Steve Jobs was a tweaker, Malcolm Gladwell writes in a New Yorker book review of the Steve Jobs biography. He took existing technologies and perfected them, obsessing about everything from the title bars at the top of windows in the Mac OS to the color of paint in his factories. This obsessive quality was part of who he was and extended to his personal life as well. He spent two weeks deciding what kind of washing machine to buy for his family.
Gladwell notes that tweakers who perfect inventions often bring about more progress than the original inventors:
Jobs's sensibility was editorial, not inventive. His gift lay in taking what was in front of him�the tablet with stylus�and ruthlessly refining it
He was an editor in the sense that he saw his job as making hard choices on behalf of consumers. (Other product-oriented CEOs following in his footsteps, such as Jack Dorsey, also see their role as that of an editor). Jobs was really good at saying “No,”, as I’ve written before:
One of Jobs' greatest talents was as an editor, selecting what not to include in a product. It was that ability which helped him save Apple from going off in 18 different directions and do a few things better than any other company.
In order to do so, he went through countless choices himself, typically rejecting a long line of options from those presented to him by the people who worked for him until he found perfection. He didn’t always know what he wanted until it was placed before him. “I'll know it when I see it. That was Jobs's credo” Gladwell writes, “and until he saw it his perfectionism kept him on edge.”
Steve Jobs was the co-founder and CEO of Apple and formerly Pixar.
Steve Jobs was born in San Francisco, California to Joanne Simpson and a Syrian father. Paul and Clara Jobs of Mountain View, California then adopted him. In 1972, Jobs graduated from Homestead High School in Cupertino, California and enrolled in Reed College in Portland, Oregon. One semester later, he had dropped out, later taking up the study of philosophy and foreign cultures.
Steve Jobs had a deep-seated interest in...
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Started by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne, Apple has expanded from computers to consumer electronics over the last 30 years, officially changing their name from Apple Computer, Inc. to Apple, Inc. in January 2007.
Among the key offerings from Apple’s product line are: Pro line laptops (MacBook Pro) and desktops (Mac Pro), consumer line laptops (MacBook) and desktops (iMac), servers (Xserve), Apple TV, the Mac OS X and Mac OS X Server operating systems, the iPod (offered with...
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