HOW APPLES STEVE JOB's STOLE THE COMPUTER MOUSE FROM XEROX

[Anonymous]

HOW APPLES STEVE JOB’s STOLE THE COMPUTER MOUSE FROM XEROX

Is there a difference between ripping off and inventing? Not when by ripping it off you make it practical, and for all practical persons, Steve Jobs effectively invented the first modern computer mouse in the mid-70s… by stealing it from Xerox.

In the latest episode of NPR’s All Things Considererd, Malcolm Gladwell tells the story about how Steve Jobs first brought the mouse to Apple. It’s a fantastic look inside Steve’s brain, and how he can reduce a complicated concept down to its essence for mass consumption.

According to Gladwell, when Steve Jobs visited Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center in the late 1970′s, he was amazed by what he saw: a demonstration of a new three-button computer mouse.

The only problem? It cost $300. Realizing that this would be the perfect interface innovation for his Apple Computer, Jobs took the concept to industrial designer Dean Hovey, who “improved” the mouse by dropping two of its buttons… and, along with them, the mouse’s build price, which sank to just $15.

Obviously, Apple’s decision to favor just a single mouse button has been a contentious one. To this day, it’s one of the first snarky comments Windows users like to ignorantly drop when you say you’re a Mac user. In fact, Apple’s single mouse button aesthetic is commonly leveled as an example as to how Cupertino’s obsession with simple interfaces can be taken too far.

When you actually hear Gladwell explain how the single button mouse came about, though, the genius of the decision really clicks. Not only is a single button mouse an easier interface to introduce to users either new to computers or used to text-only input, but it dropped the build price of the mouse to a level where every consumer could afford to buy one.

And why was it so important for every Apple Computer owner to have a mouse? So Steve Jobs could unveil his other big new product inspired by his Xerox Labs visit: the Macintosh, and its GUI-based OS. Genius.

http://http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/05/16/110516fa_fact_gladwell
Creation Myth
Xerox PARC, Apple, and the truth about innovation.
ABSTRACT:  about Xerox PARC, Apple, and the creation of the personal computer. Describes a visit by Steve Jobs to Xerox PARC in 1979. Xerox PARC was the innovation arm of the Xerox Corporation. In 1970, Xerox had assembled the world’s greatest computer engineers and programmers, and for the next ten years they had an unparalleled run of innovation and invention. By 1979, Apple was already one of the hottest tech firms in the country. So Jobs proposed a deal: he would allow Xerox to buy a hundred thousand shares of his company for a million dollars—its highly anticipated I.P.O. was just a year away—if PARC would “open its kimono.” Jobs was given a couple of tours, and he ended up standing in front of a Xerox Alto, PARC’s prized personal computer. Describes the innovations the Alto featured, including the mouse, icons, and “windows.” Xerox soon began selling a version of the Alto. It was slow and underpowered—and Xerox withdrew from personal computers. Jobs, meanwhile, raced back to Apple, and demanded that the team working on the company’s next generation of personal computers change course. He wanted menus on the screen. He wanted windows. He wanted a mouse. The result was the Macintosh, perhaps the most famous product in the history of Silicon Valley. Tells about the mouse created for Jobs by the industrial-design firm that became known as IDEO. Considers whether Jobs “stole” the personal computer from Xerox, or whether it is more accurate to say that he and Apple adapted some of Xerox PARC’s ideas for a different audience. Compares the evolution of the personal computer to the so-called Revolution in Military Aairs ( R.M.A.), as analyzed in “The Culture of Military Innovation,” by Dima Adamsky. Adamsky begins with the simple observation that it is impossible to determine who invented R.M.A. The first people to imagine how digital technology would transform warfare were a cadre of senior military intellectuals in the Soviet Union, during the nineteen-seventies. The first country to come up with these high-tech systems was the United States. And the first country to use them was Israel, in 1982. That’s three revolutions, not one, and Adamsky’s point is that each of these strands is necessarily distinct, drawing on separate skills and circumstances. Tells about the work of Gary Starkweather, an optical engineer who worked for Xerox and helped develop the laser printer. Starkweather transferred to Xerox PARC after feeling frustrated at the company’s East Coast research center. Discusses psychologist Dean Simonton’s ideas about importance of fecundity in innovation and creation. “Quality,” Simonton writes, is “a probabilistic function of quantity.” Simonton’s point is that there is nothing neat and efficient about creativity. “The more successes there are,” Simonton says, “the more failures there are as well”—meaning that the person who had far more ideas than the rest of us will have far more bad ideas than the rest of us, too. This is why managing the creative process is so difficult. Tells how, in 1988, Jobs hired Starkweather away from Xerox to join Apple.

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May 18, 2011 at 10:09 AM