Apple and Apple is Jobs. Or that when he disengages from Apple the wheels must necessarily fall off.

Jobs bought Pixar in 1986, and while he wasn’t nearly as closely involved with it as he has been at Apple, he assembled a team that helped the company thrive even after it was sold to Disney two years back. Since then, Pixar delivered the Oscar winning “Ratatouille” as well as “Wall-E” (Nos. 144 and 34, respectively, on IMDB’s list).

If Jobs hasn’t done the same at Apple, he’s failed at one of the key tasks of a great CEO. I don’t think that’s his style. Yet this week, the media once again turned the spotlight onto Jobs’ health after the company said he won’t appear at MacWorld, that Apple is essentially snuffing what has become a tedious knockoff of a Galaxy Quest convention. Any other company, and it would have ended at the headline.

But Apple isn’t any other company. It’s Apple. Therefore Jobs must be dying. Therefore the stock loses $6.6 billion in two hours.

One day we’ll all look back on this and shake our heads. Rarely has so much attention been paid to the health of an individual who was not the head of state or a religion. What if Jobs is fine, and just wanted no part of the obscene gadget fetishism, which tech conferences in general have become, when millions were losing their jobs and homes? Isn’t that kind of the opposite of dying?

The voluble world of Apple-gazers has been cleft between the virulent fanatics and the desperate naysayers (which the fanatics have in good part created). All this drama overlooks two boring things: a) Apple is a company, and b) Steve Jobs is a businessman.

Apple doesn’t need Macworld anymore. It did for years, when Jobs would step out like Gandalf and save our butts from the ill forces of Mordor. Now Apple rules online music, and Mordor — read Microsoft — is greatly weakened.

Apple has blossomed into a global, mainstream brand, and the fanatics who helped get it there are suddenly less useful. Which brings us to point b.

Until now, Steve Jobs never showed discomfort with the mystique, the legend, the icon that he had become as the man who created and later saved Apple. He totally dug it, but he dug it totally as a businessman. His fan base grew passionate, grew vocal and then — in late 2008 — grew outmoded. Apple simply didn’t need them anymore. It could expand on its own powers.

Besides, this whole mystique thing was starting to backfire. The idea that Jobs and Jobs alone could keep Apple successful is kind of demeaning to the other 32,000 employees there. If Apple did suffer after Jobs’ departure, many of the most talented of those people would found startups, some of which would eventually accomplish insanely great things like Apple has.

Beyond Apple’s stunning success this decade, the success of those new startups would be the ultimate compliment to Steve Jobs’ skills as a corporate leader.

Photo courtesy of acaben via Flickr.

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Update: Research firm TeleGeography emailed us that three international submarine cables in the Mediterranean Sea were damaged today, causing disruptions to internet and phone traffic in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, India and all of the Gulf states. TeleGeography pinpoints the faults  between Tunisia and Italy, and claims the damaged cables are the FLAG Europe-Asia cable, operated by Reliance Globalcom, and two consortium cables, SeaMeWe-3 and SeaMeWe-4 owned jointly by several telecommunications companies. From the TeleGeography statement:

The current series of faults is reminiscent of the submarine cable faults that occurred in January 2008. Today’s events have the potential to create worse disruptions: while the January 2008 accidents broke two of the three cables connecting Europe with Asia via the Middle East, Friday’s cable failures have caused faults on all three. France Telecom projects that service on all cables will be restored by December 31. Until then, many carriers in the Middle East and South Asia will need to route their European traffic around the globe, through South East Asia and across the Pacific and Atlantic oceans.

It’s unknown if the Malta cable problems are related to these cuts, perhaps from a weather or seismic event. However in the online world the cuts are certainly related in how they will make it that much slower or impossible for users to connect around the world. (Malta cable cut report published earlier follows.)

In a reminder of both the frailty and the flexibility of the web, the Times of Malta is reporting that last night, a submarine cable delivering traffic to subscribers of GO’s broadband service experienced a “fault.” Thousands of Maltese lost their web connections.  Combine Malta’s experience with the earlier epidemic of a few undersea cables getting cut over a period of days, and a fight by Sprint and Cogent in the U.S. over peering agreements that cut off the web for some users, and it becomes clear that we should consider the web not only as physical infrastructure, but also held together by political and economic agreements.

It’s like an information superhighway, but also a like series of treaties that allow trade to various points of the globe. In Malta’s case, an agreement with Vodafone to share its cable kept the physical infrastructure from staying out. But as the Sprint/Cogent peering fight proved, when those agreements fail, the web is vulnerable in a way roads are not.