I'm surprised that no one has commented on the irony of the title of this thread.
After decades of hearing fanpersons boast that every other company imitated Apple -- and that Apple imitated
no one -- I'm relieved that global innovation has relegated Apple to such a reactive position that threads like this exist. Now no one can continue to claim that everyone else is always copying Apple -- let alone that Apple never copies from anyone else.
Even apart from the revelation of Jobs' visit to Xerox PARC, it should be apparent that
every company appropriates ideas from other companies, and that
companies do not innovate so much as
employ innovators. If a company is successful, then it survives the people it employs. This means that levels of innovation are not company- or even iconoclast-specific.
I don't think that Apple is unusually guilty of imitation, but neither did I appreciate people talking about its singular originality for so long. I see that as the liability of Jobs's egotism as projected onto the brand.
Even so, he was the driving force behind many of Apple's best products and I'm glad his aesthetic took Apple as far as it did. Surely Jobs' "
democratization of digital type," which has affected things like our font choices on e-readers, wouldn't have taken place as early if he hadn't taken that famous calligraphy class at Reed College.
Of course, the amusing part of Jobs' version of the story is that it portrays him as the
inventor of computer font tech instead of as the person who made the general public aware of computer typography.
Still, we do have Jobs to thank for the convention of naming fonts after world cities (Athens, Cairo, Chicago, Geneva, London, Los Angeles, Monaco, New York, San Francisco, Toronto and Venice), which began with
the very first Mac. I'm especially pleased with the later inclusion of Taliesin, named after Frank Lloyd Wright's art city.
Then again, all of those fonts (and all of Apple's original icons) were created by
Susan Kare, so why isn't anyone crowning her as a great innovator? She continued to make Jobs look good at NeXT as well.
Kare also designed the card deck for the solitaire game, and lots of icons for the OS, in Windows 3.0, which brings us back to the idea that innovation is not company or brand-specific.