from Marketing Memetics, by Michael Taylor
Could the iPhone have been invented by anyone other than Steve Jobs? In an alternate history where Jobs died in 2007 instead of 2011, would something like the iPhone exist today? The ‘Great Man’ theory says no: the course of history is altered by extraordinary individuals, and no invention was inevitable. Jobs was a fan of this theory –“The ones who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.” – but famously, so was Hitler.
Curiously, one of the 3 people Jobs picked for “Project Purple”, Tony Fadell, had interned at General Magic a decade earlier, who launched a ‘personal digital assistant’ with apps and a touchscreen. This wasn’t the first time Jobs ‘invented’ something that already existed: the first Macintosh came out shortly after Jobs saw an early Graphical User Interface and Mouse on a tour of Xerox Parc. As Jobs said, “good artists copy; great artists steal”. It wasn’t just Apple and General Magic that dreamt up the smartphone, even Nintendo had an early prototype called the ‘Page Boy’ which featured, Email, Instant Messaging and even a search engine (Ask Mario).
History is littered with similar examples, from great rivalries like Edison and Tesla in electricity to independent simultaneous discoveries like Darwin and Wallace on evolution. Sometimes an idea’s time has come. Sadly it’s often not the most deserving inventor that gets remembered, it’s the one that was better at marketing.
| Name | Link | Type |
|---|---|---|
General Magic, Wikipedia | Reference | |
History of Smartphones | ||
History of the iPhone, Wikipedia | Reference | |
How the First Smartphone Came Out in 1994, But Flopped | Article | |
List of multiple discoveries, Wikipedia | Reference | |
Mobile ad creative: how to produce and deploy advertising creative at scale | Blog | |
Nintendo Almost Made The World’s First Smartphone | Article | |
The Selfish Gene, Dawkins | Book | |
Xerox PARC and the Origins of GUI | Article |