On The Business Pages this week, Tim Wu has a story about the open-versus-closed debate in the technology industry. Here’s a look at the metric Wu developed for assessing the “openness” of companies, and see whether Wu’s theory proves true when applied to Amazon, Apple, Google, and Microsoft: http://nyr.kr/W7Pv9G

Has Apple lost its perfectionism? And has it lost it because of an obsession with crushing a rival? Perhaps…

Nicholas  Thompson on Apple’s innovation after Steve Jobs: http://nyr.kr/T7Sq4T

3. “You’re the baddest bitch.”

- Who did a college student say this to? Click here for Nicholas Thompson’s list of the ten best “tech” quotes of 2011, based on how much he likes the line and how much it mattered: http://nyr.kr/u257Zq

This week in the magazine, Malcolm Gladwell writes about the real genius of Steve Jobs.

Taking place now (12:00-1:00 E.T.), Gladwell is answering readers’ questions in a live chat. Click here to join the discussion: http://nyr.kr/tF4PmD

longreads:

Was Steve Jobs a Samuel Crompton or was he a Richard Roberts? In the eulogies that followed Jobs’s death, last month, he was repeatedly referred to as a large-scale visionary and inventor. But Isaacson’s biography suggests that he was much more of a tweaker. He borrowed the characteristic features of the Macintosh—the mouse and the icons on the screen—from the engineers at Xerox PARC, after his famous visit there, in 1979. The first portable digital music players came out in 1996. Apple introduced the iPod, in 2001, because Jobs looked at the existing music players on the market and concluded that they “truly sucked.”

“The Tweaker.” — Malcolm Gladwell, The New Yorker

See more #longreads from Malcolm Gladwell

(via longreads)

In this week’s issue: Evan Osnos makes a series of visits to Japan to assess the aftermath of last March’s earthquake and tsunami; Tad Friend profiles Andrew Stanton, the director of Pixar’s “Finding Nemo” and “Wall-E”; Michael Specter travels to Portugal—a country that, in 2001, was the first to pass a law that fully decriminalized personal drug use—and looks at the effects the law has had; Nicholson Baker and James Surowiecki on Steve Jobs; and more.

For more on Steve Jobs, read Ken Auletta, John Cassidy, Jonah Lehrer, Meghan O’Rourke, and other New Yorker contributors.

The cover of next week’s issue. Read our Steve Jobs coverage: http://nyr.kr/mPLCkE

Many of the tributes to Steve Jobs, who died on Wednesday, have mentioned Apple’s famous “1984” Super Bowl ad. Apple also created a number of memorable print-ad campaigns, many of which appeared in the pages of The New Yorker. Click here for a look back, from the Macintosh Personal Computer to the iMac.

Revisit Malcolm Gladwell’s piece on the story behind one of Apple’s earliest innovations: the computer mouse.

Ken Auletta on Steve Jobs: “Many books were dashed off describing what a tyrannical person Jobs could be—how he took the parking spaces of the handicapped, how he reduced employees to tears. Those tales will fade like yesterday’s newspapers. What will stand erect like an indestructible monument are the things Steve Jobs created that changed our lives…”

Click here for the rest of Ken Auletta’s take on the passing of Steve Jobs.