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Comment by nirvana | Hacker News Reader

It is kinda astounding how often people use this quote and seem to think it means the opposite of what it means.

Steve Jobs is saying it is easy to copy. But if you're great, you steal the fundamental idea and do something totally new with it.

Apple didn't just copy the phones already on the market, they stole the idea of a cellphone and did something fundamentally different.

So different that we had 6 months of people saying it was going to be a failure, Ballmer going on the record saying there's no way they'd sell any significant numbers, and the RIM engineers telling upper management that the iPhone couldn't possibly work the way apple said!

Thats "stealing" -- doing something for which there is nothing comparable on the market, in Steve Jobs view.

Copying is when you look at a successful product and mimic it down to the millimeter.

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The distinction (I believe the original quote is Picasso, and the difference is that the great steal while others borrow) is that once you've STOLEN an idea your version is so much better than what you took the whole thing becomes YOURS. Borrowing an idea means that your version ends up simply looking like a lame attempt to copy the older idea, and people prefer the older idea.

So while there were GUIs before the Mac, once Apple had stolen their ideas and transformed them the stuff that had come before simply looked like crap. Similarly previous attempts, including by Apple, to create tablet devices look like crap beside the iPad.

>Steve Jobs is saying it is easy to copy. But if you're great, you steal the fundamental idea and do something totally new with it.

Is there an extended version of the linked video? I don't know where you got "and do something totally new with it" from his original quote. How did you extrapolate his true intent from the provided quote?

>Thats "stealing" -- doing something for which there is nothing comparable on the market, in Steve Jobs view.

That is certainly not the accepted definition of the word. I still don't understand how you've managed to take Steve Jobs words and claim they're a metaphor for "innovation". In what world are invent, innovate and steal synonymous?

From the video: "And 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."

Forgive me if I depart a moment from the explicit and literal, but I fail to see how you can apply ideas from music, poetry, zoology, art, and history without "doing something totally new with it." Did 19th century bookmakers and typesetters have the faintest idea what a computer was when they were practicing their craft? And would somebody making a computer screen without the slightest notion of what really went into calligraphy know which ideas to capture in writing rendering software? This is the essence of what Jobs meant by stealing. It wasn't, hey, let's just copy our competitor but make it cheaper.

As for "stealing," it's unfortunate word choice because the original quote from Picasso was in Spanish and he didn't say it in a trade (high art) where copying could be justified as "natural evolution."

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