Summary Of The Tweaker By Malcolm Gladwell

In the article “The Tweaker”, Malcolm Gladwell is trying to persuade people that Steve Jobs is an arrogant, pessimistic person. He even states “Steve Jobs, Isaacson’s biography makes clear, was a complicated and exhausting man.” (Gladwell, pg. 2) He frequently references to Isaacson, who wrote a biography about Steve Jobs, at his request. He even states on the second page that Jobs was a bully. Malcom Gladwell was not only trying to get people to see that Jobs was an arrogant, pessimistic person, but that he was a tweaker, who took tweaking to a whole new level. Malcolm Gladwell uses a lot of examples in his story to show how pessimistic and arrogant Jobs was. One example, referring to Isaacson once more, Gladwell mentions “Jobs, we learn,

As Gladwell states “Jos was someone who took other people’s ideas and changed them. But he did not like it when the same thing happen to him. In his mind, what he did was special” (Gladwell pg. 6) Jobs would go and tweak everyone’s ideas and make them his own, but when someone tweaked his ideas, he would react with anger and lawsuits. Gladwell, referring to Isaacson, states “The angriest Isaacson ever saw Steve Jobs was when the wave of Android phones appeared, running the operating system developed by Google. Jobs saw the Android handsets, with their touchscreens and their icons, as a copy of the iPhone and he decided to sue” (Gladwell pg. 5) In his lawsuit letter he threatened to destroy Android, and even used curse words to express his anger for something that he had done many times before. Gladwell states “In the nineteen-eighties, Jobs reacted the same way when Microsoft came out with Windows.” (Gladwell pg. 5) Had Jobs not done the same thing? Had Jobs not tweaked many people’s ideas and made them his own, and not give any credit to these people? Gladwell states “He borrowed the characteristic features of the Macintosh-the mouse and the icons on the screen-from engineers at Xerox PAC, after his famous visit there, in 1979” (Gladwell pg. 3) Jobs often took the ideas of a man named Jonathan Ives, who states, “He will go through a process of looking at my ideas and say, “That’s no good. That’s not