Today in Apple history: Fortune names Steve Jobs ‘CEO of the decade’

November 5, 2009: Fortune magazine names Steve Jobs “CEO of the decade.” The accolade comes just four months after Jobs returned to Apple after undergoing a liver transplant.

The business publication credits Jobs with transforming multiple industries, as well as continuing Apple’s meteoric rise. These achievements seem particularly noteworthy considering the tough economic conditions of the 2008 financial crash.

Steve Jobs is ‘CEO of the decade’ after turning Apple around

It was clear Jobs would be a remarkable force for Apple after he made the ailing company profitable again within months of his return in 1997. After a decade at Apple’s helm, the amazing, sustained success of Jobs as CEO became truly evident.

Within just a few years under Jobs, the company introduced the original iMac, which reconfirmed Macintosh computers as the coolest machines on the market. The launches of the iPod and the iTunes Music Store transformed the nascent digital music industry — and set up Apple as a key player.

Jobs also reinvented Apple’s operating system with the UNIX-based OS X. Plus, he presided over the launch of the iPhone and the App Store, major products that set Apple on a course for domination of the technology world.

At Pixar, the company he ran alongside Apple, Jobs also achieved great things. (In fact, the movie studio’s success made Jobs a billionaire.)

Although Fortune didn’t know it at the time, Jobs was preparing to launch his final great product, the iPad. That groundbreaking tablet was as pure a distillation of Jobs’ vision for computing as he ever created.

Steve Jobs: The end of an era

More poignantly, Jobs received Fortune’s “CEO of the decade” award at a time when the tech world was beginning to reconcile itself to the fact that he might not be around for a whole lot longer to lead Apple.

Rumors about his poor health surfaced in the summer of 2008, when Jobs appeared at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference looking shockingly gaunt. Apple claimed he simply suffered from a “common bug,” and later changed this to a “hormone imbalance.” By late 2009, however, Jobs admitted in an internal memo that his “health-related issues are more complex than … originally thought.”

Like many of the plaudits Jobs received at this time, the “CEO of the decade” title therefore felt bittersweet. Adding to the effect, Fortune published various photos of Jobs throughout the years, and ran down a list of his career highlights.

The award celebrated Jobs’ enormous success. But it also served as an acknowledgment that Apple was coming toward the end of an era. A decade and a half later, Apple still rules the tech roost, with Jobs’ right-hand man Tim Cook at the helm as CEO.