Steve Jobs: Artist or Hippie Capitalist? 
Steve Jobs: Artist or Hippie Capitalist?
Let me get the obligatory “Hail to Steve” bit out of the way. Steve Jobs was a great businessman: a legendary product innovator and developer; an inspired marketer; a ruthless exploiter of monopoly power; and, within the companies he was associated with, a tremendous (and sometimes fearsome) source of energy and forward motion.But a great artist, as some have suggested, including the headline writers of the Huffington Post? If so, he was a great artist in the sense that Bob Dylan and Andy Warhol are great artists: hugely talented jackdaws who took other people’s half-baked innovations and converted them into beautiful products with mass appeal.* Apple didn’t build the first desktop computer based on a microprocessor: the Micral N and the MITS Altair predated the landmark Apple II. Steve Jobs didn’t create the mouse, either: he lifted it from a version he saw at the Xerox Parc research center in Palo Alto. George Lucas, and not Jobs, created Pixar. The Nomad Jukebox, a digital music player made by a company from Singapore, predated the iPod.Jobs’s real genius was seeing, before practically anybody else, that the computer industry was melding with the consumer-goods industry, and that success would go to products that were useful and well designed, but also nice to look at and cleverly branded. He took genuine innovations and improved upon them. The Apple Macintosh, released in 1984, was the first PC that didn’t look like it belonged in the basement of the campus science center surrounded by math books and used pizza boxes. The iBook used bright colors to make laptops look cool. The iPod, unlike the Nomad, was sleek and light enough to carry around in your pocket. In a 1996 PBS documentary called “Triumph of the Nerds,” Jobs himself said, “We have always been shameless about stealing great ideas.”Unlike Thomas Edison, to whom he has been compared, Jobs wasn’t really an inventor. In fact, by the standards of Silicon Valley, he wasn’t really a techie at all all. As John Markoff of the Times noted in his careful obituary: “Mr. Wozniak would be the technical half and Mr. Jobs the marketing half of the original Apple.” During the creation of the iPod, his main role, according to a 2006 article by Wired’s Leander Kahney, was in encouraging Jon Rubinstein, the former head of Apple’s hardware division, and Tony Fadell, an Apple engineer, to build something better than the Nomad.In the bigger picture, Jobs’s success owed a lot to the good fortune he had to grow up in Mountain View and Los Altos during the nineteen-seventies. With the invention of the microprocessor and the development of the Internet—both the products of government-financed research programs—Silicon Valley was brimming with technical ideas and snazzy components waiting to be converted into mass-market applications. Jobs saw the opportunity, and seized it brilliantly.If Jobs is to be categorized, he was a hippie capitalist—the leading member of a species that emerged from the nineteen-sixties and includes Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, the creators of Ben & Jerry’s; Richard Branson, the man behind Virgin Airlines; Anita Roddick, the founder of the Body Shop; Felix Dennis, the magazine impresario; and Jann Wenner, the founder of Rolling Stone. With their background in a movement that sneered at working for “the man,” these groovy entrepreneurs realized that one of the greatest advantages a business can have is to be considered hip and sensitive to larger issues.As their businesses grew, they tried, with varying degrees of success, to maintain their reputations as outsiders and renegades. Of course, it didn’t always work. Ironically, Wenner was quoted in the Times today complaining about the amount of control that Jobs and Apple sought to exert over the magazine industry. “There is no point for me or any other publisher to give them the name of my customer in exchange for two or three thousand replacement readers, so that ultimately, like the music business, I will be totally out of touch and not control the delivery,” Wenner said.Evidently, Wenner has come to sympathize with the sentiments behind the old punk-rock slogan “Never trust a hippy.” Many other technology and media executives who dealt with Jobs at the height of his success and power reached a similar conclusion. But few of them could hide their admiration for their tormentor. Even when he was acting like a nineteenth-century railroad magnate and mashing your business into the digital ether, Jobs was cool.*Updated: 10/9. Before the Bob Dylan and Andy Warhol appreciation societies try to have me deported, let me make clear that I am a fan of both, and I own (or have owned) copies of many of their well-known works. The point I was trying to make, and which I should have expressed more clearly, was that neither created the genres in which they worked: Dylan didn’t invent folk rock and Warhol didn’t invent pop art. Undoubtedly, though, they developed their genres in novel ways, creating things of lasting beauty. To correct my loose language, I have edited the offending sentence, omitting “only,” adding “hugely” and changing “beautifully made” to “beautiful.”Photograph by John Mabanglo/AFP/Getty.