Here’s what we know: Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced Monday he’s taking a medical leave of absence and hopes to be back “as soon as [he] can.” In the meantime, COO Tim Cook will oversee day-to-day operations.

Monday’s announcement prompted plenty of media attention, notably from Fortune, which reported on Jobs’ 2009 trip to Switzerland for cancer treatment.

Apple’s stock also took a hit early Tuesday, though it had mostly recovered by the closing bell.

Jobs’ e-mail announcing his leave was strikingly similar to the one he issued almost exactly two years prior, the key difference being that the earlier memo stated Jobs would return to the company after five-and-a-half months.

Communicators and Apple-watchers are left to ask again, did he say enough? And, just as then, opinions vary. Most communicators did agree on one thing: The idea that Apple can’t survive without Jobs isn’t as prevalent this time around.

Silence may or may not be golden

“He did exactly the right thing again,” says Rob Frankel, a branding expert and author who also praised the 2009 Jobs announcement. “The less you give them to speculate on, the less they speculate.”

The best thing Apple can do, Frankel says, is simply continue forward while Jobs is on leave to prove it can do well with or without its public face.

“The company’s not going anywhere, and the brand’s not going anywhere,” Frankel says. “The longer he’s not there at the helm and Apple continues to thrive, the better it is for everybody.”

Apple already communicated that message while Jobs was away two years ago, he says. “It isn’t quite as big a story as it was the first time.”

Frankel also praises the absence of a time estimate in Monday’s statement. It keeps the business news media from creating a countdown clock for Jobs’ return, and it wards off criticism and further speculation if Jobs doesn’t make it back within a stated timeframe.

Gary Tobin, principal at Tobin & Associates, says he sees the implied message of Jobs’ “hope” that he will return: He won’t. Along with a “perfect storm” of elements—lots of recent press about the company’s lack of openness, its high stock price, growing competition in the phone and tablet markets, Jobs’ cult of personality—the CEO’s absence may cause a shakeup within Apple, he says.

“I think that Apple will survive but, for the near to medium term, will be under extreme pressure to change,” Tobin says.

Michael Shmarak of Sidney Maxwell Public Relations says the company’s relative silence is a sign it’s working out its contingency plans.

“When a company doesn’t talk like this, that means there’s a lot of planning going on in the background on what will be that next step,” he says. “They would be very smart to try to assess their situation and have a series of flow charts going. If situation A exists, this is what we’re going to do. If situation B exists, this is what we’re going to do.”

As soon as A or B happens, Shmarak says, Apple would be wise to let employees and the public know what’s happening. “If I were in Apple’s communication team, I would ask when is the right time to put aside personal considerations to say, ‘We’re going to update you on Steve’s condition.’”

Controlling the message

Jobs has “taken the authoritative stance here and is controlling what the speculation might be,” Frankel says.

The announcement was perfectly timed, Frankel says, on a day in which U.S. markets were closed and just before a big earnings announcement. Shmarak says the memo was just another example of Apple’s controlling the flow of communication, much like when the company clamped down on Gizmodo last summer after the blog got hold of a pre-release iPhone 4.

Still, Apple should consider four key filters when deciding what to divulge, Shmarak says: moral, legal, social and economic. For instance, withholding information that shareholders deem important could prompt lawsuits, he says.

Elizabeth Castro, vice president at O’Malley Hansen Communications, says business concerns ought to trump human curiosity, and Jobs has accomplished that.

“The human side is that everyone wants to know the status of his health,” she says, “but his biggest goal with communications about this subject is one that helps the organization remain focused on their purpose.”

Is it instructive?

Communicators are most assuredly going to find lessons in the way the organization handles Jobs’ possibly permanent absence, Shmarak says.  “How Apple addresses it in the short and long term is going to go a long way in terms of helping other companies do things differently,” he says.

Tobin contends that companies built around cult figures like Jobs will continue to see themselves as exceptions to the rule.

“The ‘cult’ companies will not learn as much as we would expect from the situation, because those companies tend to have younger management who believe that they can figure a work-around,” he says. “And probably can’t.”