Apple's packed product pipeline likely to benefit from Jobs' insights for years to come

Steve Jobs' announced resignation as CEO of Apple raises a number of questions about the future of Apple and its winning iPhone and iPad product lines.

Jobs will remain an Apple employee, as well as its director and chairman of the board —"if the board sees fit," Jobs wrote in his resignation letter, — and has recommended Apple COO Tim Cook, who has held the reins since Jobs left on third medical leave in January, to succeed him. Both those moves are underway.

While Cook may well be a superior executive, he's no Jobs — whose brilliance, spot-on instincts and meticulousness have been well documented (Vic Gundotra, Google's senior vice president of engineering, described in a Google+ post this morning Jobs once calling him on a Sunday to say the yellow in a Google logo Apple had was the wrong shade and that he already had a man on the case to fix it).

The Apple team "has been training for this day for a long time," Roger Kay, principal analyst with Endpoint Technologies, told Connected Planet. "Apple has a lot of momentum in the market. Jobs is leaving his baby well nourished and in good hands."

Will the anticipated iPhone 5 see even greater than expected sales, with consumers uncertain of what will follow?

“We do not expect too much to change within the organization. In our view, the far-reaching successes of the iPhone, iPad, iPod, and MacBook Air reflect the work of many, not one," J.P. Morgan analyst Mark Moskowitz said in an Aug. 24 research note. He continued:

We have a favorable view of new CEO Tim Cook. He has a proven track record. As COO, Mr. Cook has been integral to driving the company’s unprecedented revenue and earnings growth phase, limiting disruptions to the operations. We expect his knowledge of Apple and its rigid product cycles, supply chain, and partners to result in little change to the go-to-market strategy.

Strategy Analytics director Neil Mawston is likewise unconerned about Apple for the short term, suspecting its product roadmap is in place for at least the next year. But even after that, "Apple is not a one-person outfit," he told Connected Planet.

Still, Mawston added, "the stepping down of the iconic Steve Jobs is a blow to Apple and it potentially gives hard-pressed competitors like Motorola a little breathing space. Steve Jobs has a very high media profile and his familiar presence helps to maintain Apple’s brand equity worldwide, and that is going to be a challenging dynamic for his successors to replicate in the longer-term."

A number of analysts are expected more of the same (good stuff) from Apple for years to come, as Apple "has a deep pipeline of products that has likely been packed even more deeply in anticipation of this day," Endpoint's Kay wrote in a blog post on Forbes.

But at some point Apple will come to the end of all the Jobs-made plans.

"At that point," Kay continued in the post, "Apple will become a lot more like other companies, merely mortal."