Was Steve Jobs an Innovator or Just a Tweaker?

Malcolm Gladwell just published a piece in the New Yorker arguing that Steve Jobs did not really invent anything, but merely tweaked and repackaged existing products. Is Gladwell right? Or was Jobs a large-scale visionary and innovator?

In his New Yorker article entitled "The Tweaker," Gladwell writes:

"In 1779, Samuel Crompton, a retiring genius from Lancashire, invented the spinning mule, which made possible the mechanization of cotton manufacture.

"Yet England’s real advantage was that it had Henry Stones, of Horwich, who added metal rollers to the mule; and James Hargreaves, of Tottington, who figured out how to smooth the acceleration and deceleration of the spinning wheel; and William Kelly, of Glasgow, who worked out how to add water power to the draw stroke; and John Kennedy, of Manchester, who adapted the wheel to turn out fine counts; and, finally, Richard Roberts, also of Manchester, a master of precision machine tooling—and the tweaker’s tweaker.

"He created the 'automatic' spinning mule: an exacting, high-speed, reliable rethinking of Crompton’s original creation.

"Such men, the economists argue, provided the 'micro inventions necessary to make macro inventions highly productive and remunerative.'

Gladwell asks, "Was Steve Jobs a Samuel Crompton or was he a Richard Roberts?"

Let's look at some facts. Here is a video of the 1982 Xerox Star, which, says Gladwell, Jobs and Apple simply "tweaked" to build the Macintosh.



As Walter Isaacson writes in his biography "Steve Jobs", Jobs was outraged when Microsoft came out with Windows in the 1980s. Windows featured the same graphical user interface—icons and mouse—as the Macintosh.

Jobs summoned Gates from Seattle to Apple’s Silicon Valley headquarters. “They met in Jobs’s conference room," Isaacson writes, "where Gates found himself surrounded by ten Apple employees who were eager to watch their boss assail him.

“Jobs didn’t disappoint his troops. ‘You’re ripping us off!’ he shouted. ‘I trusted you, and now you’re stealing from us!’

"Gates looked back at Jobs calmly. Everyone knew where the windows and the icons came from. 'Well, Steve,' Gates responded. 'I think there’s more than one way of looking at it. I think it’s more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it.' "

It begs the question, What is innovation anyway? In his book, "The Power of Strategy Innovation" (co-authored with Douglas Bale), my fellow consultant Bob Johnston puts it this way:

"Gary Hamel, C.K. Prahalad, Constantinos Markides, Jim Collins, and Clayton Christensen all champion strategy innovation as a vehicle for creating "new value" and spawning new wealth."

In 1981, a typical Xerox Star installation cost some $75,000, it needed a network and a dedicated file server, plus a starting price of $16,000 for each additional work station.

The 1984 Macintosh cost $2,495; and Jobs was pushing to make it cheaper.

"Bringing the concepts of a $100,000 networked workstation," writes John Gruber on his blog, "to a $2,500 standalone mass market personal computer is, I say, radically innovative. 

"The Macintosh was no 'tweak'. Pixar was no 'tweak'. The iPod is maybe the closest thing among Jobs’s career highlights that one could call a 'tweak' of that which preceded it — but it’s hard to separate the iPod, the device, from the entire iTunes ecosystem in terms of measuring its effect on our culture and the way everyone today listens to music. 

"Does anyone really think Apple’s entry into the music industry was a 'tweak'? A 'large-scale visionary' is precisely what Steve Jobs was."
What do you think? Was Steve Jobs a mere tweaker, or did he come up with true innovation? I look forward to reading you on http://thomaszweifel.blogspot.com/.

P.S. To learn more about innovation and how to bring it about,  check out "The Power of Strategy Innovation" by my colleagues Robert E. Johnston Jr. and J. Douglas Bate.