Steve Jobs named CEO of the decade by MarketWatch, likened to Thomas Edison and Alexander Bell

Plenty of people have characterized Steve Jobs' return to Apple as "the second coming" for the company. And the facts speak for themselves - during his time as Apple's CEO, Apple bypassed longtime rival Microsoft in the stock market (at present, Apple is valued at $285 billion to MS' $220 billion), the Cupertino-based company is credited with "saving" the recording industry with its iPod and revolutionizing the phone industry with its iPhone.

The president of think-tank Endpoint Technologies Roger Kay thinks that Jobs will pass the test of time and stay in the history books:

“The resurrection of Apple is just the most astounding story that’s probably happened in business in at least a decade — you might be able to go further and say it’s a half-century. It’s on par with Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell in terms of its total impact.”

It has been a long, strange trip for Jobs, but not one without setbacks. To start with, he was fired from Apple in 1985 and the company was reportedly near bankruptcy before he was brought back. There were rumours of Jobs' erratic behaviour - some of them indicating that he was firing employees at random. And, of course, we all know that it is the understatement of the year to say that he values his privacy quite a lot.

But none of these things have stopped Apple's meteoric rise since Jobs returned to the company. No one can deny the fact that Steve Jobs is so adored by some people that he is described as "the rock star of Corporate America" and we all know guys who think that the Apple logo is a badge of honour.

But this is rather easy to explain with only one word - success. It is reported that "Apple sales are up twelvefold from the end of 2000, surging from $5.4 billion for fiscal 2001 to $65.2 billion for fiscal 2010", which is to say that if you have invested $1000 in Apple's stocks in 2000, by the end of the decade your stocks are worth close to $43 000.

The Apple fairy tale started with the launch of the iPod and iTunes. According to Apple, 279 million iPods have been sold, which brought the company $47.7 billion in revenue, while twelve billion songs along with 7 billion applications have been sold via the iTunes store to date. But that was only the beginning. When the iPhone was released, it was great success, selling 73.7 million units (as of now). Now, Steve Jobs is looking to the post-PC world, with the iPad being the first step in that direction:

"PCs are going to be like trucks. They’re still going to be around. They’re still going to have a lot of value. But they’re going to be used by one of out x number of people."

Apple's dominance is not to last forever, but for now, the company led by Steve Jobs looks really strong. Still, we all know that "this too shall pass", but for his achievements in the last decade, we guess that Jobs wholly deserves the title "CEO of the decade".

source: MarketWatch via TUAW