Since Steve Jobs' death there have been many paeans to his genius, with many books and movies dedicated to his memory. There's no doubt that he accomplished a great deal, but his true genius wasn't so much as a technologist, but as a marketeer.
Not so long ago people laughed at the very idea of a tablet computer. Who would want one? It's too big compared to a cell phone, it doesn't have a keyboard so it's inferior to a laptop, it doesn't have enough processing horsepower to do "real" work, etc., etc.
But when Steve Jobs "invented" the iPad everything changed. Just the other week everyone was breathlessly awaiting the arrival of the third incarnation of the iPad. But did Steve Jobs and Apple really invent the tablet computer? Nope. Not even close.
It's an issue because Apple is suing other tablet manufacturers like Samsung for patent infringement. Apple is claiming that the Samsung device is a copy of the iPad, in part because it has round corners. Sorry, Apple, but you didn't invent round corners, or even the iPad's form-factor. Take a look at this video from Star Trek: The Next Generation's season 6 (circa 1992): Picard is holding what looks suspiciously like an iPad. The device is actually called a PADD (Personal Access Display Device). And Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey has another iPad precursor as well.
An article in the New York Times about Roger Fidler, a former Knight-Ridder think tank honcho, describes how Fidler designed an electronic newspaper in 1994. Fidler's group made a video in 1994 depicting how such a tablet computer would work. It pretty much looks like an iPad, only with a bigger screen and a stylus for input. Because Fidler's group worked for newspaper, they had no hardware or software development infrastructure so their ideas went nowhere. Except, it turns out, to Apple, who happened to be right next door.
Bill Gates had been pushing tablet computers for more than a decade, and everyone just laughed at him. We've seen those tablets running versions of Windows on futuristic TV shows like 24, though real people never seemed to own them. But in reality, ruggedized tablets with touch screens have been use in warehouses for many years to read RFID tags and maintain inventories. In the beginning everyone also laughed at Gates for pushing CDs as a computer storage medium.
The Amazon Kindle came out years before the iPad, and it had pretty decent success considering its limitations. It showed Jobs that the market was there for a table if it could be small and powerful enough: Jobs knew he could eat Jeff Bezos' lunch if he could make a general-purpose tablet that wasn't limited to reading e-books.
Apple has made a lot of cool stuff. But almost everything that makes the iPad possible was invented by someone else. Does Apple hold all the patents on Gorilla Glass? High-resolution LCD displays? Capacitive multi-touch screens? Low-power microelectronics? Flash memory? High-density batteries? Nope. Almost every piece of hardware in the iPad was invented by someone else. And the software is a clear evolution of everything that has gone before. Apple takes other people's work, puts it in a nice clean package and has it assembled by FoxConn in China. In fact, most of the patents Apple holds are on design and software, patents that the US Patent and Trademark office would have flatly rejected thirty years ago. And many of Apple's patents are either based on prior art (such as Fidler's work), or are blatantly obvious and therefore not patentable.
The iPad isn't the first idea that Jobs borrowed from someone else. Touch screens were in use for general computing at the University of Illinois in the early 1970s. Apple didn't make the first personal computer; the Altair 8800 and IBM 5100 came years before. The graphical user interface and the mouse, made popular on the Macintosh, were invented by Xeroc PARC. The Macintosh's key innovation was to make the hardware as cheap as possible while charging a premium price. The iPod was not the first MP3 player; it was introduced in 2001, four or five years after the first portable digital music players came out. Apple has enjoyed great success with the iPhone, but didn't invent the cell phone, or the touch-screen cell phone, or even the smart phone. Apple's OS X is based on BSD and UNIX, an operating system developed by Bell Labs in the 1970s, because the original Mac OS was pitifully inadequate for real multitasking.
Jobs wasn't a font of new ideas. He was good at recognizing the potential of technology, synthesizing disparate elements and refining the technology, then convincing people it was fabulous and getting them to pay top dollar for it. Apple was also unafraid to throw out bad or outdated products and ideas. They've often dropped entire hardware and software product lines to suit their needs, switching processors and operating systems on Apple products at least four times (from the 6502 in the Apple ][, to the 68000 in the Lisa and Mac, to the PowerPC, and finally the Intel platform). Microsoft Windows has been running on the Intel platform since its inception, and can still run MSDOS programs written more than 25 years ago. That has left Windows with a lot of clunky legacy code.
With its patent lawsuits—and similar lawsuits by other patent trolls—Apple has been working to stifle innovation and prevent exactly the type of synthesis and refinement that Jobs practiced his entire life. In effect, Apple's rationale for suing Samsung over the Galaxy tablet amounts to "we stole the idea fair and square."
I would venture to say that Apple's primary product is not its hardware, but an air of preening, smug superiority, as evidenced by the John Hodgman/Justin Long Mac/PC ads and the "If you don't have an iPad, well, you don't have an iPad" ad campaign.
It is rather sad and ironic that the 2011 Jobs would have done everything in his power to crush the 1976 Jobs and prevent him from ever getting a start.
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