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Only those giant underwater crabs locked in a 20-year hibernation cycle at the bottom of the Pacific will have failed to hear that Steve Jobs has stepped down as Apple CEO.

It immediately hit the front page of most news websites, pushing events like the overthrowing of Colonel Gaddafi into second place, and tributes have flooded in from fellow business executives, cancer survivors and technology enthusiasts like Stephen Fry, who remarked that Jobs had more influence on culture over the last 30 years than pretty much anybody else he could think of. I’m not sure I’d go that far (surely Fry must have heard of Justin Timberlake), but Jobs’ success at Apple has been unprecedented.

He helped launch the Apple II, which started the home PC revolution, then the Apple Mac, which redefined the home PC into a model that it still fundamentally uses today. On his return from being unceremoniously booted out of his own company, he gave us a string of hits from which his competitors have never quite recovered – the iMac, the iPod, the iPhone and finally the iPad.

Whatever you think of his penchant for overpriced designer technology, he has a pretty strong resume up his turtle-necked sleeve. His record isn’t unblemished of course, but in August Apple was briefly worth more than ExxonMobil, making it the biggest company in the world. Forget about trying to win a private war against Microsoft or Google, Apple beat everyone on the planet.

How on Earth did he do it? I think that’s a question that’s still going to be asked 100 years from now, but for his successor as Apple CEO, Tim Cook, it’s going to be asked very shortly. Cook has very large trainers to fill, and those fickle stock market investors will be watching what he does next very, very carefully.

To the stock market Apple is Steve and Steve is Apple. Or rather, it was. When Jobs resigned, the stock dropped 5 per cent almost immediately, then a further 2 per cent the following day. That might not sound like a lot, but 5 per cent of Apple is $10billion. That’s a lot of iPads.

The way I see it, things can go three ways from here. First we could carry on pretty much as normal, with Tim Cook running the day-to-day operations and Steve still pulling the strings from his new vantage point as Chairman of the Board. Second, it could be that Steve is so vital to operations that without him Apple falls apart, and finally Tim Cook could turn out to be the man who takes Apple to its next level of greatness.

Nobody knows how sick Steve is. His resignation letter simply said that he couldn’t perform his day to day duties, but he’s been on a medical leave of absence since January, with Tim running the show. Nothing really changes in my first scenario, except that the difficult and distracting question of who takes over from him is answered once and for all. Apple is free to get on with making its great products and innovating everybody else out of the water.

In my second scenario, Apple starts to go downhill rapidly. It turns out the stock market was somehow right and an Apple without Steve is like a Roman slave revolution without Spartacus. As somebody heavily invested in the world of Apple, this would be my least favourite scenario, but I also think it’s the least likely.

The third possible outcome is that Tim Cook turns out to have even more revolutionary and innovative ideas than Steve Jobs, and we’ll all be flying around in Apple-branded jet packs and having our tea served by iRobots that make Isaac Asimov seem unimaginative.

I think we’re most likely to see a version of scenario one – at least for now. Microsoft didn’t fall apart when Bill Gates decided that giving away his money was a better use of his time, so there’s no reason to assume that Apple without Steve will crumble. True, Steve has been a brilliant CEO, and his involvement with Apple’s products is the epitome of the phrase ‘hands on’, but the team at Apple know what they’re doing. The grand design is there and there’s no reason to think it won’t work, even without the architect who helped create it.

There’s no doubt Apple will be a different company without Steve and his legendary keynotes, pithy catch phrases (“Boom!”) and frank emails to customers. We’ll all miss him. His second act at Apple has been one of the most thrilling success stories in the history of business. As Jobs said in his resignation letter, Apple’s best days could be ahead of it, but I doubt we’ll see his like again and I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s planning a final ‘one more thing’ before he goes for good.