Gladwell: Steve Jobs was an editor, not a visionary

Malcolm Gladwell says that Steve Jobs’ true brilliance was in how he applied an editor’s eye to consumer technology. “Jobs’s sensibility was editorial, not inventive,” he says in an article in The New Yorker about the new Jobs’ biography by Walter Isaacson, “Steve Jobs“. “His gift lay in taking what was in front of him—the tablet with stylus—and ruthlessly refining it.”

Jobs, he argues, was not a visionary but a “tweaker.”

Jobs’s vision, brilliant and perfect as it was, was narrow. He was a tweaker to the last, endlessly refining the same territory he had claimed as a young man.