A lot has been written about Steve Jobs’s passing recently, mostly for the obvious reasons (i.e., he changed the literal face of technology as we know it, revolutionizing four established technologies four distinct times in the last decade and a half alone [iMac -> iPod -> iPhone -> iPad] while flawlessly painting competing products as technology as we knew it), but occasionally for the less obvious reasons. Gawker, in particular, has an extremely humanizing (as opposed to deifying) article pointing out that, like most great men, Jobs also had great flaws as well.

Excerpts:

Apple’s factories in China have regularly employed young teenagers and people below the legal work age of 16, made people work grueling hours, and have tried to cover all this up. That’s according to Apple’s own 2010 report about its factories in China. In 2011, Apple reported thatits child labor problem had worsened.

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In the pursuit of greatness he cast aside politeness and empathy. His verbal abuse never stopped. Just last month Fortune reported about a half-hour “public humiliation” Jobs doled out to one Apple team

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He has no public record of giving to charity over the years, despite the fact he became wealthy after Apple’s 1980 IPO and had accumulated an estimated $7 billion net worth by the time of his death. After closing Apple’s philanthropic programs on his return to Apple in 1997, he never reinstated them, despite the company’s gusher of profits.

But I’m not here to talk about how transcendent or degenerate Jobs was. I’m here to ask the (ironically) open question: whither now, Apple?

Last April, after the debut of the original iPad, Tim Wu of Slate wrote an keenly insightful piece demonstrating how Apple the company has come full circle, from playing the role of iconoclast rebel bucking the establishment to now leveraging its formidable influence and war chest on a near daily basis to ensure that no iconoclast rebels ever buck its establishment. As Wu posits:

perhaps the greatest story is of Apple itself, and the degree to which the iPad’s design does battle with the company’s own history and the computing legacy of its co-founder, Steve Wozniak.

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Wozniak’s design was open and decentralized in ways that still define those concepts in the computing industries. The original Apple had a hood, and as with a car, the owner could open it up and get at the guts of the machine. Although it was a fully assembled device, not a kit like earlier PC products, Apple owners were encouraged to tinker with the innards of Wozniak’s machine—to soup it up, make it faster, add features. There were slots to accommodate all sorts of peripheral devices, and it was built to run a variety of software. Wozniak’s ethic of openness also extended to disclosing design specifications. In a 2006 talk at Columbia University, he put the point this way: “Everything we knew, you knew.” To point out that this is no longer Apple’s policy is to state the obvious.

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Steve Jobs’ ideas have always been in tension with Wozniak’s brand of idealism and the founding principles of Apple. Jobs maintained the early, countercultural image that he and Wozniak created, but beginning with the Macintosh in the 1980s, and accelerating through the iPhone and climaxing with the iPad’s release this month, he has taken Apple on a fundamentally different track, one that is, in fact, nearly the opposite of the Wozniak vision.

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Now in 2010, the iPad takes the same ideas to their logical extreme. It is a beautiful and nearly perfect machine. It is also Jobs’ final triumph, the final step in Apple’s evolution away from Wozniak and toward a closed model. The main, and most important, concession to openness is the App Store, a creation that shows Jobs learned something from Apple’s bitter defeat by Microsoft in the 1990s. You cannot run software Apple does not distribute itself. You cannot access the file system unless you hack the machine. You cannot open the hood; indeed, the machine lacks any screws…The iPad has no slots; its only interface is an Apple-specific plug. Oddly enough, this all means that the iPad is not a machine that Apple’s founders, in the 1970s, would have ever considered buying.

With Tim Cook’s official ascension to the Apple core last August and then Jobs’s death last week, one has to wonder if the company will remain true to the narrow philosophy of its original visionary tyrant or begin to chart a slightly broader course. I say “slightly,” of course, because when you finally and fully inherit a company as successful as Apple — one with such a rabid, predictable, and established consumer base — it would be stupid to completely reverse direction, regardless of how much your views differ from those of your predecessor. And we don’t even have any idea if Cook’s views do differ in any way. For all we know — because let’s face it: what the hell does anyone know about Tim Cook? — he could very well turn out to be the Generalisimo Franco of the tech world, running an even more iron-fisted regime than Jobs while establishing his own private gestap-ple security squad to enforce his every dictum.

An unlikely caricature, to be sure, matched in unlikeliness only by the possibility that Cook turns out to be Wozniak’s spiritual heir instead of Jobs’s. But don’t be surprised if Cook reveals a little Woz in him after all, if for no other reason that it is an inherent quality of all successors to want to distinguish themselves from their predecessors — the better to reap the rewards of future successes.

In Cook’s case, however, you could make the argument that he has inherited either the best or worst of both worlds, given the Daily Mail’s recent revelation that,

Despite knowing he was dying, Steve Jobs worked for more than a year on the products that he believed would safeguard the company’s future… masterminding updated versions of the iPod, iPad, iPhone and MacBooks, ensuring at least four years’ worth of products are in the pipeline, according to Apple sources.

So for the next half decade, Cook has the onus of convincing shareholders and consumers that he is the person responsible for Apple’s future blockbusters — or the blessing of being hide under the umbrella of “I was just following orders” should the fallout of failure begin to rain down upon him.

2012-2015: ???