Steve Jobs did not invent the iPhone
Steve Jobs did not invent the iPhone
By Brian Merchant Published on July 1, 2017
An important lesson in innovation—and teamwork—on the
10th birthday of the most popular product of all time.
The iPhone just turned 10 years old, and if you were
anywhere near a magazine, newspaper, or screen—swipeable or otherwise—you
probably saw a story or nine celebrating its advent. That story would likely
run alongside an image of one man in particular. There he is, Steve Jobs on
stage at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. Steve Jobs with an
aluminum-backed rectangle in his palm. Steve Jobs handing the iPhone down unto
the world.
The narrative is clear: Steve Jobs gave us the iPhone,
which, at over 1.2 billion units sold, has become the single best selling
product of all time. But that narrative also happens to be rather flawed, even
misleading. And that’s well worth noting, all these years after the iPhone was
set upon its trajectory for world domination—because Steve Jobs did not invent
the iPhone.
Rarely is it worth going to the trouble to point out that
someone did not invent something. ‘Brian Merchant Did Not Invent the Cuisinart’
is a headline that is unlikely to generate much interest anywhere, ever, even
inside the whirring world of cuisinart aficionados. So why pick on Steve Jobs?
Why the iPhone? Because the myth is becoming inextricable from the man. Jobs
may have never claimed outright that he alone invented the one device—though he
did seem to insist on putting his name first on many of its patents—but history
is beginning to conflate the art of invention with CEOship, marketing prowess
with innovation.
Think back to those photos of the iPhone. There are few,
if any, images of the team(s) of impossibly hard-working designers, engineers,
and hardware hackers who deserve the lion’s share of the credit for bringing it
to life. (And I’m not just talking about Jony Ive, either!) We are being
encouraged to believe a version of a myth that has been promulgated for
decades, if not centuries: The myth of the sole, or lone, inventor.
At least since Edison—and probably since Newton and
beyond—the public has glommed onto narratives of great men with great ideas,
overcoming adversity and uncertainty to transform the world with the invention
of the light bulb, the telephone, the iPhone. This isn’t anyone’s fault, and
everyone’s guilty; our brains just tidily compute such appealing narratives,
suffused as they are with moral rectitude and justified outcomes. But in a
research paper published in 2012, the renowned patent scholar and Stanford
professor Mark Lemley found that the vast, vast majority of inventions were
achieved not just by people working in teams, but often simultaneously, by
different teams, even sometimes working in different parts of the world. Ideas
are truly “in the air” as he says.
We now know, for instance, that Edison most certainly did
not invent the lightbulb—he simply perfected it as a consumer product. His team
found the ideal bamboo filament that made his bulb’s glow much more appealing
than the competition. And even then, Edison manned a large lab staffed by
brilliant researchers; but who remembers a name besides Edison’s when we think
of the bulb, going off, signifying the spark of a new idea?
So it is with Steve Jobs and the iPhone. In fact, some of
the parallels are almost eerie. There was work being done on smartphone
products at least a decade and a half before the iPhone was launched—Frank
Canova Jr. built the IBM Simon, which was a large black rectangle with
touchscreen buttons, apps, and a web browser. Sound familiar? It should—but it
was launched in 1993, and flopped. It was ahead of its time, and the technology
wasn’t ready.
What Jobs did at Apple with the iPhone was take a
smattering of percolating technologies, and drove his team to integrate them in
a way never executed so elegantly before. The key word is “team”; the iPhone,
in fact, grew out of a series of clandestine meetings, under even Jobs’ radar,
in the bowels of Apple’s 2 Infinite Loop building—where designers, user
interface experts, and hardware engineers experimented with a collection of
technologies until they’d come up with the set of demos that would form the core
of the iPhone experience: Multitouch finger sensors married to custom Apple
software that would bring the pixels to dance underneath your fingers.
I had a chance to meet many of these pioneers over the
course of reporting my book: Bas Ording, Imran Chaudhri, Greg Christie, Brian
Huppi, Josh Strickon—any of those names ring a bell? Probably not—yet they’re
the forefathers of the iPhone. They prototyped what would become the “one
device” long before Steve Jobs even had a whiff of its existence. And then a
whole slew of software engineers—Scott Herz, Richard Williamson, Nitin Ganatra,
And Grignon and so on, organized by product manager Kim Vorrath—took those
experiments and built the world’s most stealthy mobile computer around it. And
then a crack team of hardware engineers, including David Tupman, Michael
Culbert, and—okay, you’re getting the point. There’s a small city worth of
people who contributed to the iPhone, who made it tick, who unfurled its
innovations, who designed the most popular software interface of all time, who
made it sing on a tiny handheld device. And that is to say nothing of the
miners, laborers, and manufacturers who collect and convert the raw materials
into tiny components and finished products around the globe.
Steve Jobs made crucial decisions. His business
maneuverings—especially absorbing info from the carriers and then winning
near-total freedom to build his iPhone any way he liked, and winning favorable
contract terms—and his aesthetic tastes in the space were unparalleled. He
deserves a lot of credit. Just nowhere near all of it.
“The thing that concerns me about the Steve Jobs and
Edison complex,” Bill Buxton, who helped pioneer multitouch in the 1980s (Jobs
said Apple invented it in 2007), told me, “is that young people who are being
trained as innovators or designers are being sold the Edison myth, the genius
designer, the great innovator, the Steve Jobs, the Bill Gates, or whatever,”
Buxton says. See: The current myth of the founder-hero, that is partly to blame
for steering companies like Uber into peril. “They’re never being taught the
notion of the collective, the team, the history.”
Which is why it pains me a bit to see the story of the
iPhone reduced to Jobs, brilliant as he may have been. The true version is more
intense, messy, convoluted—and human. And it’s not just a matter of doling out
credit, either; it’s a matter of understanding how innovation actually happens,
so we might facilitate it better in the future. There are lessons here for
anyone who might try to build a product, advance a technology, stir progress—or
understand how innovation really unfurls. The iPhone is the product of a
collaboration carried out on a scale that’s so massive it can seem almost
incomprehensible—but it makes more sense than the lone inventor myth. And we
can learn more about where we're headed if we look into the iPhone's black
mirror and try to see the huge host of faces reflected back—not just Steve
Jobs'.
Brian Merchant is the author of The One Device: The
Secret History of the iPhone.
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