Wasn't Steve Job's comment driven by his belief that Eric Schmidt used his insider knowledge of the iPhone project to inform the direction of the Android team?
It seems to me that he wasn't calling it stolen because it was a similar product - other comments of his indicate that he was was well aware that the technology would be cloned.
He was calling it stolen because he felt the time-to-market advantage had been stolen by an insider who breached his trust. I think this is what drove his animosity.
Android is obviously deeply influenced by the iPhone. The iPhone is obviously influenced by a whole load of other products (though not to quite the same extent).
What makes it 'stealing' is whether the influence was underhand or not.
We don't know whether Eric Schmidt did use inside information in breach of trust, but if he did then Jobs' position seems a lot more supportable.
> If you focus only on the single feature that is multi-touch, sure, but it's the entire package that likely pissed Jobs off.
The "entire package" of Android included a huge number of features that the iPhone did not, many of which later got incorporated into iOS.
> Pre-iPhone, Android's demo phones looked like a BlackBerry clone
As I understand it they had full screen touch-based prototypes as well. They were experimenting with everything. Of course, what actually emerged into production was iPhone-like because by then the market had moved in that direction.
Absolutely. Google couldn't possibly have been doing anything with full-screen touch-based smartphones. They were a software company and weren't working with anyone who'd built such a device before.
</sarcasm>
Sorry, for all that I wasn't personally a fan, I remember how amazing the O2 XDA (and its its immediate relatives) were at the time and I have to stick up for them (and HTC, of course).
Exactly. Picking individual feature to judge innovation is like saying Sydney Opera House is not interesting because the concrete, the flooring, the paint and window are pretty much the same as any one of the boring office buildings; and Golden Gate Bridge is just a bridge because it's still a bridge-looking bridge built with bridge-building materials.
Like design of any architecture, a consumer product is always a package of many components. Knowing what component to keep and what not to and tuning each to best please the user and work together are the art and the kind of innovation that is the most difficult to find.
And you know people are copying/stealing just by looking at it:
And I think the real point of contention was that Eric Schmidt was a member of the Apple board starting a year before that and as such had seen early iPhone prototypes. That in particular is what Jobs was angry about.
I can guess why that's a much bigger point of contention.
Steve Jobs must have really sold the board on the viability of next-gen smart phones: "guys - our work on iPods shows us we are just about at the point where almost-PC-class processors, RAM, and hard drives can be crammed into a mobile-phone sized package, without wiping out the battery in 12 hours. You know what will happen next?"
If that was the reason Google put so much effort into Android, then Google effectively stole Apple's strategy. Sure, some random Googlers would have thought of it, but it may not have been sold as well at the top level. Remember, Steve Jobs was an unbelievably good strategy salesman.
It's inevitable then that Android would follow the market leader - that's what products do.
Google had already bought Android and bet on next-gen smartphones well before Eric Schmidt joined the Apple board. And that bet was already serious and high-level. Schmidt wasn't involved in the acquisition, but Larry Page was. They were also, correctly, talking about mobile as the "next great frontier of search". If that wasn't a big deal at Google, I don't know what could be.
Apple did not invent multitouch however they did invent how it was used to make a phone with a very specific interface that was then copied feature for feature by Google who had intimate knowledge of its design.
> Jobs called Android a "stolen product," but theft can be a tricky concept when talking about innovation.
This article is heartily missing the point.
Android is basically a stolen product. It's a direct successor and competitor to the iPhone, and the direction of Android in it's current form has been and is extremely influenced by what Apple has been doing.
Sure, the iPhone is a bunch of "stolen" technologies and ideas, but Apple brought them together to make something great in a way that had never been done before. What Apple did took vision, discipline, and execution. That is what Apple brought to the table, and that is what innovation is.
Nobody was making products that resembled the iPhone before Apple, but now everyone is trying.
We don't need to get all emotional about this. This doesn't have anything to do with the quality of the products, it's just the history about how this stuff came about. You are still free to like Android or WebOS or iOS or whatever you want. It's fine. Just recognize innovation for what it is.
> Nobody was making products that resembled the iPhone before Apple
That's blatantly false. Every smartphone I owned going back to 2003 resembled the iPhone. Smartphones of the day either resembled the iPhone or they resembled the blackberry but both designs were out there in number. After the iPhone was released almost everyone dropped their blackberry-like designs (except for RIM).
Apple's innovation was the capacitive multi-touch screen and finger-friendly interface. I'm not even sure that's a revolution just an evolution of existing designs.
Indeed. Remember the Palm Pilot? Those things eventually ended up quite advanced; I remember buying one in Japan in 2002 with a camera, keyboard, swiveling screen, and so on. The only difference was that it didn't have a 3G radio.
I owned three Palm Treos from 2002 - 2006, including the 600 and the 700p. I _lived_ on those phones for the better part of four years - and I recall waiting for each new release.
So, as a Palm "Fanboy" I can say with certainty that those devices were not even in the same product category as the iPhone. Suggesting that they looked like iOS is farcical at best. I recall struggling for the better part of a week to purchase and install a "Yahtzee game" for the phone. Even after nine months on the 600, I _still_ was unable to reliably hit the proper key sequence to dial a number out of my phone book (the Cancel had the focus by default, so you would "select number, hit enter - and cancel out. Instead you had to "Select number, change focus, _then_ hit number to dial. They finally reversed it on the 700, screwing up 18 months+ of muscle memory that finally developed.
net-net - anybody who ever owned a Palm, and particularly those who used the browser, will state beyond a shadow of a doubt the iPhone and Palm had no relationship, evolutionary or otherwise, to each other.
I lived on the Treo 650 from the day the GSM version came out to when I got my G1 (about a month after it came out). Having used that Treo 650 and many other smartphones of that era (O2 XDA, Sony-Ericsson P900, Nokia Communicator, ...) I will absolutely, unequivocally, beyond the shadow of a doubt say that the iPhone was part of the same evolutionary tree.
Did the iPhone do the things my Treo could do much, much better? Was it a great step forward? Absolutely. The iPhone was and is amazing [1]. Nevertheless, saying that the iPhone stands apart from the broader evolution of mobile devices is either ignorance or a willful misreading of the relevant history.
[1] Though I will admit to finding the idea of paying money for ringtones of music you already owned a repugnant step back.
fpgeek - I guess, insofar that a Human and a chimpanzee are in the same evolutionary tree, the Palm Treo and iPhone are in the same evolutionary tree - but, (perhaps stretching the analogy a little too far) - I would suggest that would put the Palm Treo 600/650/700p in the same species as Australopithecus Afarensis (Lucy) compared to the iPhone Homo Sapien - an absolute disconnect. Do you remember what the Browser was like on that 650?
I think most people would agree that the iPhone 4S is an evolutionary upgrade over the original iPhone. Indeed, many, many of the Enhanced Browser/No Keyboard/App Store Enabled/Touch Screen smartphones today are closely related to the iPhone in a manner that that iPhone is not related to the Palm Treo - that's all I'm trying to say - that Apple did something completely new with the iPhone, rather than just iterating on a previous design.
I will _never_ forget the day I used the iPhone of a friend (I was among those who thought the concept of Apple getting into the "Phone" business was ludicrous, and was determined not to get one) - and used that browser/map. Within 48 hours I had an iPhone, and never looked back on my dear Treo.
I think you've proven my point more than your own.
Just because a particularly successful combination of traits looks like a giant leap doesn't mean it is (consider things like Nobel Prize winners or Olympic medalists born to "ordinary" parents). Similarly, the relationship of the iPhone to its predecessor phones is tighter than you think. Almost all of the traits that made the iPhone what it is were present in the predecessor population of smartphones.
In particular, I'd say the iPhone is what you get if you cross two specific devices and add the mutation of capacitive multi-touch (and the inevitable march of Moore's Law, of course). Those two devices are:
1. the O2 XDA (full touch screen, no keyboard, "enhanced" browser with desktop-like ambitions [even if it was Pocket IE])
2. the Danger Hiptop (consumer focused device with similar built-in apps, centralized app download catalog / store)
Those ancestors were chosen quite carefully, of course. The manufacturer of the O2 XDA was HTC. A bunch of ex-Danger people (most notably Andy Rubin) went on to start Android. A smartphone cross in the iPhone's immediate vicinity was going to happen regardless.
I agree. Comparing those devices to the iPhone is just laughable. The iPhone took everything Palm could do and made it much more elegant and intuitive to use. It did it in such a way that made the older palm devices look so incredibly archaic.
Apples spin wasn't ditching the keyboard as so many people think, it was designing the user interface around finger-based touch, making the interface easy enough for normal people to use, and finally to ship a decent performing browser at a time when most other phones were a nightmare to use when browsing the web (try a N95, also released in 2007, to see what I mean)
I forgot about the communicator because I didn't consider it a smart-enough phone to use. I kept using my Palm Pilot Pro becuse it gave me the productivity I needed. The communicator definitely had a keyboard and apps though, I just didn't find them usable at the time.
By far it is still one of the most bad ass looking phones, with that folding out.
On a side note, the Handspring Visor Phone addon is also worthy of a shoutout, since it was out before the Treo..
I owned a P800 and I consider the iPhone to be in a completely different class. Each of the individual differences is small, but when taken together the feel of using them is quite different.
To be fair, the P800 had a 150mhz processor and 16 MB of RAM and could display a whopping 4,098 colors. It came out around the same time as Windows XP SP1.
The Prada phone is as similar to the iPhone as the android phones people claim are rip offs of the iPhone. Given the short difference in time between their announcements, it is. Lear they were developed concurrently. Therefore, the android devices are derivAtive more of the Prada phone than the iPhone or the design decisions in common to the iPhone and Prada phone are "obvious"
You mean the non-smartphone that was announced a couple weeks before the iPhone? I forget, how was multitouch on it? And the web browser, was it any good?
It's undeniably true that Apple shipped the first good multitouch implementation on a handset. But there were lots of phones with very capable browsers, and a comparatively successful company (Opera) selling them for years before Apple started work on the iPhone.
Which of course is the whole point: ideas are items of trade. Someone thinks of something and someone else improves it. That's the way innovation works. Apple has surely done more of it than any other single company, but they've also, like everyone else, "stolen" far more than they invented themselves.
Claiming that they have some special ground with the iPhone is just a laughable, juvenile flame war. I wish these would stop.
Indeed they don't have special ground with the iPhone. Except maybe for one "thing".
Back in 2007 I joined a new employer. One evening during my new hire training a colleague demo'ed his iPhone he brought over from America to Europe. All other attendees, including myself, were amazed about the multitouch, pinch and zoom photo's, the easiness of use, the awesome GUI and the beautiful design. At the end of the demo there was a deep respectful silence by all of us. Amazement. Thinking about our own phones at the time compared to what we just saw.
Then.. the owner of the iPhone put it gently against his face and caressed it. Yes he actually caressed it. I still remember that image.
This is the "thing". You know, this thing called love. Something that cannot be traded like an item and which still holds true for many.
The HTC Dream didn't look anything like the iPhone either, but Jobs still says Android is a stolen product. So the question is, what did Android steal from Apple?
thats more a personal comment from Jobs...... Apple isnt charging anyone with theft.
before thi ihone, no app store no multi touch, litte integration outside of the blackberry, and smartphones and phones in general sucked by comparison. how quickly we forget how crappy what we had before was.
sure, previous products had lots f features............ but they didnt blowpeoples minds, or make their companies the most valuable ever.
There were app stores in Japanese phones from 1999.
We're not forgetting that they sucked. We're pointing out Apple didn't invent this stuff.
Touchscreens, had those for years. Multi-touch? Lots shown in the ARS article. Here's some http://tactiva.com/demo.html. Includes pinch to zoom, 2 finger rotate objects. Also includes tactile feedback, something no tablet has introed yet AFAIK.
Maps, I had 3d first person maps on my 2004 feature phone, something still missing from any iPhones I know of. They had 2d maps in 2000
Games, Yep, last 5 phones I owned before my iPhone all had downloadable games.
Here's me playing mappy I just purchased from an online app store in 2001
http://blog.greggman.com/blog/what_s_this_/
Webpage browsing? Yep. Wrote my first blog post from a phone in 2001.
Maybe Apple can claim full browsing first on iPhone though I suspect people have earlier examples. I could certainly view full pages through Opera Mini before iPhone.
Music? Several of the phones I owned has music stores built in and some phones advertised how awesome a movie player they were. Synced to PC and everything.
Did Apple take all those features and make them super awesome? YES.
The point is THEY TOOK EXISTING FEATURES. They didn't invent them. They just made them way better. Awesome. It's the little details they did well. It's the sum of the parts. It's pretty hard to pick any one thing for which there is no precedence. Cut and Paste? old. Zoom under pointer? Old. Slide to Unlock? Old. Email? Old. Pages of icons? old. They brought awesome style and design but even my old B/W WinCE machine linked above I didn't need or use any of the buttons except POWER and I could use my finger to control everything else.
I believe when people are saying the "looks like the iphone" they're referring to device where the primary input method is the screen, with less emphasis on physical buttons.
The first Windows Mobile phones were just WinMo PDAs with cellular radios in them. So while the iPaq isn't a phone it's the direct predecessor to many of them.
My first smartphone was a Sony Ericsson P800. Like the iPhone, it had no face buttons. It came with a stylus but the OS was much more finger friendly than many of the phones I used after. Then I "upgraded" to a few HTC phones running Windows Mobile that again were all touch screen.
Even in 2001 there was the "iPaq". ARM processor, etc. Even used a similar name. No 3d chips were widespread yet, lack of white led tech meant the display sucked too much power, compact flash was tiny, had a resistive screen that was somewhat poorly calibrated, etc.
> Every smartphone I owned going back to 2003 resembled the iPhone
Do you have specific smartphones in mind? The only ones of that era I'm more than passingly familiar with are the Palm phones, and they were nothing at all like the iPhone.
That's silly. There were more touch-screen smartphone models than non-touch screen models before the iPhone was released. If anything, Apple copied those designs and improved on them.
You say "Android is basically a stolen product" and then "We don't need to get all emotional about this". If you don't want people to get emotional then stop using highly pejorative, emotionally charged words like "stolen".
Aspects of Android were inspired by the iPhone. The iPhone itself was inspired by the Blackberry, Palm and Windows Mobile series of devices before it.
There really is no such thing as "stolen" when it comes to knowledge. Everything is built upon other things, emerging from the context where they are conceived. It is utterly impossible to not "steal" when you create because your creations are a direct response to the environment in which you create them, which by necessity is a result of creations that came before.
The Nokia 770 from 2005/11 and the N800 which was released (2007/01) around the same time that Jobs was announcing the development of the iPhone. (These were Internet tablets with the hints of the telephony stack already included. Eventually the N900 phone did come out, too little too late unfortunately.)
Android has much more in common with Maemo than Apple iOS.
..and sadly, the 770 and its user interface just shows too well why the iPhone won, and why the other companies had to go back to the drawing board with their operating systems.
I used the 770 and actually got wrist pain from using it too much with the crappy plastic stylus that was included.
(And at the time, the 770 had a pretty amazing screen and user interface compared to most other mobile devices. If only Nokia had known that capacitive touchscreens existed and started porting the Hildon UI to multi touch in 2005..)
Apple "advocates" always said: apple invented the gui, apple invented mp3 players, apple makes the fastest PC, apple's not the "big brother" company, etc. etc. Every claim usually turns out false. The Rep for "reality distortion field" has firm basis in trugth.
We can't always take Apple's claims at face value. This article just exposed, once again, another pro-Apple fallacy: that they own mini-tablet-phones and everyone stole the idea from them.
Apple "advocates" never said any of those things. I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you actually did read this stuff, so let me just say, you need to learn how to recognize a straw man argument when you see it.
Apple "advocates", including some in this very thread, do routinely dismiss as unimportant, sucky, etc. every pre-Apple contribution in some of these categories (especially smartphones and tablets). I generally think they're trying to emphasize the importance and originality of Apple's contribution, but I can see how someone else might interpret that as saying "Apple invented X".
I don't agree with this. Lets flip it the other way round and compare it with technology today. Lots of research labs have made AR Goggles and they've been featured in lots of movies / sci-fi. But lets say the google goggles are a hit and Apple starts making goggles, I believe Google can rightfully claim that Apple "copied" them.
Look around in any industry you want. How would you define competition, if nothing but very similar products to the original product of that type in that particular market?
This video describes very well how inventions get created and then evolve for the benefit of everyone:
Nobody was making products that resembled the iPhone before Apple
Years before the iPhone I was carrying around an iPaq. Now it isn't quite the same, most notably because the original device didn't even function as a phone. Yet I would argue that the phone part of smartphone is by far the least important part (and the only reason it is so prevalent is that carrier subsidization allows people to stomach $700 iPhones). Really these things are ultra-portable computers and the phone thing is ancillary.
The iPaq wasn't multitouch. But here's the thing -- Apple bought that multitouch sensor. They didn't invent it. They didn't specify it. They didn't even initiate its creation. Their software used it brilliantly, but by the common narrative you'd think they had invented it.
Capacitive touchscreens evolved. Embedded processors evolved. GPUs evolved. Wireless technologies evolved. Batteries evolved. Makers like RIM pushed much of that evolution.
Apple stepped in at the perfect confluence of technologies and made the iPaq v2.0. Better in every way -- largely owing to those hardware improvements, all of which came from outside Apple -- but did it really invent an industry?
It's actually a bit sad how little credit RIM gets, given that they were the ones who pushed a lot of the innovation in mobile that made the iPhone possible. A distributed messaging, application platform, camera, etc...everyone just focuses on the damn keyboard as if it defines the platform.
Already I'm seeing many ascribing the iPad as inventing the tablet, forgetting so many products that came before (both real, such as Archos, and conceptual like the Crunchpad). Apple executes amazingly well, but their creations are seldom as out of left field as people imagine. They say that the victors write history, but it is sad if we're blinded into confusing commercial success with innovation.
I think Apple can rightly be credited with making smartphones and tablets mainstream. Smartphones and tablets were niches before the iPhone. Microsoft had tried for years pushing Windows Tablet Edition, but it only became a niche.
Do you think that was only because those devices lacked a capacitive touchscreen? If so, then why did every other company have to scratch their mobile platform after the iPhone came along? Why didn't Microsoft make Metro in 2006, after all, the techology was available (I tried a Panasonic Toughbook with a capacitive display way before that).
I agree that others should be credited for their inventions. Both RIM and others like Nokia helped pushed the technology forward, but they did so very gradually. It took an outsider to disrupt the industry (luckily, Apple had killed off the Newton, or they probably woudn't have had the incentive to do so).
I agree with you about tablets but not about smartphones, some people back then, this in 2006, were discussing just how smartphones would be the future once they became cheap, this is what happened.
Besides everything being touch based, which was really disruptive, I believe a real disruption in the iPhone was that it included a full browser and not the mobile crap that existed back then, apps were good, but it was something that existed in other smartphones although without the centralized distribution medium, but they did exist.
Now some people are saying that Apple reign will not last just because smartphone prices will follow the same path that feature phones prices walked in the last 10 years, they will become much cheaper than now, I do not know about Apple remaining the leader or not but I do believe that smartphone prices will be really cheap in 2020, even for developing nations.
No one would deny the incredible commercial success of Apple: It has changed the industry. Few would argue against the notion that Apple brought a fit and finish and UI model that completely changed the baseline of the industry as well, significantly raising the bar. The Apple quality tide lifted all boats, though some are still trying to bail out water and catch up.
For those right choices Apple has yielded incredible riches: Profits never before seen, quarter after quarter. They're a half-a-trillion dollar company.
All I argue about is this revisionist history that acts, essentially, like Apple is entitled to everything. That they borrowed nothing and created everything. It seems like I'm arguing against a strawman there, but it is too common of an opinion. It is an argument that is based upon taking the smallest trivia of Apple's implementation and making it the most profound, important thing ever, while everything else doesn't matter.
Another thing that we are missing here is Apple is expected to make products with great UI!
History of their company in making such products automatically creates a media hype around the products. Its like so long as products are not very bad, they are always good. And assumed to be so! They have done a lot of work to make that happen and deserve it too.
Don't forget that iPhone and iPad got the push because iPod generation of devices did a very good job convincing common folks that handheld devices can be usable. Again apple needs to be credited for this.
Android can be told to have copied iPhone's trend. Not as a product.
As you said others have done a better job building ecosystem to ensure such an innovation happens.
And wasn't the Newton v2.0 just the Palm Pilot v2.0? And wasn't the Palm Pilot basically just an overgrown Psion personal organizer? So is it just Psions all the way down?
It's too late for me to edit it into my post, but I should have added that the incredible improvements in embedded processors, in particular GPUs, was also heavily spurred on by the GPS industry. Those little 3D perspectives on the in-vehicle GPS are what financed the technology that made the iPhone possible.
I'm not sure anyone is arguing the iPhone invented all these individual technologies, and if anyone is claiming that, they shouldn't be as the evidence is overwhelming to the contrary.
I think the real meat of the argument is "iPhone synthesized all those individual pieces into something coherent and incredible.". It's kind of like how the Macintosh and Lisa took the ideas from PARC, perfected them, and turned them into a real product. I think the stink is being made that Android is copying that aspect of the iPhone, instead of just a piece or two.
Maybe that's not what's actually being argued, but that's what I think should be argued at least.
I mean, do we really want to support synthesis of other people's work as something that can be protected legally?
Especially when most development nowadays is clicking cogs together anyways?
This doesn't seem like a meme we should seek to perpetuate.
If the resulting synthesis is something new, why wouldn't we want to protect it legally? To make a literary analogy, any book written in an established genre necessarily synthesizes work that went before it… are these new works less worthy of legal protection because the ideas and tropes (and in the case of works synthesized from the Commons characters, setting, etc.) are things we've already seen? In the technology fields, it is common to base new innovation on that which came before. So long as the prior art is referenced in the claim for protection, aren't the useful arts strengthened by legal protection in exchange for continued disclosure of innovation, even in the case of innovations synthesized of prior development?
aren't the useful arts strengthened by legal protection in exchange for continued disclosure of innovation
No, they're not, at least not in software. Nobody reads software patents, for two reasons. First, the majority are either non-novel or written in a way that they are not useful to others. Second, by reading patents you increase the damages in a possible infringement suit since at that point you knowingly infringed.
I'm afraid you misunderstood my point, as I never mentioned software patents at all. The iPhone is a synthesis of prior research that (in 2007) encompasses advances in both hardware and software. That is the synthesis that I think advances the useful arts, and it's beneficial to society for us to provide a legal framework to protect it.
I think what I said about software patents applies to hardware patents as well, if less so. There is this idea that patents are a compromise: I file a patent, and I get a temporary monopoly on the idea. In exchange, the world gets full disclosure of my idea.
The point I'm making is that the full disclosure is worse than useless. Nobody ever says I wonder how I should implement this? Let's go check some patent filings to see if someone else has figured it out...
The book written establishes a copyright, not a patent.
Bringing this back to technology with an example: Palm synthesized the smart phone and color LCD screen in ~2004. I'm pretty glad all smartphones have color screens today.
I did say I was making an analogy, not establishing a direct link between patents and copyright. Patents protect a specific method of implementing an idea, so Palm synthesizing a smart phone with a color LCD (controlled by a stylus) does not prevent Apple from protecting the synthesis of smart phone with a color LCD (controlled by fingertips). If there was no innovation in bringing multi-touch to smart phones, why wasn't everyone doing it in 2007 when the iPhone was first released?
Patents are time-limited not eternal. The first company to build a laptop most certainly obtained a patent on it, as did the creator of the first flat-screen.
Patents last for 20 years in the US. To give you an idea of how rapidly the personal computing/internet boom has progressed, Mosaic is not 20 years old yet, Mosaic being the browser that marked the start of the www era.
If Netscape had been smart (and evil) enough to patent the hell out of their browser and then stick all those patents on a shelf for a while... they'd probably be more valuable than Apple is today.
I think it's a bit "pushing it" by saying the iPhone was a "big" technological revolution for having synthesized a few technologies together. Deep down, every invention is to some level, an evolution over existing inventions. As many great inventors said throughout history "I can only see this far because I'm standing in the shoulder of giants".
But sometimes, to better see the whole picture, we need to take a step back from the drawing board. We, as engineers, like to think that every great revolution in consumer behavior is due to a technological invention fundamental to the shift. But if you pay attention you'll notice that Apple's biggest innovation wasn't technological. The area they excel the most is marketing. They built a coherent experience from the device interface design, to the propaganda on TV ads that was powerful enough to convince consumers to buy their products.
Steve Jobs was a genius. But if you believe he was a genius engineer who you should try to mimic, then you'll end up making poor technical decisions. He was a genius marketer who excelled at convincing consumers his products are worth it. That's what we should take from all this. That's we should learn from Apple's growth. Marketing matters.
While he was a genius at marketing, that's not the main lesson to take from Apple. The main lesson is that it's possible to focus on a few products and make them work really well. I don't think all the marketing genius in the world would have made the MacBooks and iPhones a success if they had been running Windows Vista or Windows Mobile 6 when they were released.
But then you can also say that everything is a remix and a synthesis of prior innovation, and if that's the case then Apple's position is still indefensible.
"I'm not sure anyone is arguing the iPhone invented all these individual technologies, and if anyone is claiming that, they shouldn't be as the evidence is overwhelming to the contrary."
Isn't that what the current legal battle over slide to unlock is over? I'll be the first to agree that the iPhone put all the pieces together, but it seems like every other week there's a new lawsuit over some iPhone or Android feature that is more of a common sense thing and probably shouldn't have been granted a patent.
The battle over slide-to-unlock is particularly ludicrous because neither Apple nor Android invented it. To the best of my knowledge that honor (in the context of a smartphone) belongs to Neonode with their N1m (though I wouldn't be at all surprised to find out someone had anticipated them, as well).
Steve Jobs saying he's going to spend billions and billions on frivolous lawsuits should make still independent developers wary about getting boxed into his walled "ecosystem". Perhaps it's time to revise the laws on "thought property" to declaw the patent and copyright industries. We need more competition, not more "I have a lot of money therefore I get even more money" monopolies. Geez. Patent law is just turning into a subsidy for Silicon Valley.
Of course, all of those lawsuits might also make independent developers think that the only "safe" place is his walled "ecosystem". Yes, you pay taxes and you live at the pleasure of the king, but at least most of the time he's more interested fighting with the enemies outside than the subjects inside.
Sorry, I'd missed that link in your article. Although I don't claim to know him personally, I've interacted with him a few times and I know that he takes an interest in getting the mainstream tech. media to cover or correct popular myths (such as Apple pioneering multi-touch).
Next time around, drop him an e-mail. Never hurts to ask, although I know why Microsoft's PR might have turned you down :).
I did email him. He told me I needed to go through Microsoft PR, and after I explained the topic of my story Microsoft PR declined to let me talk to him.
I agree. Apple had a lot of great ideas for their phone, and sooner or later someone would've copied them to be able to compete in the same type of market, and then build on that platform. In turn Apple ended up copying some of the later ideas from their competitors, too.
It's how progress happens. Too bad people are so quick to blame others with "stealing" when this happens.
Funny how the article mentions the LG Prada pre-dating the iPhone and then dismisses it. The software would of course be different but the LG Prada's physical design - full capacitive touchscree etc. - was public knowledge before the iPhone came out (and they also won a couple of awards for the design) : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LG_Prada
What's that, Apple-Guy? A website billing itself as "Apple iPhone, iPad 2, iPod News, Celebrity Mac Users, and More" claims that Apple did all the real, important work? Wow!
Let me put this in hacker terminology: Have you ever looked at someone else's product and said, "Well that's stupid, I could remake it in a week and it would be even better"? But even if that were true, you weren't the one who took the risk and built the damn thing.
Other people here are talking about "vision" and "innovation" and while these are certainly things Apple had in abundance, the bottom line is that Samsung's lack of vision is not what Apple is complaining about. It's all about risk: Apple took a risk, they pioneered a whole metaphor of a smartphone made of a giant touchscreen and little packaged apps. They had to convince a whole legion of consumers that their highly simplified interface was the elegant solution they needed, and that takes a lot of money and a lot of risk. Now Apple wants their day in the sun to last as long as possible, they want as much of the payoff from the risks they took as possible, and they feel entitled to a degree of exclusivity.
The sword cuts both ways - here on HN we've had a number of stories about the 'little guy' who makes a software package (eg cloud music manager), taking the risk, then apple comes along and implements the same thing, destroying the little guy. The little guy takes risk that's big from his point of view - does this mean he's entitled not to be copied by Apple?
And Motorola took a risk on the cell phone in the first place and Rio took a risk (including a make-or-break lawsuit) on the first mp3 player and on and on...
Has Apple been fair to those companies by their own standard?
I swear to god, this would be such a non-issue if people would just stop acting like human history started with the release date of their favorite Apple product.
Re: IBM's 1993 Simon: "The e-mail app even included the ability to click on a phone number to dial it."
Would that not constitute prior art in one of the patents Apple asserted against Android recently? I am only vaguely aware of the finer details so I'm probably mistaken on some point.
Actually, it would. Apple is asserting a patent (from 1996) against Android's "Linkify" functionality which does exactly that.
Other prior art would be Ward Cunningham's WikiWikiWeb (1994/1995) for turning CamelCase into links and, my personal favorite, Netscape Navigator 2.0b1, for "Live URLs" (that recognized URLs and email addresses in mail and news text and made them clickable).
I've been following this off and on, and AFAICT, HTC didn't bring up any of these piece of prior art, which makes me seriously question the quality of their prior art searches.
I suspect it isn't so much the design (although as has been pointed out the jump from treo-like to iphone-like is telling), but that a member of a board of directors used his access to proprietary company secrets/internal information to directly benefit a competitor company - its a conflict of interest issue at best, and corporate data theft at worst. And I think Jobs took it personally because the Larry, Sergei, and maybe even Schmidt had soliticed his mentorship and advice and for them to turn around and do this to him would seem to me like it would be felt as a personal betrayal.
As is Hacker News apparently. It's a trollbait article that say nothing of merit or value. Frankly I'd've said the same were it a story about Android being a rip off of iOS. You 'haters' of whatever denomination are just ridiculous and it's about time you all grow the fuck up.
How arrogant. Yes I read your opinion piece. As I said, you have said nothing new. You have added nothing to the debate except for regurgitating the same old trite arguments to drive yet another pointless flame war over a topic that is of actual important. And the net result is merely more ill-informed opinion.
The article goes a great length to mention other companies' and persons' accomplishments in the field, all the while completely ignoring Apple's research on it since the 80s.
They get to the point themselves:
Indeed, what made the iPhone such a great product was precisely that Apple drew together a number of innovations already developed separately—touchscreen phones, capacitive touchscreens, sophisticated multitouch user interfaces—and combined them in a product greater than the sum of its parts.
And then Android just imitated that precise sum of parts (full touchscreen, swipe gestures, on-screen keyboard, apps, desktop-class browser, accelerometer, great graphics...). Android looked nothing like it is today before the iPhone OS.
It seems to me that he wasn't calling it stolen because it was a similar product - other comments of his indicate that he was was well aware that the technology would be cloned.
He was calling it stolen because he felt the time-to-market advantage had been stolen by an insider who breached his trust. I think this is what drove his animosity.
Android is obviously deeply influenced by the iPhone. The iPhone is obviously influenced by a whole load of other products (though not to quite the same extent).
What makes it 'stealing' is whether the influence was underhand or not.
We don't know whether Eric Schmidt did use inside information in breach of trust, but if he did then Jobs' position seems a lot more supportable.