Steve Job at his Job

Up until this week, I had thought of Steve Jobs as a legend, who was innovative through his simplicity in the way he designed and invented the original designs of Apple products. Like many other members of the general public, I had thought of this man as a technology God.

(Source: talentdevelop)

Although I still see him with great admiration, Malcolm Gladwell's article, "The Tweaker: The real genius of Steve Jobs," compelled me to alter my view of Jobs. Gladwell discusses Job's tendency to "tweak" rather than invent. In other words, instead of having the ability to create something from zero, this man needs to visually analyze something, see what's wrong with it, and then give it a unique touch of improvement.

"I'll know it when I see it." - Steve Jobs

There are various instances where Jobs tweaked something in existence that he thought needed improvement. With a few touches, this man converted such inventions into much better and profitable products. Many critics of this man saw it as a lack of creativity, plagiarism, etc. To me, it is a debatable subject, specially with the knowledge I have gained in Collaborating in Online Communities. After reading this particular article, I did not seem to hate the idea of tweaking, quite the contrary. Jobs was collaborating and using information available to him to advance our technology community. By using others' personal contributions, individuals are able to refine them, and that way the community can benefit and advance as a whole.

(Source: betanews)

This article also made me think about the legal aspect of collaboration and copyright. On the one hand, collaboration is what allows for invention. It is previous mistakes that enhance creativity and allow for analysis to further improvement. But on the other hand, is it fair for Jobs to take an invention, which took time, money, and many other resources, slightly tweak it and make significantly more profit? It seems immoral to completely discredit the inventor of the tweaked invention, but at the same time everything around us today are collaborative results of tweaking. We didn't arrive at environmentally friendly LED dimming light bulbs by suddenly "inventing" them from scratch. It comes from tweaking after tweaking, from the start with wax candles.

(Source: knxtoday)

In conclusion, the advancing technologies and collaborative communities will inevitably and exponentially continue to raise questions regarding copyright and legal issues with new innovations, and it will be a challenge to control or solve this issues. With this said, online communities have to become acceptable of the idea of Open Source, allowing free access to others' information as long as you do so in an appropriate way. In class, we talked about how failure is essential for improvement, you can't improve if everything is done perfectly. This process would be inefficient if the failure, tweaking, and work towards success was al left to one individual. As I mentioned before, our world is improving as a result of tweaking collaboratively.