Jobs

Stuck on a plane and lacking viable options I’m watching a movie on the subject of Steve Jobs.

A man that I met once for a business meeting and one that didn’t resemble the one in the movie.

Indeed it’s chestnut central, this movie.

The Jobs character even said “whoever said ‘give the customer what they want’ was probably a customer.”

It’s a tad confusing because I’m pretty sure I saw another movie on the subject and it wasn’t this one.

But maybe the Americans made more than one. They’re pretty much into eulogising Jobs.

And I’m not sure why. Although he was at the helm when a few things happened for the first time, these things were going to happen without him, in time.

Many innovations are like this.

Flight for example. If the Wright brothers had run out of cash then someone else would have been the first to get airborne that year or the next.

Just as a thought experiment I made a special category of innovation, one where it’s highly likely that an innovation wouldn’t have happened ever if the originator hadn’t innovated when they did.

I couldn’t think of a single technical innovation to put into that bucket.

Firstly, all of old-school science is ruled out of this category since it was just about all ‘discovery’; putting words ands maths to observations of nature.

This is “plod” country, and the so called great scientists are completely redundant to the process.

Once the unexplained observation exists it’s only a matter of time before some highly functional Asperges character figures it out.

Physics for example wouldn’t have had to wait too long for Relativity if Einstein had fallen under a bus.

Secondly, there’s engineering which includes all of IT. Plod, plod, plod. What has happened always would have, in one similar form or another.

If VHS had never been funded we would have happily used Betamax for a couple of decades and it would now be long redundant. Who cares?

Truthfully the only true innovators are in the arts, where ironically the genius of creation is totally subjective. But also totally unique.

So why are science and technology innovators, the first to create the inevitable, given so much airtime?

I suspect that it’s just for encouragement. The story that is spun is that the rewards supposedly go to the winner of the race. The money, the fame and the power.

Unless you’re Confucian.

Then you’d know that the rewards go to the person with the most money hanging around waiting to pick up the new things at the appropriate time.

Imagine that; a whole country that thinks like tricky financiers. There’s a reason why they don’t have to fight wars too often.