What Jobs was talking about was bringing a wide cultural, arts and literary hinterland to bear on the process of designing products. That’s the only time it’s every deployed. It matters because it’s only every quoted in relation to discussion about other companies copying Apple products and is only ever used in order to diminish the crassness of the copiers by implying that Apple does the same sort of thing. Of course it matters that it’s not about copying products. You just proved Steve Jobs copies ideas, not that there needed to be any more proof. Your attempt to excuse your hypocrisy shoots yourself in the foot. Hell, you’re even on record confusing patents and copyright together because you think ideas shouldn’t be allowed to be copied. Ideas don’t become original just because you bought it off someone else and marketed it better. Ideas don’t become original just because you add “with a computer” to the end of it. He’s still copying other people’s ideas, whether or not they are in the computer industry or not. It DOESN’T MATTER that it’s not about copying other products. You only say it’s stupid because it takes you down two pegs. That sort sort obtuse and pedantic behaviour in pursuit of propping up fallacious arguments leaves people without a shred of intellectual dignity and should be avoided like the plague. What would, to use Jobs term, ‘being very narrow’ mean in practice? Well it could mean endlessly dredging up a sentence from a Steve Jobs interview in 1995, taking it out of context, fetishising it, implying it is about one thing when it is about another, and then using it to prop up a delusional world view and a deliberately fallacious argument in defence of crass product cloners or in order to try to pretend that Apple are not innovative. It is not about copying other products in part or in total. So the oft used quote is about about bringing parts of other disciplines, from literature, art and culture, into computer science and product design. I don’t think you get that if you are very narrow. And they brought with them to this effort a very liberal arts attitude that we wanted to pull in the best we saw in these other fields into this field. But if it hadn’t been for computer science these people would have all been doing amazing things in life in other fields. I think part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians and poets and artists, and zoologists and historians who also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world. We have always been shameless about stealing great ideas.
He said good artists copy great artists steal.
It comes down to trying to to expose yourself to the best things humans have done and then try to bring those things in to what you are doing. In response to the question “But how do you know what’s the right direction?” Steve Jobs said: I doubt you know, without using Google, where or when Jobs said that sentence, or the sentences and thus the context that surrounded it. It’s the favourite quote of people, like you, who are seeking to use it out of context and to make it appear to be about something it is not.
It’s easy to misquote by taking a sentence out of context, and in this case the out of context sentence has become a sort of tech urban legend. “Picasso had a saying - ‘good artists copy great artists steal’ - and we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas.” – Steve Jobs ’96. Ah well let’s get this out here for the record, so we can all feel either really smug now or completely misunderstood depending on your perspective:
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