• by Diane Mermigas , March 6, 2008

Maybe Apple chairman and CEO Steve Jobs has earned the right to be arrogant. About not owing shareholders dividends or share buybacks using the company's $18 billion in cash reserves. Or maintaining a walled garden of content and a limiting AT&T service pact for its iMazing-connected devices. Or pushing another generation of functional iMacs as hard as the more flashy iPhone and Apple TV. Maybe it's just another genius CEO telling his adoring throngs, "just trust me."

Many a celebrated media, Internet and technology CEO essentially has made the same appeal, but few have delivered on their promises. Former Time Warner CEO Gerry Levin's promise of a revolutionary union with AOL was a joke. A vow by Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page to organize the world's information has been a brilliant stroke, despite the company's plummeting over-inflated stock price.

When Jobs told Apple investors this week there is a plan--and it doesn't necessarily include the form of returns they seek--it was another "trust me" moment from a man who has singlehandedly reversed his company's fortunes and jump-started the age of mobile interactivity.

There may be no second-guessing the father of the iMac, iPod and the iPhone. But consumers and investors have endured enough media and tech barons to know that trusting visionaries doesn't always work out. On the other hand, the public and Wall Street are now conditioned for a steady barrage of announcements from sector leaders like Apple and Google. When there's silence, it's assumed that something is wrong. Stock prices drop. The blog machine works overtime with rumors. It's as if the World Wide Web has developed a click-and-download ADD. We need a new fix of digital gizmos and video connections, supported by our best 1,000 online buddies, or we just aren't happy.

Well, it's time to get real.

The lightning pace of digital interactive enterprise must take an occasional breather. Devices, platforms and services need time to work out the bugs and develop ideas. Like children, they deserve and require growth curves. That is partly what is at work in the anxious uncertainty stalking the flagellating stocks of Apple, Google and most of their peers.

It doesn't help that these companies are demonstrating a logical vulnerability to a pullback in consumer and ad spending during an economic downturn. Asked about this at Apple's invitation-only annual meeting March 4, Jobs reportedly answered much like he did in a personal email to employees a month earlier: "Our stock is being buffeted around by factors a lot larger than ourselves," he wrote. "Hang in there." It's the kind of "trust me" response that increasingly makes shareholders and devoted consumers uneasy, even if it comes from a CEO who holds himself to $1 annual salary, plus lucrative stock and option grants.

But Apple is hardly alone. Key players everywhere on the digital media spectrum--from hardware to content--are in a "trust me" transitional mode. Everyone is digesting, formulating and testing, armed with boatloads of cash. You can't blame think tanks like Apple and Google for wanting to keep their powder dry. Mandated innovation has its price. This is, if nothing else, a time of rolling up small, niche start-ups into the corporate fray.

The damper on even the most formidable media and tech stocks might mean that no company is too powerful--no digital device or service too groundbreaking--to be impervious to economic adversity. Although Jobs reaffirmed his forecast sales of 10 million existing and next generation iPhones this year, that is predicated on pursuing corporate business adopters with 3G Internet, easy interface email, and third-party developer software. Today's long-awaited iPhone Software Roadmap event will heighten anticipation of advanced iPhones as a BlackBerry rival.

It is just the start of a long-running development cycle that eventually could match Mac computers' 40% support of Apple revenues, while reinvigorating Apple's stock price. Mobile phones and devices are the ultimate in universal ubiquity. However, analysts point out the high barriers to entry--large enough screens with crisp images and speedy mobile browsers that can navigate and display the Web's richness--have been challenging even for Apple and Google.

The 40% plunge of both companies' premium stock prices this year may mostly be a matter of being unable to produce vast enough, fast enough, for a jittery investor and consumer base. Some of it is the realization that ingenious thinkers like Jobs, Brin and Page can bring consumers and business partners to the dance, but everyone needs to learn their own new high steps. That is why Yahoo and Facebook are vulnerable and scrounging for new enterprising leadership.

Against the backdrop of a turbulent economy and intense, diverse competition, even the most cutting-edge companies must continually redefine their value propositions. Nothing is a given; certainly Jobs knows that from rebuilding Apple since his return a decade ago. And that makes the new CEO mantra: "Test me; go on and test me."