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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?"
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!
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();