Amaya Toman In his time, Steve Jobs was considered one of the best entrepreneurs in history. He ran a very successful company, he managed to change the way people interact with technology. For many, he was simply a legend. But according to Malcolm Gladwell - journalist and author of the book Blink: How to think without thinking – was not due to intellect, resources or tens of thousands of hours of practice, but a simple trait of Jobs's personality that any of us can easily develop.
The magic ingredient, according to Gladwall, is urgency, which he says is also typical of other immortals in the field of business. Jobs' urgency was once demonstrated by Gladwall in a story involving Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center Incorporated (PARC), an innovative think tank based near Stanford University.
In the 1960s, Xerox was one of the most important technology companies in the world. PARC hired the best scientists from around the planet, offered them an unlimited budget for their research, and gave them enough time to focus their brainpower on a better future. This procedure proved to be effective – a number of fundamental inventions for the world of computer technology emerged from the PARC workshop, both in terms of hardware and software.
In December 1979, then twenty-four-year-old Steve Jobs was also invited to PARC. During his inspection, he saw something he had never seen before – it was a mouse that could be used to click on an icon on the screen. It was immediately clear to the young Jobs that he had something in front of his eyes that had the potential to fundamentally change the way computing was used for personal purposes. A PARC employee told Jobs that experts had been working on the mouse for ten years.
Jobs was really excited. He ran to his car, returned to Cupertino, and announced to his team of software experts that he had just seen "the most incredible thing" called a graphical interface. He then asked the engineers if they were capable of doing the same - and the answer was a resounding "no". But Jobs refused to just give up. He ordered the employees to immediately drop everything and get to work on the graphical interface.
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“Jobs took the mouse and the graphical interface and combined the two. The result is the Macintosh—the most iconic product in Silicon Valley history. The product that sent Apple on the amazing journey it is on now.” says Gladwell.
The fact that we currently use computers from Apple and not from Xerox, however, according to Gladwell, does not mean that Jobs was smarter than the people at PARC. "No. They are smarter. They invented the graphical interface. He just stole it,” states Gladwell, according to whom Jobs simply had a sense of urgency, combined with the ability to jump into things immediately and see them through to a successful conclusion.
"The difference is not in means, but in attitude," Gladwell concluded his story, which he told at the New York World Business Forum in 2014.
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Source: Business Insider
In other words, did he steal an idea that another company had been working on for 10 years? Mainly because he fought against Samsung...
If I'm not mistaken, he bought the idea, i.e. the mouse and the graphical interface.
I see. The article sounded differently. Thanks.