The dichotomy the author of the cartoon was trying to achieve was geek (Tesla) versus non-geek (Edison) and the distinction might be important but very much overly simplified in the cartoon, because the world is better when geeks and non-geeks work together. The world is also better when we stop thinking in false dichotomies and look for those nuanced gray areas where the secrets of life really happen.
I’d like to chew on the nuances in the space between geek and non-geek and other false dichotomies—Government/Business, Open/Closed Systems, Microsoft/Apple, AC/DC—and look at how finding some sort of middle ground in a spirit of collaborative competition is what makes innovation happen. This post was prompted by recent readings of biographies on Tesla and Jobs but morphed into a whole other beast as I sat down and wrote, so that’s why it might appear jumbled, but all of it revolves around the idea of how innovation happens in the gray areas.
The times that Jobs and Tesla lived in are not that different. The Gilded Age Tesla occupied was a wild time with banks and railroads failing, the economy crashing, but even with all the chaos an Age of Invention was taking place. Sound familiar? The parallels between the late 19th century’s attempts at electrification and our own age in disseminating broadband are uncannily similar. Just as rural electrification took time (not until the 1940s did most rural areas have electricity, despite the US having a rural economy), now we are facing the difficulties of the digital divide and there is a notable disparity between those who have access to broadband and those who don’t.
It’s strange that we always forget that necessity is the root of innovation. When we can’t rely on Big Government or Big Business, inventors make it on their own with really mad ideas. Even still, the dichotomy between Government and Business—just as real of a debate then as it is now—is a false one because being anti-government is most definitely not pro-business. The two behemoths work best in partnership and when little guys find their place in the space between the two. It’s sad that the current public debate has been debased and simplified so much that people actually think that being against the government helps business when so many of our innovations (electrification and broadband Internet are the first to come to mind) come from the great partnership between government and business, though surely there is a time when government needs to get out of the way and let business do its job. After sparking the innovation with research grants and the like, because businesses have a hard time working on their own when it comes to innovating for the long term or for longer out than the reporting of next quarter’s operating results, government needs to find a position that doesn’t stifle innovation. It’s also curious that Tesla and Edison operated in this strange space between Big Government and Big Business that was widened when both behemoths were failing. (But then Edison became Big Business and Tesla joined Westinghouse who became Big Business.)
Thinking about our geek/non-geek dichotomy, on the geek spectrum Steve Jobs falls into the non-geek area (but of course with a lot of geek creds). Like Edison, as a non-geek (he couldn’t program), a businessman first, asshole, his lack of geekiness in a milieu of geeks (computer programmers), combined with his innate business acumen and even his tendency to be an asshole, were what helped him to create great products that benefit society.
Jobs pays homage to Edwin Land of Polaroid who made reference to the importance of people who could stand at the intersection of the humanities and the sciences, which represents the San Francisco Bay Area of Jobs’s time, where you have engineers at Ames and the legendary Stanford Engineering Department but you also have a rich music and cultural scene that inspired creative thought and was really pushing boundaries. Jobs’s greatest contribution to world history was that he obsessed over being at the nexuses of sciences and the humanities, technology and liberal arts, commodities and art. And nobody capitalized on this important intersection more than Jobs, as the iPod perfectly exemplifies, and only Da Vinci did it as beautifully.
Not an engineering geek per se, what Jobs excelled at was obsessing over a product to the point where he made the product truly meaningful to human beings. Jobs’s father, a mechanic and hobbyist cabinet maker, taught him that you have to build the back of cabinets right even though you don’t see them, a classic wood worker’s mantra. This lesson from his father isn’t surprising given Jobs’s attention to detail on products.
Having grown up in the Bay Area, I deeply relate to Jobs’s obsession with the elegant design simplicity of Eichler homes (Eichlers are the little details I really miss about home)—clean modernism made for the masses of engineers, doctors and professors, condensed along the 280 corridor, particularly in the South Bay Area. In many ways, the simplicity of Eichler homes became a model for the iPod and the first Mac.
Working for a powering solutions company that makes power supplies for broadband applications, I appreciated Jobs’s obsession with power supplies as a way to improve product and the power supplies’ very importance in how Jobs innovated computing. Geeks like Wozniak paid little attention to the analog and very mundane power supply, but Jobs, because he was obsessed with detail, obsessed over the power supply in the Apple II. In particular he wanted to provide power in a way that would allow the Apple II to go without a fan, and this lack of fans is something that characterizes Apple products to this day. The less is better mantra makes Jobs’s products more useful. Jobs dropped by Atari where he used to work and visited Rod Holt, a chain-smoking Marxist who turned Jobs onto power supplies like those used in oscilloscopes, which instead of switching power on or off 60 times per second, switched power thousands of times in a second, allowing it to store power for a longer time and release less heat as a bi-product. Hence, Apple’s fan-less products created fans of efficient and beautiful products.
For Jobs, packaging was key and he knew how to package from the get-go. Wozniak deserves the credit for the design of the Apple computer’s clean circuit board and related operating software, which was one of the era’s great feats of solo invention. But Jobs was the one who integrated Wozniak’s boards into a friendly package, from the power supply to the sleek case. He also created the company that sprang up around Wozniak’s machines while Wozniak was more like a goofy geek who just wanted everybody to have fun and not get caught up in Jobs’s tirades or the idea of making a profit from the enterprise. Noble but naïve ideas, but the world is better because Jobs promoted products with unique packaging.
The day Jobs got Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in 1979 to “open the kimono” and show him what Xerox’s West Coast skunk works division was working on was a historic day that put Apple on the map. Jobs instantly recognized that PARC was sitting on a gold mine and “borrowed” so many ideas that PARC was working on, like a GUI with a bitmapped screen and the mouse. Per Picasso: “Good artists copy, great artists steal.” The difference is artists know how to package their theft well.
When people complain about Apple products, they complain about their tight integration and the notion that the products are packaged too well, as if it were a bad thing. It wasn’t as if Jobs just stole PARC’s mouse to commercialize it. He took an entirely theoretical idea with little to no practical application and made it user friendly. PARC’s mouse couldn’t drag items around on the screen and really couldn’t be used for anything practical when Jobs first saw it.
Jobs’s team ran with the desktop metaphor theorized by PARC and transformed it into virtual reality by allowing the user to directly touch, manipulate, drag, and relocate desktop icons. Using complex coding, they made regions in which windows could overlap each other, something that we take for granted now but was a big deal in its time. What makes Apple products is the tight vertical integration between application software, operating system and hardware device. Jobs was all about control and the closed system that Jobs championed is anti-hacker, anti-free spirit and against some of the espoused ideas of his 60s ideals. No time in our history represents such strange contradictions.
But Jobs was a man of many contradictions and that he could stand in between these contradictions is what made his ideas so innovative. As Walter Isaacson, author of his biography points out: Jobs “was an antimaterialistic hippie who capitalized on the inventions of a friend who wanted to give them away for free, and he was a Zen devotee who made a pilgrimage to India and then decided that his calling was to create a business. And yet somehow these attitudes seemed to weave together rather than conflict.” Once again, here we are back at the idea of false dichotomies and the notion that innovation happens in the gray areas.
In his dedication to tight integration, Jobs was so strong-willed that he didn’t want his creations mutated by unworthy programmers. As ZDNet’s editor Dan Farber said, tinkering with Jobs’s products “would be as if someone off the street added some brush strokes to a Picasso painting or changed the lyrics to a Dylan song.” Jobs instituted such practices as designing a case so that it couldn’t be opened with a screwdriver just to keep people from tinkering.
One thing I learned from reading about Jobs’s life was that we have to let go of the notion that for Apple to win Microsoft has to lose and the false dichotomy between Microsoft and Apple, and nowadays it’s Apple versus Google. Jobs and Bill Gates were tighter as friends and collaborators than I would have imagined. One of Jobs’s more humble moments comes when he convinced Gates to still design software for the Mac and got an investment from Microsoft in Apple: “Bill, thank you for your support of this company. I think the world’s a better place for it.” And it’s true that these 2 very different philosophies work better for everybody both when they’re competing and working in harmony at the same time in a sort of collaborative competition.
The Open and fragmented versus Closed and integrated question when it comes to operating systems and computing products will be a perennial one, but I’m a believer that the answer is always both. Advancement of humankind by putting the best tools in our hands only happens when we utilize the advantages of both these competing paradigms and what they have to teach us. The tidy user experience, unified field theory, a testament to Job’s control and belief in simplicity and unity doesn’t allow the tinkering and customizing a product might need for certain applications that a Gates-philosophy product would give us. The answer is always both, and both Jobs and Gates came to that conclusion in a 3-hour discussion they had near Jobs’s death after Gates walked through Jobs’s back gate. What surprises, even more than Jobs keeping a rather simple house instead of a mansion, just allowing Gates to walk in through the back door, is the deep friendship the two had, and the (dare I say it) heart-warming discussions the 2 purported adversaries had.
Just like we have a Jobs because we had a Gates pushing him, and vice versa (coincidentally they were born in the same year), we have a Tesla because we had an Edison pushing him.
Much has been made of Edison not having invented the light bulb, an urban myth commonly repeated in polite conversation because nobody can think of the person who did. Let’s credit a number of scientists and inventors who either worked in unison or borrowed each others’ ideas in a spirit of collaborative competition, which also marks Tesla and Edison’s divisive but productive rivalry. In the end, Edison was the first to make a commercially practical incandescent light and the first to market the light bulb to households, but much credit must be given to his predecessors.
Edison was strong at promoting his inventions. Tesla worked for a time as a ditch digger because he could not convince others of the worthiness of his AC inventions while Edison furthered his campaign against AC. Tesla’s AC eventually won out in its time but there are a number of advantages to DC in certain applications: safer low voltage operation, increased efficiency, seamless transfer, use in electronics and battery applications. The competitive collaboration, because their lives did touch, though not usually in friendly ways, was what made innovation happen in power.
While Jobs found use for other people’s inventions, Tesla sometimes suffered when he experimented without thought for use of his inventions, which isn’t really bad, but just made it harder for him. Jobs made the important contribution of making technology more than just technology for technology’s sake but for real and practical use. Tesla, though genius, had a hard time crossing the dichotomy and finding the middle grounds between technology/invention/art and mundane human tasks whereas Jobs succeeded when he got that very subtle notion of not being a programmer/technologist or really a “true” businessman, but understanding the importance of being at the nexus between the two where creativity happens.
In the end, we have to let go of false dichotomies, which doesn’t mean we don’t fight for our ideals (which all of these innovators did). We just have to know when to concede and where to find the middle ground that is really meaningful. It’s hard work, but somebody’s gotta do it.
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