In a surprise announcement, Apple today said Jobs offers resigned as company CEO and named Chief Operating Officer Tim Cook because his successor.
Jobs will now be the chairman of Apple's board.
"Few chief executives are as closely identified having a company as Steve Jobs has been with Apple. Now it will largely be up to his deputies to make certain that the company continues to stay ahead of competition with trend-setting products as well as services that impress consumers, " a report in the Wall Street Diary said.
It said the executives that will now run Apple without Jobs will "face big tests of whether or not they can still excel in highly competitive businesses that often have small income. "
The New York Times said the Apple team will face the "far greater trial in achieving continued success without Jobs in charge".
Stanford University's Graduate School of Business professor Charles O'Reilly said in the WSJ report one will need to wait and see if Apple "can hit the next home run", asserting when it doesn't, "they're in a bunch of bad businesses".
With a "charismatic persona" as well as "sharp instinct" for knowing what consumers want, Jobs is one of probably the most successful chief executives in corporate history, the New York Times said.
"The great news for Apple is that the product roadmap in this industry is virtually in place two and three years out, " the New York Occasions quoted Harvard Business School professor David Yoffie as saying.
"So 80-90% of what would happen in that time will be the same, even without Steve, " Yoffie said.
Yoffie added that the "real challenge for Apple is going to be what happens beyond that roadmap. Apple is going to need a new leader with a new way of recreating and managing the business later on. "
"Jobs had a unique combination of visionary creativity and decisiveness. Nobody will replace him. "
Jobs' successor, Cook, has handled the affairs from the company thrice when Jobs was on a medical leave of absence -- as soon as in 2004 when he was recuperating from pancreatic cancer surgery, in 2009 when he was on the six-month medical leave for a liver transplant and again in early 2011 with regard to another unexplained medical leave.