With all of the recent media hype on the death of Steve Jobs, I thought it would be interesting to take a brief look at Jobs’ connection with our topic. The common myth is that Steve Jobs “stole” the ideas for the first Mac personal computer, the Lisa, from Xerox. Apparently, Jobs and several Apple engineers got an inside look into what researchers at the Palo Alto Research Center were working on and marketed the products before Xerox got a chance. Like most Hollywood-like tales, this was not the case. Rather, Xerox got to buy a ton of Apple stock in exchange for this first-look. This means Apple paid Xerox for this sneak peak in the long haul. Plus, Apple didn’t exactly steal these ideas; instead they used the PARC researchers’ solutions to solve problems they had been battling in their designs.
The point to all this is that the hype that mere legend of stolen intellectual property can generate is nearly unstoppable. If rumors can go viral, how is the ever-evolving technological world supposed to keep tabs on what is true and what is false. It is becoming harder and harder to track the genesis of innovations. Can the problem be the solution? Who will be the next genius to map the information web? Jobs leaves big shoes to fill, but what are shoes in a virtual world?
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