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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?"
$150 million investment that breathed new life into then-struggling Apple
when you have BILLIONS of cash in the bank, a $150 million 'investment' is better called, a token gesture.
This tiny detail of history is always presented wrong... but you have a wiff of the truth. Bill Gates' and Microsoft's $150 million investment was exactly that, a token gesture, and it is not what 'saved' Apple from bankruptcy. It was Jobs and his radical reshaping of the company, the elimination of failing product lines, and the introduction of the iPod/iTunes paradigm that probably saved Apple. Had that $150 million never changed hands, the result would not have been much different. Jobs wanted Microsoft's Office products for the Mac... that's ALL that was. Did MS Office save Apple? Fuck no... that's absurd.
The Admin and the Engineer
You're trying to define innovate to mean the same thing as invent. That's not what it means. It means "Make changes in something established, esp. by introducing new methods, ideas, or products.". It's hard to argue that Apple doesn't do this. They find markets where there's room for improvement in the products and then release a product which is better is some way.
I agree, but then there's the stuff that Apple plain invented. FireWire? ADB? AppleTalk? TrueType? Even the PowerPC wouldn't exist without Apple's involvement. This idea that Apple doesn't create anything is frankly bizarre, and I think it must just be sour grapes, because it has very little basis in reality.
Breakfast served all day!
At the end of the day, BillG is alive and SteveJ is not.
A few years, and we'll say: At the end of the day, MacOS X is alive and Windows is dead :-)
Seriously, Apple just pulled off the mother of all trolls: They made Microsoft believe that Mountain Lion would be a merge between MacOS X and iOS, and promptly Microsoft responded with Windows 8, which _is_ a merge between a desktop and a phone OS.
That's certainly an informative piece—so thank you—although I think I can resolutely say that while Apple didn't steal it from Xerox, they did definitely steal it from PARC:
Then, in exchange for the opportunity to invest in a hot new pre-IPO start-up called "Apple," the Xerox PARC commandos were forced — under protest — to give Apple’s engineers a tour and a demonstration of their work.
That being said, I don't completely trust the article by Mr. Landley being quoted, because it perpetuates the misunderstanding that Windows was purely derived from Xerox and the Macintosh; this is annoyingly in ignorance of VisiCorp Visi On, and that Windows was already under development when the consumer GUI market consisted of the Lisa and Visi On.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
The man, once the world's richest, has basically given away his fortune to humanitarian aid and to help develop the world.
Humanitarian? Do you realize the Gates Foundation support ALEC - along with many other scams.
The "American Legislative Exchange Council" has a reputation that you would not believe. It's like they are some James Bond Villian, something like SPECTRE maybe.
> National Public Radio, NPR, has aired several programs about ALEC and its influence in the drafting of legislation
> For ALEC Exposed, the Center for Media and Democracy made a new website
> Simultaneously, The Nation devoted a special edition of its magazine to breaking the story on ALEC Exposed
> On July 14, 2011, the Los Angeles Times announced that government watchdog Common Cause would issue a challenge to ALEC's nonprofit status, on the grounds that ALEC "spends most of its resources lobbying, in violation of the rules governing nonprofit organizations."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Legislative_Exchange_Council
It just goes on and on.
The Hidden History of ALEC and Prison Labor
> . . . prison labor for the private sector was legally barred for years, to avoid unfair competition with private companies. But this has changed thanks to the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), its Prison Industries Act,
> Somewhat more familiar is ALEC’s instrumental role in the explosion of the US prison population in the past few decades. ALEC helped pioneer some of the toughest sentencing laws on the books today, like mandatory minimums for non-violent drug offenders, “three strikes” laws, and “truth in sentencing” laws.
http://www.thenation.com/article/162478/hidden-history-alec-and-prison-labor
12 Things You Need to Know About the Uprising in Wisconsin
Monday, 21 February 2011 19:03
> What's happening in Wisconsin is not complicated. At the beginning of this year, the state was on course to end 2011 with a budget surplus of $120 million. As Ezra Klein explained, newly elected GOP Governor Scott Walker then " signed two business tax breaks and a conservative health-care policy experiment that lowers overall tax revenues (among other things). The new legislation was not offset, and it turned a surplus into a deficit." (Update: please see this note for more detail on the cause of the budget gap.)
> Walker then used the deficit he'd created as the justification for assaulting his state's public employees. He used a law cooked up by a right-wing advocacy group called the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). ALEC likes to fly beneath the radar, but I described the organization in a 2005 article as "the connective tissue that links state legislators with right-wing think tanks, leading anti-tax activists and corporate money." Similar laws are on the table in Ohio and Indiana.
http://techsunite.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=category&id=3&layout=blog&Itemid=58&limitsta...
And now this comes out in techrights:
Bill Gates Funds ALEC
02.27.12
> Summary: A citizens-hostile front group turns out to be funded by the Gates Foundation
> IN OUR daily links we occasionally include links about ALEC, a controversial AstroTurfing/lobbying group for corporate power. It turns out that Bill Gates is funding them. “Knowingly or not, the Gates Foundation has just stepped on a political landmine,” says this one report. What about the Koch ties that we wrote about some days ago?
http://techrights.org/2012/02/27/alec-and-gates-foundation/
I'm pretty sure that the PARC demo was seminal. They took from a lot of people but they didn't take as much from everybody else altogether as much they did from PARC. Why PARC didn't patent and exploit it is a different question. Another question is why Digital didn't market the demo PC they built - vehemently opposed by David Cutler.
Dave Cutler, who was involved with this technology, jumped to Microsoft at that time (October 1988) and is still there now. He was working on the recently embarrassingly failed Azure, but is now on the XBox team.
He's 70 now so his contributions might not be as vigorous as they once were - but they have the unequaled benefit of his unique experience of having prevented DEC from marketing the PC they invented.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I'm in no way bitter. A sci fi writer thought of a technology that would be neat, having no idea how to implement it, or if it was ever even going to be possible. A technology guy (Bill Gates) thought of an implementation of it as a similar technology but could never quite get it. Apple realized that the key to the user experience was touch sensitivity that had been developed long before by someone else. It was a tremendous innovation in design to realize that was the the key missing element. It was so crucial to the whole thing they could come up with probably the stupidest product name in decades, and it *still* sold like hotcakes. That shows just how valuable design innovation is.
But they didn't develop touch screens. In the context of what is an innovation, developing a touch screen was a science and engineering innovation, apple didn't do that. They did innovate the design and integration.
Without the technology for touch screens it would have never come together at all. And we'd be stuck with microsofts vision of tablets and slates (which, admittedly served me very well for specific purposes, but not for what an iPad does).
If you want to go one step further, the Android guys (and microsoft) are trying to figure out what the most important things Apple missed are. Androids answer to this is "mostly open marketplace", Microsoft is more on the 'stop thinking of it as a collection of dumb icons' approach.
I appreciate that you may have had trouble reading the first line of my post, but I was quite clearly I was drawing a distinction between types of innovation, and stating one cannot exist without another. That happens a lot. No hard feelings.
The match between Apple and Nokia is much better than the match between Samsung and Apple. Who is ripping off who? Basically this kind of "copying" is nothing more than a type of fashion and Apple is outrageous to try to get competitor's products banned for things that they do themselves many times over.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();