Apple's Jobs is Financial Times' man of the year

The Financial Times, Britain's globally respected business paper, has named Apple Inc chief executive Steve Jobs - seen by many as the comeback player of the quarter century – as its person of the year.

Saying this year's unveiling of the iPad "capped the most remarkable comeback in modern business history", the FT noted Apple's Jobs-led bounce-back from its near demise, as well as the visionary leader's perseverance through his recent struggles with cancer. In terms of Silicon Valley lore, the publication said, Jobs now shares the stage with no one else.

Little more than a decade earlier, both Jobs' career and Apple, the company he had co-founded, were widely considered washed up, their relevance to the future of technology written off both in Silicon Valley and on Wall Street. By the start of this year, however, the rebound was complete.

"Long-time nemesis Bill Gates may be richer and, at his peak, arguably exerted greater sway, thanks to his monopoly over the world's PC software," the FT said in a profile of Jobs earlier this week. "But the Microsoft co-founder has left the stage to devote his life and fortune to good works. It is Mr Jobs, who now holds the spotlight."

Despite a slip or two, Jobs has, indeed, enjoyed a fine year. Upon its release, the iPad leaped into consumers' hands - and the culture's consciousness - smashing, by some accounts, all previous records of consumer-electronics adoption and threatening to make the PC a thing of the past.

And speaking of Gates, Apple passed Microsoft in overall market capitalisation this summer, no doubt a sweet feeling, considering the Redmond giant's perceived rip-off, all those years ago, of the Mac OS in its Windows operating system – once-popular bumper stickers read 'Windows '95 = Mac '84').