Irrelevant and misapplied. This tape was from an era where foundational ideas in personal and graphical computing were being hashed out. Concepts like pointers, modality, bitmapping, state representation, humane I/O, task management, and basement-level software plumbing were being worked out. Basically: how do you turn massive industrial installations into a comprehensible and affordable machine that can fit in a home?
Those decisions, insights, and the attitudes that evolved early personal computing have flipping zip-all to do with trade dress in the early 21st century.
"Stealing" in the sense that Jobs means it is a reappropriation of an idea from a seemingly unrelated field into the new one to solve a problem (typically in design it's a teaching problem).
That's why his example from the Macintosh days is about applying calligraphy to rendering typefaces on screen, or why later in the interview he talks about how Apple took great pride in hiring people with a diversity of backgrounds (ex. zoologists and poets)--all to maximize the probability that someone would make an unexpected connection and hence, innovation. It's a subtle point that I frequently see people overlook here, but anybody with humanities training will tell you that there is a tremendous difference between inspiration and plagiarism.
How do you people know what Jobs meant by the word "steal"? And it's always kinda opposite of what the usual meaning is. Is there a Steve Jobs dictionary somewhere?
How do you people know what Jobs meant by the word "steal"?
It's easily gleaned from the context. Clearly he is distinguishing between stealing and copying, the key differentiator I believe to be some metaphorical notion of possession.
From this idea you can infer that Jobs is saying that you can take a solution designed for (or, by possession, owned by) a given historical problem and repurpose it so that it can now solve a new problem.
That's the only way the quote makes sense, and that's the only way you can read Jobs's reference to the diverse fields of study his early Macintosh people had under their belt before tackling computer science. It was all about repurposing old ideas to meet new challenges.
When you steal, you make something others have done yours. While Apple built upon the work of others throughout its history, they made their products so distinctive that nobody would say could have come from anyone else.
Apple really hasn't "invented" anything. What they HAVE done is apply a keen sense of design and an obsessive focus on execution to a segment of a very diverse industry.
I think it goes without saying that Apple has had serious problems over its lifetime and there isn't a guarantee that they wont find themselves in that predicament again. My first computer was an Apple (//c, natch) and I can tell you that they nearly did themselves in a couple of times while IBM/Microsoft were leading the way.
I didn't say Apple invented the personal computer, or the portable music player, or the smartphone. What they did, and did very skillfully, was to appropriate the ideas and make a product so unique that it redefines the market around it. This is stealing the idea rather than merely copying it.
It's most interesting that the biggest problems Apple faced were when it was trying to copy the IBM PC by building dozens of different Mac models with expansion slots.
It is kinda astounding how often people use this quote and seem to think it means the opposite of what it means.
Steve Jobs is saying it is easy to copy. But if you're great, you steal the fundamental idea and do something totally new with it.
Apple didn't just copy the phones already on the market, they stole the idea of a cellphone and did something fundamentally different.
So different that we had 6 months of people saying it was going to be a failure, Ballmer going on the record saying there's no way they'd sell any significant numbers, and the RIM engineers telling upper management that the iPhone couldn't possibly work the way apple said!
Thats "stealing" -- doing something for which there is nothing comparable on the market, in Steve Jobs view.
Copying is when you look at a successful product and mimic it down to the millimeter.
The distinction (I believe the original quote is Picasso, and the difference is that the great steal while others borrow) is that once you've STOLEN an idea your version is so much better than what you took the whole thing becomes YOURS. Borrowing an idea means that your version ends up simply looking like a lame attempt to copy the older idea, and people prefer the older idea.
So while there were GUIs before the Mac, once Apple had stolen their ideas and transformed them the stuff that had come before simply looked like crap. Similarly previous attempts, including by Apple, to create tablet devices look like crap beside the iPad.
>Steve Jobs is saying it is easy to copy. But if you're great, you steal the fundamental idea and do something totally new with it.
Is there an extended version of the linked video? I don't know where you got "and do something totally new with it" from his original quote. How did you extrapolate his true intent from the provided quote?
>Thats "stealing" -- doing something for which there is nothing comparable on the market, in Steve Jobs view.
That is certainly not the accepted definition of the word. I still don't understand how you've managed to take Steve Jobs words and claim they're a metaphor for "innovation". In what world are invent, innovate and steal synonymous?
From the video: "And I think part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians, and poets, and artists, and zoologists, and historians who also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world."
Forgive me if I depart a moment from the explicit and literal, but I fail to see how you can apply ideas from music, poetry, zoology, art, and history without "doing something totally new with it." Did 19th century bookmakers and typesetters have the faintest idea what a computer was when they were practicing their craft? And would somebody making a computer screen without the slightest notion of what really went into calligraphy know which ideas to capture in writing rendering software? This is the essence of what Jobs meant by stealing. It wasn't, hey, let's just copy our competitor but make it cheaper.
As for "stealing," it's unfortunate word choice because the original quote from Picasso was in Spanish and he didn't say it in a trade (high art) where copying could be justified as "natural evolution."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CW0DUg63lqU