January 18, 2011

Apple CEO Steve Jobs has announced he will go on medical leave from his position. Jobs had surgery in 2004 for pancreatic cancer, which medical experts have said explains the liver transplant.

“My family and I would deeply appreciate respect for our privacy,” said Jobs.

He did not reveal specifics about why he had been given time off.

“At my request, the board of directors has granted me a medical leave of absence so I can focus on my health. I will continue as CEO and be involved in major strategic decisions for the company,” he told employees.

Apple stock fell about 6% trading Monday following the news. Investors will have to digest the news about the chief executive as well as the latest earnings for the Christmas season. If this turns out to be a temporary leave of absence, for comparatively minor medical reasons, then this shouldn’t have much effect on your shares. But if the absence is longer and the problem more severe, who knows what will happen to Apple!

Steve’s email in full is as follows:

Team,

At my request, the board of directors has granted me a medical leave of absence so I can focus on my health. I will continue as CEO and be involved in major strategic decisions for the company.

I have asked Tim Cook to be responsible for all of Apple’s day to day operations. I have great confidence that Tim and the rest of the executive management team will do a terrific job executing the exciting plans we have in place for 2011.

I love Apple so much and hope to be back as soon as I can. In the meantime, my family and I would deeply appreciate respect for our privacy.

Steve

Sources:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703396604576088143564482196.html

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/01/17/steve_jobs_medical_leave_apple/

http://www.computerweekly.com/Articles/2011/01/18/244943/Steve-Jobs-takes-medical-leave-from-Apple.htm

Google has updated the SLA for its Google Apps suite so that they no longer make excuses for scheduled maintenance. Meaning that ANY dwntime, no matter how little, will be recognised as downtime and applied to the agreement with the customer.

At present, when Google alert users to “Scheduled Downtime”, this downtime is not covered under the SLA and the end-user has no retribution via the SLA for a refund.

Google have now fine-tuned their highly-distributed infrastructure so that servers can be taken offline one-at a time or in multiples and the end-user wont notice. This is nothing new however, Google have been able to do this for a while now, but have never included this kind of interruption as part of their SLA.

Now, should a service be made unavailable at Google’s end as a result of this downtime, the end-user is well within their rights to demand compensation under their SLA.

In 2010, the company says, Gmail was available to business users and consumers over 99.9 per cent of the time. This equated to about seven minutes of downtime per month. During that period, there was no scheduled downtime for end users.

Microsoft are currently rolling out a competing cloud-based product, Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS), which is intended to bring the Office suite onto the web with phenomenal new features and services. As avid Google Apps users, we’ve just started trialling the BPOS service from Microsoft and will post an update with our findings in due course.