Did Steve Jobs really personally invent all those iThings that the media are describingafter his death (subsequent to his true inventions that launched Apple)? Or did he simply conceptualize them? I think there’s a big difference between emerging from a workshop after weeks of doing nothing but working, sleeping, and eating Twinkies and holding up a prototype of a music player with no moving parts that can hold your entire album collection in your pocket, vs. walking into a roomful of engineers saying, “Here’s an idea for what I’d like to sell, figure out how to build one.”
According to Steve Wozniak no, he was a great marketing guy.
Just to give you an idea of what kind of inventor he was, here is an interactive look at some of the things that were patented in his name (along with others) (and here is the related article). Clearly, he was much more of a hands-on guy than many corporate CEOs.
Apple, let alone Steve Jobs personally,didn’t invent many fundamentally distinct technologies at all let alone the ones they are most known for. The original Mac was a copy of concepts invented by Xerox and lots of companies made MP3 players before Apple got in the game. That isn’t to take anything away from Apple or Steve Jobs though. There are lots of people that have the technical skills to invent something new. The trick is to do it in a way so that people will see a personal need for it and incorporate it into their lives. Apple and Jobs are the masters at that because they understand what consumers want before they know what they want and they take fundamental concepts like simplicity of use and attractive design to be essential characteristics of their products. That is harder to do in some ways than hooking up a new series of components that work but no one wants to use. I wouldn’t call it inventing exactly but it isn’t just marketing either. It is more like human centered design and engineering.
note that many/most of those are design patents, not utility patents.
As someone who comes from the marketing side of product development, you can’t overlook the role of the “conceptualizer.” Far too often, the process is something like this.
Visionary: Can we make a music player with no moving parts that can hold your entire album collection in your pocket?
Engineer: Why?
Or
Engineer: Look, I’ve made a powerful computer that can fit on a desk.
Visionary: That’s great. But I see you have three rows of 50 switches each that you have to throw in different sequences to issue commands. Is it possible to add a keyboard so the operator can type commands in plain English?
Engineer: But this works!
Steve Jobs, great designer.
However, he didn’t do that, either. Apple’s great strength was taking an existing product and making a smooth, easily-used version with “sex appeal” to the average man-about-town. In many ways the Ipod was greatly inferior to older hardware, but the companies made that hardware didn’t have the design teams to steal borrow their ideas, or the capital to make really spiffy miniaturized goodies, or the marketing clout to put them out. Steve Jobs had the idea of how to sell, the skill to judge when to do so, and the luck to be in the right place and time.
And it seems I can’t figure out to use the strikethrough function anymore. What, the board can’t accept straight html code?
Apple’s mastery has been in two areas:
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Look at what the competition is doing wrong, and don’t do that
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find a gap and fill it.
The iPod was an example of doing both 1) and 2). When the iPod came out, mp3 players were of two types; either an MMC or SD card based flash player, or a hard drive based player that was big and heavy. The cost of flash memory at the time was that typically affordable MMC or SD cards were like 256 MB max. Can’t fit shit on that. The iPod came in and drop kicked the flash players with its 5 GB capacity, and it stomped the HDD players by being small and comfortable to hold.
The iPhone was an example of 1) above. Smartphones weren’t new, touchscreen smartphones weren’t new, but RIM and Microsoft were stuck with menu-based UIs that didn’t work all that pleasantly. If you were lucky your Windows Mobile phone had a Today screen overlay like TouchFLO that at least papered over some of the most glaring flaws; but for anything any deeper you had to break out the stylus.
an example of 2) above would be the 11" Macbook Air. Apple saw a huge gap in the market for that size of notebook; you could either have a $300 POS netbook or a $2000 ultraportable. The 11’ MBA literally has no competition.
You want [del]del[/del], not s.
I’m not sure if I would say Microsoft was lacking in resources (both in terms of design man-power and capital). Even people who wanted to love the Zune, ended up not really liking the Zune. I’m sure that branding has something to do with keeping the iPod on top, but at least for me, it was the iPod that got me listening to music again. I stopped because I was tired of having to switch out CD’s all the time. “All your music in your pocket” was the key.
The iPhone was flat out revolutionary. When a product changes everything the competition is doing, that says something.
Same with the iPad. It wasn’t the first tablet, but it still is the best one. When it came out, I scoffed. It’s just a big iPod Touch! Then I realized that a big iPod Touch is actually really useful. That was an interesting lesson. When the iPad came out it seemed less useful than it really was. How often does that happen?
Design? Heck no. MS is not a consumer products company. Apple is.
That was him using his patented Reality Distortion Field generator on the suppliers. With it, he convinced them to supply Apple with flash memory for a much lower price than they were supplying it to any of Apple’s competitors.
what does flash memory have to do with the original iPod?
My guess is Steve Jobs was just “the face” behind the products. People like to have a real human being to worship or to attribute amazing prodcuts to, rather than just a big coorperation. All of those products were more realistically created by tons of “elves” constantly working, sharing criticism, saying what designs/ideas they liked or did not. Steve Jobs was their head yes but he can’t take credit for all of that.
If you have a sports team, there are always team heros there. If you have a tv show, people get to really like some actors. People also want to know the director behind a movie. Every novel has a writer. But how can people worship or get to know a faceless corperation? This is why you have these celebrities or images of people that are promoted as being genius. I believe Jobs created Apple and was exceptional in what he did back then. As Apple grew to a mega corperation, he can realistically only take a small fraction of credit for what was produced.
It might be your guess that he was just the face behind the products, but from everything I’ve heard, you’d be wrong. I’ve heard for years that Steve Jobs was intimately involved in the design and development of the products, down to the smallest details.
There is vision, there is invention, and there is innovation.
Jobs didn’t personally invent things, but he did have a pretty clear vision of things he wanted. He made that vision into reality through innovating existing technologies and through the work of colleagues and employees. It was him that gave the vision, did the pushing, and approval of designs.
I would place him in the category of guys like Walt Disney, who, as a head of a large company, pushed creativity with creativity.
Not to belittle Jobs-he was a very good businessman. But the fact was, there were other, better microcomputers available when Apple came out:
-the Digital “Rainbow” series: faster and better software than Apple. Ken Olsen (CEO of DEC) killed the line-he saw no big market for it.
-Wang Laboratories: had easy to use computers-but An Wang belived that the Japanese would swiftly seize the market.
Jobs had the conviction that he could make better, easy to use machines-and sell them at a good margin.
His idea about company-owned stores was brilliant-he avoided the throat-cutting price wars that killed Compaq, Packard-Bell, and all the others.
The original Apple computers were invented by Steve Wozniak. There is no dispute about that. Jobs helped him with getting them manufactured and with marketing them. Jobs may have played a vital role in Apple’s beginnings, but he did not invent anything (either at first or later). Jobs was a businessman, an entrepreneur, a good and innovative one, no doubt, but he was not an inventor.
I just posted this as a Facebook status in light of Jobs’ death.
To that extent, whether it’s invention, innovation, imagination, or implementation, it’s all in the execution. Something which most other computer/tech companies lacked, but came with Steve.
Why do you think it is that Apple’s products are so clearly imitated by everyone else?