“The Edison of Our Age”????
In the wake of Steven Jobs stepping down as CEO of Apple, one network newsreader confidently referred to him as “The Edison of Our Age.” This was done not as proclamation, but as a statement of fact. After a fit of coughing, I realized it was mostly true, but not as the news writer had intended. In reality, as in our own industry, “context” defines the importance of the development, not the brilliance of the original idea. It’s the package and the system that really defines the usefulness of the chip.
Edison was a great man and I’m sure Steven Jobs is too. Edison, while a brilliant experimenter himself, harnessed many brilliant men into an invention-making machine. Jobs certainly did that as well. He provided a kind of marketing genius to see what people would need, want, and eventually, really desire. In that, Jobs showed himself to be the artist Edison never was.
With Steve Wozniak, Mike Markkula and others, he helped design the Apple II series, successful, though not terribly good for writing.
One of my problems is that I’m a Jobsian contemporary. I’ve been there for the successes and what I feel were failures (like the Mac price point). I tried using the Apple for scriptwriting and eventually threw it over for a CP/M machine (even though I had to embed all the formatting codes as I wrote). The CP/M world featured tiny, tightly written programs that did huge things for their size—but they were text-only 8-bit devices. When the IBM PC came out (again just off the shelf technology but packaged for a business user and featuring primitive color graphics and a mammoth 16-bit processor) it swiftly overwhelmed the pioneers.
But Apple, with Jobs’ practical and passionate imagination, crafted SmallTalk into a user-lovable mouse-mad form and the Mac was off to the races.
A race it never won in business terms but probably will win in the history books, or rather “tablets” or whatever form they eventually take–partly because most historians will be writing/speaking/emoting/thinking on Apple-derived devices.
Edison, you’ll recall, was the prophet of DC. In the infrastructure wars his (sometimes underhanded) campaigns against AC finally failed. Had we ended up free of the curse of power lines but chained to a power station every other block, we would have had a steam-punk future. He succeeded in research because of doggedness, business skills, and the ability to harness a mass of technologists much like Ford harnessed mass production. Come to think of it, Edison was a master of that too.
Also, like with all inventions and even nation states, there is a time and a context for success. Job’s real legacy (and he ain’t dead yet), is an imagination for the user, not what they want, but what they will want and what they will aspire to want. If Apple can keep striking that chord, regardless of tactical failures, they will finally win the consumer-communication-lifestyle idea war. And in that future, Jobs will as likely be compared to Napoleon as Edison.