“Monsieur Voiture, you hopeless [redacted French slur], you still can’t prepare a proper mayonnaise! I’ll show you one last time while standing on one foot…”

[Bear with me, the connection with today’s title will become apparent in a moment.]

The year is 1965, I’m midway through a series of strange jobs that I take between dropping out of college and joining HP in 1968 — my “psychosocial moratorium”, in California-speak. This one approaches normal: I’m a waiter in a Paris restaurant on rue Galande, not far from Notre-Dame.

Every day, before service starts, it’s my job to make vinaigrette, remoulade, and mayonnaise, condiments for the hors d’oeuvres (French for appetizers) I’ll wheel around on a little cart — hence the Monsieur Voiture snicker from the chef.

The vinaigrette and remoulade are no problem, but the mayonnaise is not my friend: Day after day, my concoction “splits” and the chef berates me.

So now, pushed beyond limit, he grabs a cul-de-poule (a steel bowl with a round bottom), throws in the mustard, vinegar, and a bit of oil, cracks an egg on the bowl’s edge, separates and drops the yolk into the mixture — all with one hand. I see an opportunity to ingratiate myself: Obligingly, I reach for a whisk.

“No, all I need is a fork.”

Up on one foot, as promised, he gives the mixture a single, masterful stroke — and the mayonnaise begins to emulsify, I see the first filaments. The chef sniffs and walks away. I had been trying too hard…the rest was obvious: a thin trickle of oil, whisk calmly.

Clearly, the episode left its mark, and it came back to mind when I first saw the iPad.

For thirty years, the industry had tried to create a tablet, and it had tried too hard. The devices kept clotting, one after the other. Alan Kay’s Dynabook, Go, Eo, GridPad, various Microsoft-powered Tablet PCs, even Apple’s Newton in the early nineties….they didn’t congeal, nothing took.

Then, in January 2010, Chef Jobs walks on stage with the iPad and it all becomes obvious, easy. Three decades of failures are forgotten.

This brings us to last week’s animated debate about Apple’s talent for invention in the Comments section of the “Apple Tax” Monday Note:

“…moving from stylus to touch (finger) was a change in enabling technology, not some invention by Apple — even gesture existed way back before the iPhone. Have an IPAQ on my desk as a reminder — a product ahead of the implementing technology!

Unfortunately Apple have run out of real innovation…”

In other words: “Nothing new, no innovation, the ingredients were already lying around somewhere…”. The comment drew this retort from another reader:

“iPaq as a precursor to iPad?

Are you on drugs? Right now?”

Drugged or sober, the proud iPaq owner falls into the following point: The basic ingredients are the same. Software is all zeroes and ones, after all. The quantity and order may vary, but that’s about it. Hardware is just protons, neutrons, electrons and photons buzzing around, nothing original. Apple didn’t “invent” anything, the iPad is simply their variation, their interpretation of the well-known tablet recipe.

By this myopic logic, Einstein didn’t invent the theory of relativity, Henri Poincaré had similar ideas before him, as did Hendrik Lorentz earlier still. And, come to think of it, Maxwell’s equations contain all of the basic ingredients of relativity; Einstein “merely” found a way to combine them with another set of parts, Newtonian mechanics.

Back to the kitchen: Where does talent reside? Having access to commonly available ingredients or in the subtlety, the creativity — if not the magic — of their artful combination? Why are the great chefs so richly compensated and, yes, imitated? Alain Ducasse, Alain Senderens, and Joel Robuchon might be out of our price range, but Pierre Herme’s macarons are both affordable and out of this world — try the Ispahan, or the salted caramel, or… (We’ll note that he opened his first boutique in Tokyo, where customers pay attention to details.)

In cars, Brand X (I don’t want to offend) and BMW (I don’t drive one) get their steel, aluminum, plastics, rubber, and electronics from similar — and often the same — suppliers. But their respective chefs coax the ingredients differently, with markedly different aesthetic and financial outcomes.

Did IBM invent the PC? Did HP invent the pocket calculators or desktop computers that once put them at the top of the high tech world? Did Henry Ford invent the automobile.

So, yes, if we stick to the basic ingredients list, Apple didn’t invent anything…not the Apple ][, nor the Macintosh, not the iPod, the iPhone, or the iPad…to say nothing of Apple Stores and App Stores. We’d seen them all before, in one fashion or another.

And yet, we can’t escape a key fact: The same chef was involved in all these creations. He didn’t write the code or design the hardware, but he was there in the kitchen — the “executive chef” in trade parlance — with a unique gift for picking ingredients and whipping up unique products.

— JLG@mondaynote.com

As a postscript, two links:

— Steve Wildstrom valiantly attempts to clear up the tech media’s distortions of the patents that were — and weren’t — part of the Apple-Samsung trial:

Whatever happens on appeal, I think the jury did an admirable job making sense of the case they were given. They certainly did better than much of the tech media, which have made a complete mess of the verdict.

— This August 2009 Counternotions post provides a well-reasoned perspective on the iPhone’s risks and contributions, as opposed to being a mere packaging job. (The entire Counternotions site is worth reading for its spirited dissection of fashionable “truths”.)

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