Jobs vs Gates: Creative Genius and Cheating

(Newbie here - I posted this by mistake in the Apple Rumors section. I apologize for the second post, but I couldn't delete it over there. What a BRILLIANT first attempt to post at a new forum....)

Hi Everyone,

I had never been a Mac fan until about 3 years ago. Having just finished Jobs' biography, I now understand why Apple products are so amazing. I own a MacBook Pro, iMac and iPhone now.

Forgive me if a link to the following article has already been posted here (it was forwarded to me). But I read this really interesting analysis about a recent study done that showed the more creative a person is, the more likely they are to cheat or do things that might be unethical.

The article - written by a doctor, I think - speculated about this possibly being an explanation for Apple's and then Microsoft's lifting of the GUI from Xerox...and then Microsoft stealing just about everything else from Apple. Interesting how he talked about the research. Having just read the bio and seeing how complex Jobs was, I wonder if there is any truth to it?

I thought it was a very cool article:
Creativity and Cheating: The More Creative You Are, The More Likely You Are to Cheat | The Healthy Mind

Just FYI.

Thanks,
Ian

I removed it. This is the appropriate place for it.

And Welcome to the Mac Forums.

Interesting article.

”Well, Steve, I think there’s more than one way of looking at it. I think it’s more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it.”

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That's hilarious.

Oh, not the Xerox thing again.

Look, Xerox did some critical research and development on GUI-based computing. They did a lot to extend the work that the Standford Research Institute did, by combining Stanford's mouse with windowing and bitmapped graphics. No question, the Xerox system had revolutionary ideas about how people and computers would interact.

But Apple did not just rip Xerox off. The finished Lisa and Macintosh products are worlds removed from the primive Xerox Star and Alto.

Even something as basic as "drag-and-drop" and "double clicking", and things as universal as the Trash can and menu bar(s) were absent from the Xerox products. The Xerox machine had a bunch of dedicated keyboard hotkeys to accomplish basic functions like "delete" or "copy," because the Xerox GUI did not have a graphical/driect-manipulation way of doing that.

The Macintosh did.

Can you imagine a GUI without double-clicking? It seems like such a basic and universal part of using a computer with a mouse. Because every system, including Windows, that has come after the Macintosh, has copied extensively from the Macintosh. Xerox's product was a stepping stone; the Macintosh was a stepping stone; everything since then has borrowed from both.

And you would be hard pressed to find anything introduced in Windows over twenty five years of its history that is as important or as influential.

The biography, for all its author's supposed unique, one-on-one access to Jobs while he was alive, seems to re-hash an awful lot of well-known old stories.

Apple didn't steal the GUI, Apple gave Xerox $1 million in pre IPO shares to Xerox in exchange for technology and access to demonstrations at Alto Parc, a deal not supported by Xerox researchers at the time.

Many of those same hostile researchers would go on to Apple to work on the Lisa and Macintosh, as they saw that Xerox was going to continue to idly sit on the tech they had developed

The whole "PARC" thing was blown out of proportion when Apple first sued Microsoft during the infamous Windows 3 release fiasco. MS used that as an excuse to say they didn't steal the Windows GUI from Apple, but that Apple had stolen it from Xerox.

Thank you

chscag said:

I removed it. This is the appropriate place for it.

And Welcome to the Mac Forums.

Click to expand...

Thanks for that. Sorry to trouble you with the extra work.

Outstanding forums!!

Was just at the Apple Store and it is just an unbelievable customer service experience. Fantastic. Got Dragon Dictate. Cannot wait to try it out this evening.

Cheers to everyone!

-Ian

technologist said:

Oh, not the Xerox thing again.

Look, Xerox did some critical research and development on GUI-based computing. They did a lot to extend the work that the Standford Research Institute did, by combining Stanford's mouse with windowing and bitmapped graphics. No question, the Xerox system had revolutionary ideas about how people and computers would interact.

But Apple did not just rip Xerox off. The finished Lisa and Macintosh products are worlds removed from the primive Xerox Star and Alto.

Click to expand...

As I said, I am new to the world of Mac (about three years) Computing. Don't even know a 1/100th of what probably most of the people on this board know about Apple. I posted that healthy mind link more to make a point about how the study found creative people may be more likely to cheat, not really to make a statement about Jobs. He was an amazing Wizard

I thought I was a stock wizard (of sorts) in 1997 when I bought almost 2000 shares of Apple a few months prior to the Microsoft partnership and sold it for a triple on my money a couple years later. Thought I was a very big man for netting a $20,000 profit. Don't get me wrong, it ain't shabby, but if I had held those shares until today?? I would now have 8000 shares.

They would be worth, ohhhh about $2.5 Million today.

(yup....I was a big man....)

Ah well....always fun to think about that - when I wake from my nightmares of selling the Apple shares in 1999, that is....

Heh heh.

Sniff-Sniff....

Now where's my drink????

-Ian

You have GREAT forum!!!

My thanks to louishen for doing my job for me.

Gates' quote was clever, but inaccurate. He would have been more correct to say "you saw a house with a lot of potential and sweet-talked the owners into selling it to you for a song. I broke into the house, took photographs of everything and then tried to build my own replica out of poorly-lit, badly-done facsimiles."