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How Steve Jobs Patent-Trolled Bill Gates
theodp writes "Apple, which is currently waging IP war on Android vendors, is no stranger to patent trolling. Citing the Steve Jobs bio, Forbes' Eric Jackson recalls how Steve Jobs used patents to get Bill Gates to make a 1997 investment in Apple. Recalled Jobs: 'Microsoft was walking over Apple's patents. I said [to Gates], "If we kept up our lawsuits, a few years from now we could win a billion-dollar patent suit. You know it, and I know it. But Apple's not going to survive that long if we're at war. I know that. So let's figure out how to settle this right away. All I need is a commitment that Microsoft will keep developing for the Mac and an investment by Microsoft in Apple so it has a stake in our success.' Next thing you know, BillG was lording over Jobs at Macworld Boston, as the pair announced the $150 million investment that breathed new life into then-struggling Apple. So, does Gates deserve any credit for helping create the world's most valuable company?"
Don't you have to be a bottom feeding shell corporation with no actual products to be a patent troll?
Not sure Apple fit this definition at any stage of it's history.
Sure he does. Not only for investing, but for providing solid competition with a different angle to it -- a very successful angle -- that required Apple to innovate one way or another to succeed.
And even today, I still run Windows... under OS X, in a VM, sandboxed safely away from the Internet. :o)
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Patent troll nothing. Microsoft was caught red handed with code lifted *DIRECTLY* from the Quicktime codecs. This was not trolling with a concept or buying patents to then leverage against someone else, this was outright plagiarism.
Evidence, please. Every Apple fanboy comes out with this and points out how TOTALLY destroyed Microsoft would have been had it gone to court, yet mysteriously Apple didn't go to court but settled for $150M of *investment* and continuation of a product which probably would have been continued anyway.
Oh my f'ing gawd! If you're going to use the term "patent troll", make damn sure you know what it means. When a company infringes a patent and is sued for doing so, the suing party is _NOT_ a patent troll. When the CEO of a suing company opens a dialogue and negotiates a settlement that is mutually beneficial to both companies, that is _NOT_ a patent troll.
A patent troll is a company that makes nothing of note (typically nothing at all) yet sues other companies for patent infringement. In fact, it can be best summed up that a patent troll's business model is generating revenues from suing other companies for patent infringement. Now, before anyone tries to be witty and claim that describes Apple, pull your head out of your ass and be honest - Apple makes BILLIONS of dollars _MAKING AND SELLING ACTUAL PRODUCTS!_ They invest a massive amount of money into R&D and thus have numerous patents covering their inventions. Thus, when a company infringes one of those patents, it is entirely within their right and understandable that they would sue for infringement but APPLE IS NOT A PATENT TROLL.
Seriously. You may not like their actions; you may not like Steve Jobs; you may think everything related to Apple is crap but be honest and understand what a patent troll is and recognize Apple is NOT a patent troll.
The major issue I have with people watering down the meaning of the term is that it weakens the debate against actual patent trolls who are leaches of the worst order. When you use "patent troll" to describe Apple, just because you don't like them, you weaken the ability to rightly vilify the real patent trolls.
Apple is NOT a patent troll. You don't have to like them - hate them all you want - but be honest and recognize they are NOT a patent troll.
Don't you have to be a bottom feeding shell corporation with no actual products to be a patent troll?
Not sure Apple fit this definition at any stage of it's history.
"Don't you have to be poor, with no actual possession, to be a crack addict?"
Patent trolling is an act, not a profession. Though some people/companies do base their business around that single act.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
so the San Francisco Canyon Company actually stole the code. Microsoft & Intel used the software they produced AND *ALLEGEDLY* (a word that every Apple fanboy really needs to learn) knew that the company was stealing the code. You may say, why did MS threaten Apple if it weren't true and the answer is that litigation would have been more expensive, whether or not Apple was correct.
So, does Gates deserve any credit for helping create the world's most valuable company?
The reality is that he probably had little choice in the matter. Not investing in Apple would risk having Microsoft as pretty much the only operating system company in existence (OS/2, Solaris and others had virtually no market share, and Linux was not really a competitor on the desktop back then). With the IE antitrust suits just starting around that time, killing off Windows' biggest competitor was a bad idea. So, you could argue that keeping Apple alive was necessary for MS, even if it might cause future problems, and those could be minimised via network effects (people needing Windows to run their applications).
Microsoft has played many roles over its long history with Apple. It has been benefactor, beneficiary, competitor, and on occasion extortionist.
As a benefactor, Microsoft has invested in Apple, more than once IIRC. They have also produced many solid productivity applications, and once upon a time a number of programming tools (MS Basic, QuickBasic, Fortran) for the Mac. Apple desperately needed applications for the Mac, especially during the early years when people were wrestling with the enormous increase in complexity that programming the Macintosh interface represented at the time.
As a beneficiary, Microsoft has reaped a nontrivial amount of money from sales of Microsoft products on the Macintosh platform. It also benefited from early exposure to the GUI ideas in the Macintosh and Lisa that popularized and built upon earlier work at Xerox. It could see the many interesting things Apple was doing with object oriented programming, multimedia, and other innovations.
As a competitor, Microsoft modeled Windows after Macintosh and used it to largely drive Apple from the market for many years. Microsoft used its position as the prime application vendor to shape how Macintosh was used, making it more difficult to use Macintosh in business by withholding key applications or dropping others. (Microsoft dropped Microsoft Project and Foxbase/Foxpro for Macintosh, and never produced Access.) Apple has repeatedly aided Microsoft through brilliance in conception, idiocy in execution, and almost non-existent follow through with future products - both hardware and software. (They are doing much better over the last 10 years.)
Business being business, extortionist may be too harsh a word, but Microsoft is rumored to have forced Apple to sell its marvelous Macintosh Basic to Microsoft for $1.00 if it wanted to get another license for the Microsoft Basic in the ROMs of the Apple IIs - Apple's bread and butter money maker for years after the Macintosh was released. Funny how much Microsoft Basic -> Quickbasic improved around that time. I seem to recall that Microsoft stopped development on Macintosh applications when Apple sued them over the look and feel of Windows as being too close to Macintosh. I don't believe those were the only times that Microsoft played hardball with Apple either, although it probably went both ways at times.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
so the San Francisco Canyon Company actually stole the code. Microsoft & Intel used the software they produced AND *ALLEGEDLY* (a word that every Apple fanboy really needs to learn) knew that the company was stealing the code. You may say, why did MS threaten Apple if it weren't true and the answer is that litigation would have been more expensive, whether or not Apple was correct.
Copyright infringement. Doesn't matter too much whether you know about it or not. By hiring a company that stole the code, and using the stolen code, Microsoft became legally responsible. Not morally, assuming they didn't know anything about the code theft (and they would have had to be bloody stupid to buy the code if they had known it was stolen).The same principle that allows the BSA to make a company pay big time if an employee, with or without knowledge of his superiors, uses pirated software.
That Wikipedia quote, while it does have a leg to stand on, its one leg is not in any remotely good condition and it is missing several toes.
It cites an article where it is said the following, about patent trolls:
"The long-anticipated eBay case gets to the heart of the debate over so-called patent trolls â" companies that obtain patents only to license them, often using the threat of an injunction to extract a high price from infringers." Woellert, L.: eBay Takes on the Patent Trolls. Business Week, March 30, 2006.
One of the arguments that eBay made was that non-practicing inventors, quaintly nicknamed "patent trolls," should not be entitled to an injunction as a matter of course.
Oh, my! Now non-practicing inventors are "patent trolls" too.
And then it goes further along that way:
Who are these evil âoepatent trollsâ anyway? The term was first coined by Intel, whose in-house counsel was quoted to have said, âoeA patent troll is somebody who tries to make a lot of money off a patent that they are not practicing and have no intention of practicing and in most cases never practiced.â(TM)â Sandburg, B.: Inventorâ(TM)s Lawyer Makes a Pile from Patents. The Recorder, July 30, 2001. According to this definition, a non-practicing inventor is a patent troll.
And there is more:
Later, the definition of âoepatent trollâ was modified to describe those who buy patents, which they do not practice, for the sole purpose of assertion. Under this definition, to be a troll one needs to (a) buy a patent, (b) not practice the patented invention, and (c) assert the acquired patent. As I have argued in Making Innovation Pay â" Turning IP into Shareholder Value (B. Berman, ed., John Wiley & Sons Publishers, Inc.) (2006), this definition is patently absurd.
And in the end, the author decides that there is no such thing as a patent troll at all:
To summarize, the so-called "patent trolls" are stuff of myths and legends, not of sound reason.
So, you saying that "they are far from being a patent troll" makes sense - but only because "patent trolls" don't exist according to all those definitions above.
Particularly the Wikipedia's "common accepted definition", which is "patently absurd".
ON THE OTHER HAND...
Taking in account that "patent troll" is first and foremost a pejorative term (think of the first racial slur that comes to your mind) used to describe a perfectly legal, though sometimes morally questionable ACT, well...
Apple has been "patent trolling" many times. Or "asserting a patent".
It's all in the eye of the beholder.
As for the article itself... what retard wrote that, and how am I not shocked it's posted in Forbes? Yes, Apple (not jobs, the lawsuits had been going for years and Jobs had just returned) was running a legal battle against Microsoft at the time, but as Jobs said, Apple was going to go under way before they were able to win or lose. And to be honest, Microsoft had the money to even pay if they ever won.
Losses were not what was in Gate's mind at the time. The reason Gates actually bailed Apple out was that Apple going out of business would had been horrible for Microsoft's defense in their anti-trust monopoly abuse case since Apple's competition was one of the points that was constantly brought up by the defense during the case.
I concur. On all those points.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
What's wrong with people valuing better design?
Don't quote me on this.
They sued over 'look and feel'. They literally were suing over a trashcan. The lawsuit was dismissed. Because they were suing over graphics and the idea of throwing something out.
When it came down to it MS could have ignored apple all together. They didnt. They saw a decent market there and went after it (like most ruthless businesses do). The ideas of overlapping windows are almost silly not to think of once you introduce windowing...
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Comment removed based on user account deletion
Well, yea, it's sort of a repeating story. Businessman creates a conglomerate empire, too often through dubiously ethical means. Later on, either through guilt or through boredom, the power that's acquired is used more towards philanthropy or just rots in a vault somewhere because the purpose was never the power itself or to wield it but the challenge to acquire that power in the first place and how to use it. Of course, that's just a caricature of the situation, and it's silly to label such people as one-dimensional supervillains.
But I think the point stands that as much as we can be happy that, say, philanthropists do go out of their way to spend their money for the benefit of others, we often turn a blind eye to the fact that government trivially spends more and does greater pragmatic good (health care, paid or manditory, and food programs come to mind), often again through dubiously ethical means*. And not being one-dimensional, I don't think it reasonable to label a person "good" or "evil" in a one-dimensional sense. Certainly, it's hard to think of any one person as a stellar example of perfection in some area. But, then, that's fine. I certainly don't expect as such. That's just hyper projecting and distorting actions, as if there needs to be some level of Godhood attributed to people to have respect or disrespect for their real actions. I think it's enough to just appreciate reality as it is.
*As much as I'm all about freedom and choice, I think it a bit dubious to pretend that business always gives you choice and government does not. A business that dumps toxic waste into a shared river certainly isn't giving you a choice. Neither is a business who, having undercut the competition, has decided to grant you such a pitiful wage that it's neigh impossible for many people to save enough to move away. Thankfully, government has been forced to step in and take away some of these evils. And that's the point, in fact, that the vast majority of people deciding to force actions, even if it goes against the freedom of a few, might be the right and ethical thing to do. It's not a matter of "might makes right", as certainly democracies are just as capable of and have harmed minorities in the past. The point, then, is the matter at hand heavily determines how ethical the situation is, not simply waving a hand about the mechanism and entirely ignoring the consequences. So, while I don't embrace at all the idea of government nosing itself into every bit of what would be great freedom, I think it crazy to call for anarchy just because government makes things worse at times; no system is perfect, which is why you have to actually weigh what's actually going on and not just hand wave in a one-dimensional sort of way.
PS - Thank you very much for the links. Your two examples are very much good examples of the point, as of how different Andrew Carnegie and John Rockefeller were.
Eurohacker European paranoia, gun rights, and h
That is what bothers me. If a bunch of ignorant Apple zealots want to insist that Apple invented rounded corners, slide to unlock, and all things shinny; that's fine with me.
But, Apple pulling a Tonya Harding like stunt, to get Samsung devices pulled off market, because Apple does not want to compete with Android ICS; is very low scam, even for Apple.
It isn't that overlapping windows were overlooked they were hard. You had to have a way to keep track of which window was on top and render the windows in order so that the right parts are covered by the windows on top. It was much easier if you knew every window was in its own area, you could do things in any order and if something updated in a window that wasn't the topmost you could still rerender its window since you knew it wouldn't affect the active window. Think 10 windows open slightly overlapping each other. The background colour of the bottom one changes. You need a way to figure out that it AND everything on top needs to be rerendered (so that the right places are covered), or alternatively have a way to clip the image and render subregions of a window. Regardless it was difficult with the hardware/software capabilities at the time.
Mod article down.
Oh, wait. Why can't we do modding for articles again? Oh yes, the /. frontpage would be very empty on some days.
There's so much flamebait in this, I don't even know where to start. Pathetic, really.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Actually, some of the technology was patented, but had expired - the mouse, for instance. Also, due to antitrust litigation, Xerox had limits on what they could patent, so they focused more on products than technologies when applying for patents (for instance, the LaserWriter and Ethernet). Incidentally, they did sue Apple, but the statute of limitations had passed so it was thrown out. Apple also lost its early UI patent lawsuit against Microsoft precisely because they had largely borrowed a bunch of ideas from the Star.
But this meeting was later - by the time Bill and Steve met, Apple was sitting on a pile of new patents Microsoft was infringing on. The situation is not unlike the current Apple vs Android - Apple owns patents like swipe to unlock and Android (and Microsoft for that matter) is infringing. Saying Apple is a patent troll is unfair; defending patents you created is much different than buying a bunch of patents just to sue potential infringees as your sole or a major mean of income. For instance, look at how Unisys handled LZW - they bought Compuserv and thus the patent, then started suing anyone that made programs that created GIF (which uses LZW), and even though they probably wouldn't have won a lawsuit due to statute of limitations, they still made bundles of cash just by threatening to sue.
and I like my over-priced shiny Apple products. If it doesn't meet your needs then buy something else; I don't see why you have to insult hundreds of millions of people just because their needs are different from yours.