This will just get him disavowed as a cofounder of Apple by the hardcore supporters. Eventually no one will remember he helped start Apple and everyone will think Jobs was the only one. (edit: true enough that they already see him as the black sheep, the embarrassing uncle everyone tries to ignore)
No one cares what the "naive, idealistic" engineer clueless about business thinks. That's the battle we're fighting - to fix patents, we have to tell people how it's not mere idealism or ideology, but how real businesses can get squeezed out by patent trolls or assholes if software patents don't get reformed soon.
On the bright side, I'm noticing more friends getting Androids, even around this time when the iPhone 5 is being launched. Only the core Apple supporters are going straight for the iPhone. The tide may be turning and Apple losing a bit of its shine, at least in my circles.
Anyone who has followed Woz for any amount of time is completely unsurprised by this quote. Woz is the troublemaker they were talking about in that ad.
He founded Apple, created the Apple I/II, but Apple did a lot since then - and I know everyone disagrees and will vote me down - but e.g. for me the defining moment, the most important event was the Mac OS X 10.0 (a Cube for me, as a NeXT user).
Before that Apple was really really unattractive to me (at that time a C64/Amiga/i486 user) - I never found it inspiring or powerful in any way - and it was a pain when I needed to use it at the university.
Well said. I think it's sad that the mind behind Apple technology is getting forgotten while the marketer gets all the glory. I, too, hope Woz is right and the case gets overturned on appeal.
I am also noticing the shift to Android in my circles. This could be a good thing.
I don't think Woz is in danger of getting forgotten anytime soon. In fact, given that the last technical contribution he made to Apple was, as far as I recall, about 30 years ago, it seems to me that is getting rather generous credit for Apple's success.
Wise man. The way I see it, Apple had a case regarding "trade dress". Some Samsung devices, for example the Galaxy Tab 10.1, do look too much like Apple products. However, the rest of the patents were ridiculous. If the bar for patent validity is going to be this low, most software developers will not be able to do a day's work without accidentally infringing on something. Every piece of software I've seen being built most certainly uses methods that are described somewhere in patents, especially if it is leading edge in terms of communicating, collecting, syncing or displaying information through the web or mobile devices. If court decisions keep going this way, it is going to become impossible to code legally without the costly burden of acquiring a patent war chest and a team of layers to defend your organisation. We might as well shut down the industry to newcomers.
I'm interested in why you thought the bar was set low? From all my reading, it sounded like Samsung had to go out of their way to emulate the Apple processes, it wasn't something they would have accidentally done.
I'm not saying I agree with the verdict, but a lot of people misrepresent this case as, "Apple has a patent on pinch-to-zoom" (not true), and Samsung was sued for building a rectangle-with-glass (not true) - instead of the actual, more complicated case.
In particular, which patent did you think was "ridiculous?"
Pinch-to-zoom. Just because it is on a capacitive touch screen instead of some other type of touch screen, doesn't really change the implementation of it, and isn't worth patentability.
It is like someone coming on the scene and seeing that windowed GUIs weren't patented, deciding that now if I plug my VGA cord into an LCD instead of a CRT I have suddenly invented a new device and can get all the old innovations protected as long as they appear on a "computing device with LCD display".
Apple makes a lot of best-in-class products (and I know some people that think everything they make is best-in-class).
Do they think they need to do this kind of litigation to keep making products people will buy? Are they trying to discredit Samsung as copycats? Or is it just a case of "if it costs us $100m to pursue 10 lawsuits with a 5% chance of any one of them getting us a $1b reward, it's a positive business move" sort of thing?
Looking at the iPhone 5, and when Apple started to go litigation crazy I think a couple factors have combined to force them to go this way.
1. The iPhone 5 is an incremental update to the iPhone 4 template. It doesn't mean it's a bad product, it actually looks like it's a very very nice device. But it isn't the leapfrog over the competition that people have come to expect and Apple has built its smartphone business around.
I think Apple tends to produce their iDevices at pretty much the absolute state of the art. I think previous smartphones and recent competitors did not because it let them yield better profits given an inefficient supply chain. Now the competition has caught up and is also operating at the state of the art.
Now they just produce a very very nice device with specs more or less in-line with the competition. The differentiation is harder to demonstrate.
At some point during the development cycle for the iPhone 5 they had to have compared it to the competition in the marketplace and come to the conclusion that it simply isn't going to cut it the way previous phones have. They'll still sell it as an upgrade to most current users, but the rate of new user growth is slowing down and the rate of defectors to the competition is increasing. They must have decided the 5 simply isn't going to do enough on its own as a product to change that.
2. In the past year the competition has started to outsell them. Despite having the iPhone available across the major carriers, and having arguably a nicer device at a similar price, it just seems to be an increasingly hard sell. The iPhone 5 may not be enough of a difference from the 4S (in line with consumer expectations) to sway consumers back over into Appleland. Long new product development pipelines have prevented them from pushing out a product that really stands out in a meaningful way in the market anymore.
So Apple is hedging, they've calculated that the new iPhone 5 won't swing the pendulum back in their favor, and the only choice is to try and frustrate the ability of the competion in bringing even newer products to market. Apple isn't hoping to make money via the awards, but in swinging the pendulum a few percent back in their favor. It could mean tens of billions on top of the award.
But it isn't the leapfrog over the competition that people have come to expect...
I think this is their biggest problem. They see & take a few opportunities to be disruptive, and now people are expecting them to be disruptive every frickin' time they have a press announcement. People don't appreciate how rare such opportunities arise, how rarer still to be able to spot them and exploit them, and rarer still to do it consecutively. There's no way they can sustain the drama and anticipation of product releases, especially since the rumor mill has gotten so good at piecing together component leaks.
Well, I guess when your announcement is based around language like "The biggest thing to happen to iphone since iphone", people are going to expect some big changes. Expectations might have been lower if they'd downplayed it a bit and called it iPhone 4X.
I thought phrases like "the biggest foo since sliced bread" means that sliced bread was a greater foo, but other intervening foos may be lesser. That doesn't seem terribly hyperbolic to me. The retina display on the 4 is the only one that I would say rivals the changes in the 5. The numbers are arbitrary anyway. People are silly. Apple tries to be as silent as possible and people get lathered up anyway.
1. I'm just guessing, but my feeling is that the 5 was well into its design and testing cycle well before 2012. I don't know how long Apple's cycle is but I've hard that just getting network approval from some carriers can take as long as 12 months. It wouldn't surprise me if they had working near complete prototypes as far back as 2010.
2. I think it's specific manufacturers, not the aggregate community of makers. It makes it easier in some ways to target the largest builders instead of every random builder of cheap handsets one at a time.
minor nit: it wouldn't shock me if SGS 3 did win one or more months and I have no doubt devices will start to do that with regularity but that data point was questionable and looked to be based on carrier store data only.
more minor nit: blackberry frequently outsold the iphone for several years.
trivia/speculation: original droid launched 11/09 and finished 3rd to iphone 3gs's 2nd for the whole '09 holiday quarter (bb curve was #1) so it's not unlikely that the Droid was ahead of the iphone in one or both of Nov and Dec 09. I imagine there might be other months where single non-blackberry devices have beaten the iphone.
Maybe I wasn't clear but Blackberry won most quarters for the first 2 years of iphone.
Also: the report was that GS3 "won" US sales in August not the quarter (which isn't over yet). Which may be true but the report looked like it was just counting carrier stores which doesn't necessarily mean they won overall. Whether the GS3 "wins" the quarter seems like a red herring given the iP5 will only have 2 weeks on sale this quarter.
"Do they think they need to do this kind of litigation to keep making products people will buy?"
Doesn't really follow.
"Are they trying to discredit Samsung as copycats?"
Absolutely.
"it's a positive business move" sort of thing?"
I think they would rather sign deals guaranteeing more product differentiation than get money directly from lawsuits so not really.
...
Whether they are right or not I think Apple feels genuinely aggrieved by Android in general and Samsung's close copying in particular. Again whether they are right or not I think they are serious when they say they don't want to be both R&D and Design for the whole industry.
The litigation has the following aims imho:
(1) dilute the brands of copycats
(2) scare copycats into differentiating their products more
(3) force utility sapping differentiation via judgements
For the dozenth time: this is not some radical choice Apple made. Apple is, as a public company, responsible to act in its own interest within the current economic system. The system is screwed up, but that doesn't mean that any single company has a responsibility to unilaterally disarm.
Aggressive product-killing patent suits are not the norm, nor are they part of "the system" or "the game" as it's traditionally been practiced. Tech patents have been used to drive revenue: invent stuff, file patents, find infringers, negotiate for a royalty, sue if you can't come to agreement and eventually settle for whatever royalty you end up with.
Apple isn't the only bad actor in the mobile space right now. And other companies (c.f. Rambus) have been much worse in the past. But it's just not correct to argue that they were "forced" to act this way by their obligations to their shareholders. Don't make excuses.
The reporting as it stands is that Apple's demands (something like $30/unit I think?) weren't something that could be meaningfully "negotiated". Obviously there's complexity here, but the same logic goes the other way: if Samsung felt they could get a significant discount on that $1B award via negotiation, surely they would have cut that deal, no?
From what was presented at trial the $30/unit was the first offer and basically Samsung didn't counter-propose anything.
It could very well be that Apple was inflexible on the $30 figure but to me a starting offer of $30/unit implies a settlement somewhere at or below $20/unit. Also note that the Apple offer included significant discounts that could wittle the per unit cost down by 20%/40%/60% for various things (or up to 100% if they also used Windows Phone instead of Android).
A settlement at $15 a unit with a 40%-60% discount would only be $6-$9 a unit. Considering Samsung pays Microsoft $5-$10 a unit this doesn't seem all that crazy.
Yeah...that's silly. If that were the case, you'd see a lot more patent trolls and Captain-Planet-villain-style polluting, for just a start.
Being a public company means there is pressure on you to be profitable (and pressure for other dumb things...see: minority shareholder demands when Steve Jobs was sick), yes, but the power shareholders and charters wield aren't that strong. People actually talk about this wrt Apple all the time when they talk about all the crap products Apple doesn't release and markets Apple doesn't enter to make sure they do right by what they do release and serve the markets they do enter.
Even if you take a simplistic view of "businesses exist to maximize profit", there are a ton of secondary effects you need to worry about (dilution of brand, perception by the public, narrative for the media, the momentum your workforce feels, alienation of partners, etc, etc, etc). You're basically talking "maximize short term profits", which Apple has already shown they're willing to somewhat forgo in exchange for (massive) longterm gains.
As the largest market cap public company on the planet, Apple was doing just fine for its shareholders. When have you ever heard the leading company in a market say they're going "thermonuclear" against their main competitor?
I am not taking sides. Don't have all the data. I'll just say that there's a huge difference between "Research & Development" and only "Development". The first is far more time consuming, risky and expensive. The second is a clear and guided roadmap that you simply follow to completion.
I used to be an idealist. I bought the whole idea of "just build a better product" without question. And so I did. Many years ago I embarked in the development of electronic products for a specific industry while trenching new territory and bringing new ideas to the user base. I opted not to file for patents because, well, they were expensive and I was going to just beat them with a better product. Or so I thought.
The first product took about a year and a half in R&D. Lots of work. Lots of problems to solve. Lots to learn. It finally got out and we did really good business right out of the gate. Hundreds of thousands of dollars per month. Eight months later competitors came out with devices offering about 60% of what we were doing at half the price.
It nearly killed the business. A six month month run with a hardware product isn't enough to recoup your R&D. Our competitors had the advantage of only having to do the "D" part because they copied and stole as much as they could. Never mind the fact that they did not have to trench new territory and actually test to see if there was a market there.
The lessons I learned during this period were invaluable (and very painful). Patents do have reason to exist and should not be ignored. People will cheat and steal in business the first chance they get. It takes a special kind of person to honor an agreement without the threat of serious financial harm through litigation if violated. People will violate NDA's and use them to get your ideas and insight under all kinds of pretenses.
Business is war. I was an idealist. An idiot. Live and learn.
I don't know about the Apple vs. Samsung issue. Frankly, I don't have the time to dive into the details. Even if it did, it would be a huge waste of my time as I have nothing to gain from such an exercise. Not taking sides, here's hoping that the courts get it right.
Your story is interesting but your language clearly shows how it has affected your view on things - you refer to your competitors, who did nothing more than compete with you exactly as one expects in a free marketplace as "cheating", "stealing", "copying" etc. You assume that you have a natural ownership of any idea that enters your head just because you decide to expend effort into researching it.
Have you thought about how your own idea was almost certainly founded on an existing industry full of players who saw you doing 99% copying and 1% something new? This seems to happen all the time - Apple creates a smartphone, using all the "R" that Blackberry, Microsoft, Palm and others did beforehand to inform their design decisions, and then because they add a small layer of newness they are completely blind to what they themselves "copied" in making their product. Everything others imitate is "stolen" while everything they use was "obvious". They completely discount all the risks competitors faced, all the innovation in the competitor's products (Jobs saw only a touch display with rounded icons - despite Android being incredibly innovative in its own right and introducing many features and concepts not seen elsewhere).
Look buddy, I am not going to go into every single detail of what my life was like during that period. Let's just say that you can't --and should not-- reach such conclusions from the very limited view I chose to share with you in a short post. I am condensing over a decade worth of experiences into a few paragraphs.
Here's a short one. Imagine this: A competitor asks you to meet, under NDA, to discuss licensing your product. "Can you build one for us with these features?" is the theme of the meeting. After lawyers do their thing, NDA's and other documents are in place, the meetings get started. These are deep technical meetings with information being shared for the purpose of developing a licensed product. Then, the talks end abruptly with no communication from the other side. Six months later they show-up at the next tradeshow with the very product you helped them understand, explore, diagram and almost get to market.
Here's another one: You hire a consultant to design a product for you. The consultant doesn't really know the field but he is capable. You, effectively, pay this person to learn on the job and design a widget for you. He does. Then, a few months later, after having learned the technical bits and also about the market opportunity, he launches a company with a competing product for less. You, effectively, paid for the "R" in "R&D". All he had to do was the "D".
These are not hypothetical situations. These actually happened.
99% copying and 1% something new?
Have you ever competed in anything? Say, swimming. Do you know how hard it is to get 1% better than world class? How about building a race car that is 1% better? C'mon, all you have to do is copy 99% of the design and then improve only 1% of it. Go do it and then come back and tell me how trivial it is to innovate just 1% of something already at the state of the art. I don't know one person who goes through such and experience that would make the kinds of comments you made.
Let's all hold hands, sing kumbaya and smoke one. Right.
First, I apologize for being somewhat presumptuous - clearly this was a very distressing and unfortunate series of events where your legitimate interests were harmed in pretty shady ways.
The only thing I'd add is that from what you've described, you would / should have had perfectly good legal redress completely independent of patents. The kinds of problems you describe would normally be addressed through contract and trade secrets law - presumably you had NDAs, contracts that protected your interests with contractors, etc. If those didn't work or you didn't have the resources to follow them through then I'm not sure you can presume patents would have been different.
No worries. I understand that it is hard to communicate or see both sides of something through this medium.
Legal action is a funny thing. I get the sense that people think that it's easy, that in the US it's as easy as making a phone call and you've got a lawsuit.
The reality, in my experience, is quite different. In business at least, it's part of the arms race. Can you sue a multi-billion dollar corporation for violating an NDA? Absolutely. The very first thing you lawyer will require is a $250,000 "war chest" and a demonstrable means to be in it for twice that much. It's a game you cannot win even if the truth is on your side.
That's another misconception of my youth that got washed away with a bucket of ice-cold water. You don't necessarily win because you are on the right side of an argument.
I'll give you another example. I had a case where my most valuable reseller, a company with great standing in the industry, was effectively bribed by said multinational corporation to exclude our products from their exhibit at a trade show. I have copies of the emails between employees of the company and the CEO of the reseller outfit. Could I sue? Sure. Was there potential for federal antitrust action. Very likely. Was I on the right side of the issue? Without a doubt. Was I guaranteed a win? Absolutely not. The more likely outcome would have been that seeking legal action would have ruined my business in more ways than one.
Don't get me wrong, I've taken legal action when justified and, more importantly, the "army's" were reasonably matched. In other cases you sometimes have to lick your wounds and move on.
This is the kind of stuff they don't teach you about in school. I can't say that I am grateful to have learned it this way because it is a shitty way to learn things, but sometimes there's no other way. I am still a very enthusiastic entrepreneur with multiple projects cooking. Life is good.
That's not fair. He's not taking sides in the Apple vs. Samsung case. He has a valid opinion about the validity of the patent system, but that doesn't mean that patents should always be upheld. He's just sharing his experience (though it doesn't really have much bearing on the original post either).
OK, the problem with your argument is this bit: "Eight months later competitors came out with devices offering about 60% of what we were doing at half the price.
It nearly killed the business"
If the HTC G1 "nearly killed" the iPhone 3G, then you might have an argument. Though it would depend in sensitive ways on things like whether or not Apple had made back its R&D costs over the year of Insanely Great iPhone sales. (The fact that that phone wasn't made by Samsung seems kinda important too).
Needless to say, Apple made out sorta OK under the Google/HTC onslaught of '08/90. So why cite something like this as a related anecdote when it clearly doesn't apply? The kind of damages you posit don't exist, so why sue to recoup them?
"If the HTC G1 "nearly killed" the iPhone 3G, then you might have an argument."
He's not really arguing that and admits ignorance of Apple vs whoever. He's arguing for the legitimacy of the patent system itself.
Moreover why would his anecdote of 8 months suddenly become a hard and fast rule that can be applied to all other industries after which all bets are off?
I am not, in any way, proposing that my example or timeline is equivalent to what it going on with Apple vs. Samsung.
Mine is just one example of a real-life situation where someone got royally shafted for not having patent protection. I had major multinational corporation copying my designs, marketing materials, and more. I even had customers asking me if I had gone into a joint venture or licensing agreement with some of these competitors because of how blatant the copying had been. One or two patents would have stopped a lot of this on its tracks. Of course, part of the "business is war" aspect of things is whether or not you have enough of a financial war-chest to engage in litigation.
One of the reasons I did not go and file for a couple of patents was my natural drive, as an engineer, to just want to build it. Second was my stupid idealism at the time. I truly believed that if I just built a better product I'd always be ahead of the pack, even if they attempted to copy my work. I would later learn hard lessons when facing the consequences of these dumb, stupid decisions.
Keep in mind that I have huge problems with the patent system. I have read through hundreds of patents. Most of them are pure unrefined manure. Bullshit patents. And, yes, I felt that some aspects of the patents I was going to file for where bullshit.
I came out of school with this dumb-ass idealistic idea that makes a distinction between true invention and implementation. Engineers solve problems and implement solutions every day. These are not patentable inventions. True inventions are, non-obvious, blah, blah, blah. What a shock was it to discover that the patent office willingly hands off patents for implementation, not invention. Hell, they don't even do that, they are handing you patents for ideas, you know, the shit you are not supposed to be able to patent!
If you read through hundreds of patents and are intimately familiar with both the subject matter as well as the industry to which these patents are relevant it doesn't take long to realize that people are getting patents for napkin ideas as opposed to true realized invention.
And, don't get me started on software patents. I bet that if you were creative enough you could get a patent on the "do" loop, even today.
Boldly armed with all of this baggage and idealistic bullshit I trotted forward and built my product without filing for a single patent. It didn't take long to learn the lesson that was waiting for me around the corner.
Patents, like them or not, have become weapons of the war business can be. I can count with one hand the people I would trust without solid legal paperwork (be it patents or other instruments). I have been shafted by people who singed NDA's and then went out and used what they learned from me to go raise funding and become a competitor.
Again, its' "D" vs "R&D". They must have sounded like geniuses in front of the investors with all the product and market knowledge they stole from me. Thankfully, in that case, they ended-up failing miserably (not before causing me some financial pain) because of the fact that they had no knowledge or insights of their own. You can only go so far without a real connection to what you are doing.
I see this Apple vs. Samsung thing both ways. As I said before, I don't know who's right or wrong and don't have the time to figure it out. We'll see what happens.
I've said it before and I will say it again. Apple needs to compete on, and thus focus on the quality of their products. Not sue everyone else into the ground because they feel threatened. Apple will just keep squeezing out incremental changes to their devices and suing everyone else until they are the only ones left standing.
Maybe they should let Woz run the company, he seems to be the last innovator left.
It's not about the quality per se but I think their problem right now is that users' choice is overwhelming them and the one-size-fits-all approach of the iPhone has diminishing returns after a point. The variety, choice of screen sizes and price ranges of the competition is only getting better by the day.
A new iPhone is released only once a year, so it better be very good with a lot of new technologies, features, new designs etc. for sales to last all through the next year. iPhone 4S sales started lagging in the 3Q itself this year, compared to the 4th quarter for the iPhone 4. This is because people start waiting for the next version or switch to the competition because they have better specced devices with more features. I think Samsung timed their Galaxy S3 launch perfectly to coincide with the iPhone 4S getting old enough to beat, and they beat it in monthly sales for the first time, which is a noteworthy thing in itself.
The whole situation is reminding me of the PC wars in the 80s, where Apple had a seemingly unassailable innovation lead, and then squandered it away by offering limited choice and higher prices, while Microsoft very smartly licensed DOS to Compaq and others like Dell and HP, and the rest is history. Apple's marketshare is now 17% vs. Android's 67% which is about 4 times more. No wonder Apple is going crazy with the patent war against Android. That's probably their only weapon against the equivalent of the hordes of the 'beige boxes'.
I think Apple is aware that they only make one phone and the trade offs that result.
iPhone Q3 sales lagged more than the year before because global rollout is faster and in 2011 they had the midyear CDMA and white iphone launches to buoy Q3.
The Galaxy S3 may have outsold the 4S some months and some devices surely will in the future but the claim that it did so in July/August was not supported by much data.
This is the real problem I see with Apple's litigation streak; it poisons the very belief system essential to the creation of the products they need to make to stay ahead.
Apple's belief system is that making super high quality, ground breaking products will lead them to success. But that is incompatible with the idea that all their competitors can trivially produce equally good products just by watching what Apple does. Even while the law suits are trying to send the message that Apple's innovations are protected, they actually send the opposite message: Apple is under threat because the qualities that make Apple's products great are easy to replicate. Once Apple internalises this idea, that what they do is easy to replicate, how will they be motivated to create amazing new things?
Any organization rewards its most productive members. If Apple's marginal dollar of profit starts coming from litigating rather than Innovating it's not just bad for consumers, it's bad for Apple (over a longer horizon).
Who do we want to have higher status, Jony Ive or Noreen Krall?
I agree with the sentiment, admire respect the man for his contibutions to where technology is, but I really don't understand why Woz's opionion is solicited for every step that Apple of any time in the past 10 years has made. Even at the gestation of the company, his idea of how they should proceed was completely at odds with Jobs' (the latter actually wanted to turn a profit, among other things). I would call it safe to say modern Apple is all but devoid of Woz's influence
Infamous does indeed refer to the bad kind of fame - this is either a simple brain fart, or possibly the writer just doesn't have a very sound grasp of the language.
It's interesting that camera quality is so important for people, yet I find it difficult to find information on image quality beyond how many megapixels the sesnor has. The least they could do is tell me the sensor size/aperture size too.
You really have to search the specialized review sites to find good comparisons on image quality.
Not sure exactly what this references, but Apple actually gives fairly specific information on all of their iDevices cameras—on the Apple product page it specifically states 5 lens elements and an aperture of 2.4 for the iPhone 5. And 4 lens element and an aperture of 2.8 for the iPhone 4.
That's because the general public has been trained that more megapixels = better pictures. It's like horsepower in cars, or thread count in sheets.
We're starting to see manufacturers differentiate on aperature and other details. Nokia talked about how their mechanical stabilization allowed for longer exposures, etc. etc.
But when somebody asks me if the camera in my xperia s is any good, I still respond "yeah, it's 12 megapixels".
Well, to be fair, the filing date on that patent is Dec 1, 2004.
Absent genuine industrial espionage, it would have been rather hard for the Google Desktop team to have been aware of it in October 2004: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Desktop
Or are you saying Google should have checked for new patents (and patent applications - this wasn't issued until December 2011) before re-implementing something they'd already done on the desktop on an Android phone?
I am not saying "Infringing Patents". I am saying "Stealing Ideas". They are not the same terms. As Tim Cook put it in his email "sending a loud and clear message that stealing isn’t right".
It doesn't matter who the original inventor of Turn-by-Turn navigation is. It came on Android earlier. If something is not protected under patent, it doesn't mean that you are not stealing/copying an idea when you copy a feature from other devices/systems. It's wrong when you copy features of competitors and you blast at them when they do so.
Apple should have won a copyright case against Samsung clearly copying too much of the overall iPhone design. Instead Apple won a patent case which sucks for everyone, not just Samsung. A litigious Apple could use this win against other Android (and smart-phone in general) manufactures.
Obviously they allow and people have patented things that are also copyrightable. I just don't think that they should allow patents for many of those things.
It feels like a painter suing another artist not for copying his painting but for using patented brush strokes to create it.
Samsung may have copied the shapes and a few gestures like slide to unlock with the original galaxy s. But anyone who claims that it gave them a market advantage is being disingenuous.
Woz has always been rational about stuff and what he says. I hope the verdict gets overturned.
Will people stop posting what Steve Wozniak thinks about everything? Just because he's Steve Wozniak doesn't make him a foremost expert on everything related to technology. Does this quote add any insight or value at all?
“I don’t agree with it — very small things I don’t really call that innovative. I wish everybody would just agree to exchange all the patents and everybody can build the best forms they want to use everybody’s technologies.”
Actually it does. The man is not claiming to be an expert on technology, however he did help co-create one of the most successful and profitable companies in history. You have an opinion, why shouldn't he?
I don't think that's the only reason he's quoted often. I think the fact that Woz continues to have very sensible opinions on a lot of things has a lot to with.
We know Woz is an 'outside looking in' type person. His remarks remind me of all the people who are really upset with Apple for pursuing this lawsuit. People seem to have this conception that Apple saw an opportunity to sue the pants of a harmless company so it did. This is not the case at all. The two corporations were in meetings with lawyers for a year trying to iron out a deal. The deals fell through and they went to court.
The truth is everyone has been and is suing Apple, all the time. http://c4sif.org/2012/04/web-of-tech-patent-lawsuits-infogra... This graphic is now 9 month old. Truth is Apple is the most sued company in tech! I just don't get this 'down with Apple' mentality. It's completely irrational.
When Apple entered the phone telecom industry, it turned telecoms on their head. Apple started to take control from these awful companies (see my article on t-mobile: http://news.nucleusdevelopment.com/2012/09/11/t-mobile-infla...) and give it to consumers. Remember verizon didn't want any part of the iPhone because 'it gave the consumer too much control'?
Google and Samsung have been helping the telecoms regain control, allowing crapware and bloatware to go right back on the phones. That is one of the very things that Apple fought so hard to keep off their phones, and one of the main reasons Verizon didn't initially want Apple as a vendor. Not to mention, The spyware that gets installed with out our knowledge, ie: Carrier IQ. Controlling the software OS on the phones (ei: why it takes so long to get a new version of Android on your existing phone).
There are all sorts of things I disagree with in this comment, but I want to highlight just one:
iPhones (like many Android phones and Blackberries and ...) had Carrier IQ software installed on them. Google-controlled Nexus phones did not.
Moreover, the only reason anyone outside of Carrier IQ, operators, smartphone manufacturers, etc knows anything at all about Carrier IQ is that some people discovered it while trying to reverse-engineer an Android phone.
You may think Apple is a white knight protecting you from the carriers. The truth, as always, is much more complicated.
So how would things have turned out if we dropped all the software patent claims and Apple could only sue on trade dress?
Apple is a hardware company. A hardware enclosures design company, really; they outsource most everything to do with producingthe hardware. For a company like Apple, trade dress claims make sense. Software patents seem a little fishy.
(Even for software companies software patents are a bit fishy. That's why they've traditionally relied on copyright. And if I'm not mistaken that's why the USPTO is soon going to be issuing new rules and a new system to deal with software/business method patents since they cause so much concern.)
It is beyond me, why everyone chooses to ignore Nokia's taking a chunk out of Apple and Microsoft taking a chunk out of HTC, Samsung and Barnes & Nobles.
Many tech companies have used patents in the past to get royalties from each other. Some have been more aggressive than others.
What is new about the Apple case is that they appear to be using patents to completely block competitors from the market, and making a huge amount of noise about how other companies are "blatantly copying" things like slide-to-unlock.
Microsoft have been extracting money from Android manufacturers for a while now, but the public don't know and don't care. If Microsoft were to go around making noise about Android being copy-cats and stealing their ideas, people would be even more angry with them than they are with Apple (being Microsoft).
The argument that often goes around HN that "Nokia started it" completely misses the point of what Apple are doing.
Watch more patent litigation. The suits are always just proxies for the licensing negotiation. Even seeking to get products blocked from market is just hardball.
Despite the massive judgment in the Samsung/Apple case, it will likely all boil down to licensing agreements.
This is true and Apple's case will eventually fade to the background just as the Nokia case did and Microsoft's case(s). If anything, it should be a sign that the US patent system needs to be looked at and reviewed, not completely rebuilt, but rather revamped.
It's continually revamped. In fact, large parts of the Leahy-Smith America Invents Act are going into effect just next week. (the rest to follow in March) It includes many of the top items that internet geeks call for.
Did any of those people disagree with him before? Has he changed anyone's opinion? If he had said the opposite, that the verdict was correct, would anyone here say "hmmm, he's given me a lot to think about."? Or would they just say, "it's so sad to see a legend lose touch."?
No one cares what the "naive, idealistic" engineer clueless about business thinks. That's the battle we're fighting - to fix patents, we have to tell people how it's not mere idealism or ideology, but how real businesses can get squeezed out by patent trolls or assholes if software patents don't get reformed soon.
On the bright side, I'm noticing more friends getting Androids, even around this time when the iPhone 5 is being launched. Only the core Apple supporters are going straight for the iPhone. The tide may be turning and Apple losing a bit of its shine, at least in my circles.