Great artists steal the future
Steve Jobs once appropriated an old quote:
“Good artists copy, great artists steal.”
It’s becoming more and more clear that Steve felt personally betrayed by Google’s decision to enter the smartphone market with Android — an OS that is in almost every important way a copy of Apple’s iOS.
An early snippet from Steve Jobs’s forthcoming biography:
I will spend my last dying breath if I need to, and I will spend every penny of Apple’s $40 billion in the bank, to right this wrong,” Jobs said. “I’m going to destroy Android, because it’s a stolen product. I’m willing to go thermonuclear war on this.
Some see hypocrisy in this reaction.
I’ve always thought the “good artists copy” line was confusing, at best, so I started to think about it: What does it actually mean?
The best possible analysis, I think, rests in the distinction between copying and stealing.
They’re both negative concepts, at first blush, but the quote clearly indicates that stealing is better than copying.
Those who hold the quote against Steve, given his reaction to the rise of Android, often seem to conflate the two terms, but:
- Copying involves reproducing something wholesale and leaving the original intact.
- Stealing involves taking something and making it your own; the original owner is left with nothing.
It’s simple, really: There’s nothing bold about copying. Great artists (or designers, or whatever) take what they need and they make a product their own. But it’s also much bigger than that.
Apple didn’t invent the iPod, they stole the idea and made the music industry their own. The way we buy and listen to music is now shaped almost entirely by Apple’s vision.
Apple didn’t invent the smartphone, they stole the idea and reshaped the industry in their own vision. Yes, Apple has “copied” bits and pieces of iOS from other sources —notifications is the obvious example — but overall, the future of the mobile industry has been shaped by Apple.
Apple didn’t invent the tablet computer, they stole the idea and now iOS is the template for the tablet market.
The future isn’t about market share, it’s about a post-PC mindset:
Pre-iPad, tablets were attempting to hitch a ride East. Apple built a brand new car and started driving West.
Even assuming someone, someday, takes the bulk of the tablet market (as Google’s Android OS has done in mobile) they’ll be sitting bitch in Apple’s vision of a post-PC world.
As it stands, Apple owns the future and Microsoft still doesn’t know where their tablet ideas went.
The takeaway: In each of the above cases Apple stole the future out from under their competitors.
The reason Apple TV and iBooks aren’t taking off — the reason Apple isn’t owning those industries — is that Apple hasn’t stolen anything. They’ve brought almost nothing to the table. They copied our basic ideas of what an ebook reader and a streaming set-top video device can be:
“You wanted it, here it is.”
When Steve called Apple TV a hobby, he meant that Apple is borrowing ideas because they don’t yet know how to steal the industry. The future is still up for grabs.
I would argue that the reason Steve Jobs was so irate about Android (beyond the personal betrayal of Eric Schmidt) is that it seems to aspire to little more than a “good enough” facsimile of iOS, and most of Google’s hardware partners are slavishly aiming for “iPhone-like” hardware designs.
“Open” is Google’s attempt to steal the future, but it’s not catching on. (Google knows this because their extensive research tells them that people don’t “love” their Android phones. You can’t steal the future if no one feels a connection to your product.)
That just leaves the copying. Google isn’t taking ownership of anything except market share. Google is living in Apple’s stolen future.
That’s not to say that copying can’t be a successful business strategy. The quote doesn’t have much to say about whether “good” artists can move a lot of units and “great” is never a guarantee of long or short-term mainstream success.
I’ll leave off with the source of the “good artists” quote. It’s often attributed to Pablo Picasso, but it turns out it’s a bastardized version of a quote from a T.S. Eliot essay.
This may be the most apt description of the difference between Apple’s vision for iOS and Google’s for Android I’ve ever read. It’s also as good a summary of Steve Jobs’s legacy and genius as you’ll likely ever find:
One of the surest tests [of the superiority or inferiority of a poet] is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different than that from which it is torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest.
There’s only one way to design a smart phone!
2005 (Not a smart phone. Phones used to look like this, though, so I thought I’d set the stage.)
2007 (Apple’s first iPhone.)
2008 (Apple’s iPhone 3G.)
2010 (Apple’s iPhone 4.)
So, to recap, it’s commonly argued that there’s only one way (or not many ways) to design a smart phone, given that you’re dealing with a device that is mostly screen. This argument is made to bolster the view that it’s absurd for Apple to sue manufacturers who copy the look and feel of the iPhone, due to its proven success, rather than innovating — because Android manufacturers simply don’t have a choice.
Yet…
The 1st generation iPhone (Only 2 Gs!) couldn’t be more different than the cell phones which had previously dominated the market.
The iPhone 3G made modest changes to the 1st generation iPhone, but looking at the two devices from behind, they’re distinctly different.
The iPhone 4, on the other hand, is a complete rethinking of the look and feel of a touchscreen smart phone. It looks nothing at all like the iPhone which preceded it. In fact, Apple’s design change wasn’t merely cosmetic — the change was so radical that it’s new (revolutionary!) antenna system caused usability problems and a temporary media crisis. (Innovation and risk go hand in hand.)
Apple, at least, doesn’t seem to have any problem coming up with new, advanced designs for its touchscreen smart phones. In just over three years, we’ve seen two iPhone designs which are unlike anything we’ve ever seen before.
Apparently, when people say “there’s only one way to design a smartphone” they mean:
“Whichever way Apple is doing it.”
Blog Redux: An unsolicited rewrite of an Andy Rutledge blog post
Caveat: I don’t know Andy Rutledge, and I only semi-followed the brouhaha involving his unsolicited redesign of the NY Times website — and only then because the part I followed involved my cousin and Lendle partner, Jeff Croft.
In this case, I think Jeff’s criticisms — and popular opinion — seem to be justified. More importantly, Rutledge appears to be missing, or ignoring, the point of most of the criticism and has now veered off into hyperbole. (Libel? Really?) To that end, I’m offering a totally unsolicited redesign of his initial blog post:
News Redux
July 17, 2011
I think this is as good a place as any for Rutledge to make all the caveats he seems to be making in hindsight. Right at the top. It probably would have been wise to (at least) feign respect for those who put a lot of work into the design he’s about to dismantle.
Also, as Rutledge is a designer, but not (I assume?) involved in the news in any real way, that probably would have been worth mentioning, as well. Admitting our own limitations while pointing out the faults of others seems humble. Rutledge doesn’t.
Digital news is broken. Actually, news itself is broken. Almost all news organizations have abandoned reporting in favor of editorial; have cultivated reader opinion in place of responsibility; and have traded ethical standards for misdirection and whatever consensus defines as forgivable. And this is before you even lay eyes on what passes for news design on a monitor or device screen these days.
In digital media—websites in particular—news outlets seldom if ever treat content with any sort of dignity and most news sites are wedded to a broken profit model that compels them to present a nearly unusable mishmash of pink noise…which they call content.
In an effort to disguise and mitigate the fact that they have little idea how to publish digital content properly—often sneakily called “differentiation”—some news outlets release apps for digital devices. These apps typically (but not always) do a better job of presenting content and facilitating navigation, but they’re a band aid on a festering abdominal wound. Digital media is simply digital media; if you do it right you publish once and it works anywhere. If you’re using an app to deliver content, you’re doing it wrong.
Complete assholish and accusatory snark. He should rewrite all of the above without it. That is, if he doesn’t want to spend the next few days arguing with the internet.
Instead of working with a handful of redundant, mitigating formats (websites, mobile sites, apps, etc…) for content delivery to popular devices, news organizations should simply deliver it correctly in the first place, one time; using html, css, JavaScript, …oh, and design. The employment of content design would be quite refreshing, actually.
More of same. See above.
News Today
Some news sites are done better and some worse, but The New York Times presents a rather typical example of terribly-designed news. As they are somewhat well known in the news industry, I’ll use their site as the redux example in this article (know, however, that it is news in general that I’m talking about).
The Times politics page. I think the object of the game must be to fit as much “content” onto the page as possible in an effort to overwhelm the reader, tricking them into believing that the NY Times is just bursting with a mindbogglingly-bottomless array of important information. If only the reader could learn to ignore 60% of what’s here, she might have a chance at a pleasant experience. Please stop helping. What you’ve got here is not content, but noise.
It is hard to believe that the Times, or any other similar publication, actually cares about the news when they treat it with this sort of indignity. Worse, the design makes it quite hard and often frustrating to simply scan the news and find stories that one might be interested in. As a news reader, I want to be able to scan headlines and logically find news I’m interested in reading. And by logically, I mean according to clear, usable, undistracted organization and filtering.
It’s hard to say whether Rutledge is angry about the state of the news industry, or the state of design in the news industry, but one way to avoid a fight is to not pick one. Perhaps I’m beating a dead horse, here, but Rutledge could have avoided most of the ensuing fallout by simply being a bit more magnanimous, throughout.
For example, putting the word content into quotes is nothing more than a smug insult. I picture him finger quoting the word as I read it, and that’s just unacceptably annoying.
At this point, Rutledge finally gets around to his comps as well as some text that is centered around his opinions about how to improve the usability of the NY Times website.
It is, of course, all highly debatable and opinionated. It’s pie-in-the-sky utopian design, but that’s what blogs are for, right? The phrase “in a perfect world…” comes to mind, and that’s the sort of scenario which can open up a great dialogue, providing you don’t immediately trip up your audience with rude and unhelpful commentary.
My initial suggestion that Rutledge acknowledge his lack of experience in designing for the news has the overall benefit of padding his opinions with a sense of humility. Instead, we’re served up a heaping helping of ego which, apparently, everyone was supposed to overlook, or just swallow whole.
In the end, there’s no point in telling someone what opinions to have, but Rutledge seems to need a primer in “how” to have opinions, if he’s determined to express them in a reaction free environment.
I would add one thing, right at the end: Rutledge goes to great lengths to dismantle someone else’s work, and he does so in an fairly dickish tone. It seems a bit cowardly to provide no real mechanism for feedback and, if anything, that’s what led to the public drubbing he’s now facing. Having a strong opinion almost always means others will, as well. Better to face it in on your own turf than to have the fight erupt elsewhere.
Comments aren’t generally necessary on blogs, but they are if you want to crap all over someone’s work AND later complain that detractors then took to their own outlets in response.
