Getting Steve Jobs Wrong
21st November 2011
John Gruber of Daring Fireball pees all over the new Jobs biography … with (I think) good reason.
Jobs was neither. These men make for a poor comparison to Jobs because Jobs didn’t really “invent” anything — not in the sense that Industrial Revolution inventors did. Jobs understood technology but was not an engineer. He had profoundly exquisite taste but was not a designer. What it was that Jobs actually did is much of the mystery of his life and his work, and Isaacson, frustratingly, had seemingly little interest in that, or any recognition that there even was any sort of mystery as to just what Jobs’s gifts really were.
If this is the standard for innovation, then what product, from any company, has truly been innovative? Some people — most people? — can’t get their heads around the idea that “innovation” doesn’t mean “creating something 100 percent new using never before seen technology, ideas, and concepts”. Yes, there were digital music players before the iPod. There were “smartphones” before the iPhone. But, I say, the differences between those products and Apple’s iPod and iPhone weren’t “tweaks”.
Jobs, like Henry Ford, was a genius-level synthesist — taking stuff that was already out there in a rough form and fitting it all together in a way that made it available (and acceptable, which is an oft-neglected essential factor) to a large number of people.