But the similarities between Jobs and Cook (right) reports  CNN is that while Jobs is both charismaticand known for outbursts of temper, Cook, raised in a small town in Alabama, is soft-spoken, reserved and intensely private. 

Jobs used his creative genius and vision to conceive and design blockbuster products like the iMac, iPhone and iPad. But Cook's considerable operational skills were focused on making sure Apple could build millions of  products, delivering them worldwide, to meet customers' seemingly insatiable demand.

At Hewlett Packard CEO Leo Apothekar who formerly headed SAP and replaced Mark Hurd, managed to lose HP stock 45% of its value (below) reports  Business Insider before being fired in favour of eBay CEO Meg Whitman as its president and CEO

While eBay was considered a successful Internet start-up prior to the arrival of Meg Whitman in 1998, it has been her expertise that has made it king of the dot-coms. guiding the company from 170 employees when she arrived to 2,500 in 2002 to a a forum for selling 18,000 categories of used and new merchandise in 27 countries. Whitman also sits on the boards of Procter & Gamble, Zipcar and Teach for America.

Both new posts hold interesting management challenges. For newly appointed CEO Tim Cook the floodlights will be on his words at the iPhone 5 launch on October 4th. Meg Whitman has to work on whether the Autonomy deal goes ahead; whether to improve the services business or spin it off, decide on the PC business and whether the TouchPad has viability?

As the Chinese say "interesting times."