You've Got Great Taste, Steve

Look familiar?
Look familiar?

You may not know this, but I’m a huge fan of the Fake Steve Jobs.  The real one ain’t half bad either.

I remember hearing Steve talk at a dinner honoring him, and some poor schlub was foolish enough to ask Steve, “Now that Dell makes MP3 players, how is the iPod going to compete?”

(This was a number of years ago, when Dell was considered the titan of the PC industry, and Apple was a niche player.)

Steve delivered a withering look of utter contempt and said, “It’s called good taste. People will pay for you to tell them what’s cool.” (here’s a more extended version of this story)

The point is, Steve knows good taste.  Steve knows what looks good.  And so it is with considerable pride that our engineering team pointed out to me today just how much Apple’s wiki server resembles PBworks.

It’s a dead ringer, down to the interface for starring pages.

As Picasso once said, “Good artists copy.  Great artists steal.”

We stole the inspiration for PBworks 2.0 from Apple’s clean interface style.  It is an honor to have the favor returned.

As Fake Steve himself might put it, “Namaste, Apple.  I honor where our sense of aesthetics become one.”

Published by Chris Yeh

Chris has been building Internet businesses since 1995. He has been a founder, founding employee, or seed investor in almost a dozen startups, including PBworks, and advises a wide array of startups ranging from network equipment makers to vertical search engines. He liked his investment in PBworks so much, he decided to join the company. Chris earned two degrees from Stanford University and an MBA from Harvard Business School.

3 thoughts on “You've Got Great Taste, Steve

  1. A comment towards: “Good artists copy. Great artists steal.”
    If one is wanting to make a quick buck, than I suppose that would apply to them. I say, but the best artist comes up with an original idea, coming from within themselves. One that follows blindly or one that gather’s facts and thinks for themselves, who would you want by you’re side?

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

%d bloggers like this: