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Steve Jobs 'Invented Nothing' -- Just Like Da Vinci and Edison

SAP

Steve Jobs: Inventor Supreme (Image via Wikipedia)

My recent post refuting the canard-y contention that Steve Jobs didn’t really invent anything drew some passionate and insightful comments from readers that are well worth sharing.

Quick review: on the web site AllThingsD.com, Erik Hesseldahl has an article about an interview he conducted with tech-industry pundit Mark Anderson about the latter’s 10 big predictions for 2012.

In the course of that interview, Anderson at one point says, “Steve Jobs didn’t really invent anything at all. But he was great at integrating things into a product.”

My reaction to that can be conveyed in a paraphrase of a Charles Dickens line: if that’s the definition of “invent,” then that definition is a ass.

A number of readers agreed with my disagreement (you can see all the comments by clicking on the link to the post and scrolling down to the bottom of the first page to the Comments section):

“James” artfully wove Leonardo Da Vinci into the discussion of what the word “invent” means: Time to retire the word “invent”. It is made totally meaningless by pundits like Anderson. Leonardo Da Vinci also did not invent the Mona Lisa. He just randomly splashed paint on a canvas.

Reader “hembreeder” focused on the beauty and joy that Jobs breathed into Apple’s products: He understood that technology that no one enjoyed using productively was worthless. So I would say he invented user metaphors. He invented ways of making technology so easy, fun and useful that people fell in love with Apple’s devices.

He invented better ways of using interfaces. All the technology was there. Jobs just put it together in inventive, new ways, patentable ways. So we say that he was the most inventive leader in technology of the past 20 years. How can a man be inventive without inventing anything?

Reader “bdkennedy” brought into the discussion a man widely regarded as one of the foremost inventors in America’s history: I suggest Mark Anderson read how Thomas Edison invented the light bulb. Edison didn’t invent the tungsten filament or the glass housing but he combined them to form the first light bulb.

Reader “toyboat” went far back into the annals of creativity to offer this anecdote about the fuzzy line Anderson was trying to straddle: By logical extension, the person who invented the first lever was just integrating rocks and trees that were already there!

Reader “truth” blended innovation and discovery into the mix as well, Anderson was …confusing innovation with discovery. Apple is not discovering things, but every new product is an invention of sorts. And the great thing about it is that most everyone of them is amostly UNIVERSALLY panned by dimwits before becoming a blockbuster product! Even the Mac ‘faithful’ though the iPod was a horribly BAD idea. If you don’t believe me, watch the introduction of the original iPod–the audience looked at Jobs like he was insane. Software is an invention process. And Steve pushed it to be what it was.

Invention, creation, discovery, innovation, integration—dictionaries might find it easy to parse each of those terms into neat and discrete bundles, but such distinctions are a lot more difficult to make in our very real, very dynamic, and very fluid business-technology world here on the edge of 2012.

My vote? I’d say Steve Jobs will ultimately be remembered as one of the world’s foremost inventors—as well as one of the foremost creators, integrators, innovators, and discoverers—of the 20th and 21st centuries.

Because in the world of the present and the past, “invention” has been limited to descriptions of tangible, palpable physical things. But in the world of tomorrow, inventions will live not only in the world of physical artifacts but also in the realm of digits, ideas, and imagination.

And in that realm, Steve Jobs will reign pre-eminent for a long time to come.

(Follow me on Twitter at bobevansSAP.)         

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