Steve Jobs: artist or hippie capitalist?

Amplify’d from www.newyorker.com

But a great artist, as some have suggested, including the headline writers of the Huffington Post? If so, he was a great artist only in the sense that Bob Dylan and Andy Warhol are great artists: talented jackdaws who took other people’s half-baked innovations and converted them into beautifully made products with mass appeal. Apple didn’t build the first desktop computer based on a microprocessor: the Micral N and the MITS Altair predated the landmark Apple II. Steve Jobs didn’t create the mouse, either: he lifted it from a version he saw at the Xerox Parc research center in Palo Alto. George Lucas, and not Jobs, created Pixar. The Nomad Jukebox, a digital music player made by a company from Singapore, predated the iPod.

Unlike Thomas Edison, to whom he has been compared, Jobs wasn’t really an inventor. In fact, by the standards of Silicon Valley, he wasn’t really a techie at all all. As John Markoff of the Times noted in his careful obituary: “Mr. Wozniak would be the technical half and Mr. Jobs the marketing half of the original Apple. Read more at www.newyorker.com

 

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