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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?"
nope he doesnt deserve any credit (Gates)
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.
Who fucking cares.
So sick of these two schmucks.
Yes. By focusing on creating products that are "good enough", he enabled someone else to easily produce something better and rake in billions of dollars.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
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.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
That makes nothing you need.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Who evers written this is a 5 year old kid knowing absolutely nothing about IP or IP law.
'trolled'. Get a life.
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, 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).
First, a patent toll isn't a company protecting their intellectual property. A patent troll is a 'firm' that makes nothing, but simply collects patents and hires a lot of lawyers in an attempt to squeeze some cash out of the victims of such tolling.
Second, when you have BILLIONS of cash in the bank, a $150 million 'investment' is better called, a token gesture.
Why would Bill Gates invest in Apple if Jobs admitted that Apple wouldn't survive long enough to win a patent lawsuit against MS anyway? Something's fishy. Gates could just wait 'em out and let Apple go away and gobble up the patents. Must be something more to the story.
But I have no trouble believing that MS was infringing... I don't think they (or, probably, anyone else back then) paid much attention to "patents". They were paying more attention to copyright but even then, not very much.
No one ever had to evacuate a city because the solar panels broke!
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
For the twenty year span 1985-2005, Microsoft used Apple as their advanced R&D lab. Apple would continually release cool products and technologies, but since it was locked out of the PC mainstream they had to settle for at most 5 percent market share. Then Microsoft would ape what Apple did and try to make incremental improvements, usually mucking it up because of the warring UI designer syndrome.
Microsoft had fine engineers but they seemed (then and now) unable to create anything original. They depended on other companies to innovate, including Netscape, Sun (for Java), Borland (for C++ class frameworks), Sybase, etc. But most importantly, they depended on Apple, because Windows was Microsoft's bread and butter product.
By 2005 the world had changed so that the PC was no longer the center of the consumer computing universe. Jobs struck with the ipod and the iPhone and Microsoft was unable to respond with its usual monopolistic hold. Apple had the prime mover advantage.
R.I.P. ClarisWorks, you were ever a thorn in Office's side.
It still is. Now it is called "iWork" and iWork on the iPad is one of MS's more credible threats as it puts a competitor on a popular device and market subset MS hasn't been able to effectively target.
Microsoft did not get to be a monopoly by kowtowing to threats of patent lawsuits from failing competitors.
the DOJ lawsuits against MS had more to do with MS supporting Apple than, well, anything. The DOJ was about to get all into MS's business, with bizarre stuff like forcing them to ship Windows without the IE browser, and other harebrained schemes.
this experience it also probably kept MS out of the phone market and the retail store market, vertical integration, etc. - apparently someone didn't give Redmond the memo that regulation and the FTC died when George Bush came into office. The things that apple is doing are blatantly anti-competitive, and nobody is batting an eye.
This is best explained by analogy, and I will try to put it into a /. context. Here goes --
Professor Xavier (a.k.a. Jobs) once started a school for the gifted, called Apple Computer. There, he and his close associate, Beast (a.k.a. Woz), created a wondrous thing, the personal computer. Upon hearing about this thing, another mutant, Magneto (a.k.a. Gates), came to visit with his close associate, Sabretooth (a.k.a Ballmer), to find out more about Apple. Magneto wanted to plunder Apple but knew that Dr. Xavier had a mysterious 'reality distortion field' that could probe his mind. So Magneto took a special shell (called DOS) that kept Dr. Xavier from reading his mind (there was no point to reading Sabretooth's). Dr. Xavier thought that Magneto was fairly benign and agreed to supply Magneto with his new invention, the Mac. Magneto took the Mac back to his lair in Redmond, and invented 'Windows' (BTW, Sabretooth wanted to call it 'Doors').
Since that day, Dr. Xavier and Magneto would meet at trade shows and Davos, where Magneto would boast of how his mutant Windows had conquered the other OSes -- MVS, VMS, Unix, OS/2, and even the Mac OS. Then, one day Magneto left his helmet in his luggage on the way to Davos, and it was lost by United Airlines (how odd?^). Upon meeting Magneto at Davos, Dr. Xavier realized all the things that Magneto had been hiding from him. So, he cranked-up his reality distortion field to super-strength, entered Magneto's mind, and left thoughts of tax shelters, charities, and vaccines in his head, along with the 'brilliant idea' of turning Magneto's company, Microsoft, over to Sabretooth. And, to top it off, Microsoft would bite a chunk of Apple for $150 million plus promise to develop Microsoft Office for the Mac OS FOREVER.
With that, Magneto 'retired' to save the world from disease and left Microsoft in the hands of Sabretooth, who made Microsoft more profitable than ever AND more irrelevant than ever. The rest is history.
THE END
Apologies to Stan Lee
The Forbes article is hardly any longer than this summary. It also does not substantiate the claim of patent troll for either MS or Apple (as mentioned ad nauseum by other posters).
Pretty sad attempt to generate some discussion. At least provide some substance.
FYI: MS no longer holds any of that initial 150 million investment; http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2010/05/apples-stock-rise-could-have-meant-5-billion-for-microsoft.ars
Wearing pants should always be optional.
depends how you count it. And there are a lot of ways to count it.
Apple is highest total market cap regularly, (trading places the Exxon depending on share prices). It is no where near the largest assets or total employees. Though those don't count sub contracted employees (think foxconn) or intellectual assets.
I think it's most profitable, but it doesn't actually pay a dividend (yet), so other companies that do pay dividends are worth more in that respect. It's way down there on revenue, but profit per revenue it's probably towards the top of big companies, of course bigger companies can do more things to hide their obscene amounts of wealth, including paying principle shareholders fees as employees or contractors, for example imagine if Steve Jobs made a Company, named Steve's Job Company, and Apple payed Steve's Job Company 10 billion dollars a year for management services. Or more likely, Goldman Sachs will own 5% of the company, and is paid as the accounting firm for the company sort of thing. I can say a lot of bad things about steve jobs, but it doesn't seem like he ever tried to loot apple for his own purposes.
If you want to count state owned corporations it's still probably the largest, but not necessarily, the Saudi oil company, the UAE's various sovereign wealth funds etc. are all essentially corporations, but no one makes public how much money they have, the value of their assets, their revenue, or who gets the payouts.
I wish someone would steal from me like that.
There is this famous song: AC/DC - Dirty deeds done dirt cheeps....
I could not tell my impression of this story more clear and in just one sentence...
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
You are very misinformed in using the word "stole". Apple clearly paid Xerox for everything it got from the tours there (except maybe for the engineers that it hired away):
http://obamapacman.com/2010/03/myth-copyright-theft-apple-stole-gui-from-xerox-parc-alto/
A choice quote (for those too lazy to click over):
Apple obtained permission ahead of the Xerox PARC visit. In addition, Apple provided compensation in exchange for the various Xerox PARC ideas such as the GUI.
"Back then Microsoft was using their shear size to dominate other companies"
Now the shoe is on the other foot. I remember reading back in those years, that Apple would make a worse Microsoft than Microsoft.
Whoever said that was a bloody psychic.
I really wish Bill Gates let Apple die...
You can tell how powerful someone is by the magnitude of the crime they can commit and be able to get away with.
An interesting side story to this is that Apple engineers went crazy implementing overlapping windows because they were shown such a feature at Xerox. Xerox engineers were shocked since they never actually implemented the feature and thought it to be impossible to do.
At the end of the day the only thing Apple got out of Xerox were ideas, nothing else. Implementation details were almost all home grown and some of those details were shared with Microsoft. Those were the details Apple sued Microsoft over.
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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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'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!
An interesting side story to this is that Apple engineers went crazy implementing overlapping windows because they were shown such a feature at Xerox. Xerox engineers were shocked since they never actually implemented the feature and thought it to be impossible to do.
I have heard that story on and off over the years. But 20 years ago we were shown a video of Xerox equipment pre-Lisa/Mac and they had overlapping windows on the UI
How is it possible to write this garbage without mentioning that Apple had $4,000,000,000 in cash at the time?
Bill Gates's token $150 million investment pales in comparison! It was symbolic!
Also how is it "trolling" when Microsoft actually did violate Apple's patents?!
...Create the worlds most valuable company?
In the year 2000......in the year Two THOUSAND!
source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_corporations_by_market_capitalization -year 2000 (duh)
If you want to get anal about definitions, then please tell us where the word "plagiarism" appears in the lawsuit?
I think the case was about copyright trade dress, not patents. I am not even sure if there were software patents at the time.
Also, I'm not sure if Apple had $4,000,000,000 in cash at the time.
Google the following: gates foundation site:techrights.org
Read all the article that appear.
You are welcome.
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.
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.
Apple sues over garbage can icons, and rounded corners, and slide-to-unlock, and other such junk IP.
Apple's latest flood of lawsuits are not about protecting Apple's ideas. The lawsuits are about Apple breaking their competitor's kneecaps, because that's the way Apple likes to "compete."
Apple got quite a few of the PARC team members.
At the time it was remarkable that overlapping windows could occur. At the same time that it was remarkable that this could occur, admins of multiple Unix systems (like me) were dragging their XWindows into overlapping window configurations on their XTerminals in the regular course of business.
Once in a great while common use surpasses even theory to get the work done.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
My understanding is they didn't arrive at Apple until much later and those where the ones that saw the overlapping windows implemented and were shocked.
I can't remember exactly but it was partially covered in Steve Jobs biography, at least the part of the overlapping regions was.
Bill Gates built the Microsoft empire by crushing competition
Correct.
and flooding the market
Pray tell, how can one "flood" a market which is based on intangible goods whose duplication cost is near zero?
with low-quality products
In some instances yes. In other instances no. Windows 7 is not a "low quality product."
and not letting hardware companies offer any alternatives
Really? Bill Gates held a gun to their heads and forced them, did he?
Most people use Windows and Office because "everybody else uses that".
And it's apparent you have zero clue why this "everybody else uses that."
Even today, in 2012, you'd have a hard time finding a company willing to sell you a non-Apple computer without Microsoft Windows pre-installed.
The alternative is what, exactly? Ubuntu? Ha. Linux is not suitable for the desktop, period, which is why nobody considers it as a serious choice, not because Microsoft hired some guy named Guido to break a CEO's legs if he doesn't get in line.
Steve Jobs wanted to change the world. And he did, with good products that people want to buy and use.
Yep. And so did Bill Gates.
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.
Asus begs to differ with you, what with all those Linux powered eeePCs they sell.
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
sorry, this is pretty much known by anyone following computing at the time. It isn't news, it was done at the same time as BillG appeared at an Apple conference and got boo'ed as he appear on stage. The money was effectively a licence payment along with a promise that MS would continue to build MS-Office for Mac, although Bill was quoted that he would continue any product that still sold over a thousand units (paraphrased). I don't think Patent-troll can be used here as the things that MS were using also in use in MacOS and NeXTSTEP, etc, not the usual patent-troll action where some obscure process remains unused by it's owner until it's time to cash-in.
There was an unknown error in the submission.
I don't think Bill was threatened by the patents since, as Steve himself said, Apple wouldn't have had the endurance to fight this war. But during this time (1997) was already eyed for abusing its almost-monopoly, and losing the only "serious" competitor (which, compared to MS at that time, was still tiny) wouldn't have helped Microsoft on that front. So I guess it was more valuable for MS to avoid additional antitrust trouble. Also, despite their competition, Bill respected Steve (but the other way round I'm not so sure; Steve said he respected Bill, but while reading the bio I'm sure he lied).
For Apple, it really was an act of desperation that in hindsight payed off. But at the Macworld Expo, there was this famous presentation where Apple announced the deal, that MS would do Office for Mac and made a kind of teleconference with Bill. Bill appeared super-big on the screen, with a grin. The audience booed, which Bill didn't hear. Steve later described this as his biggest failure on stage: it made Steve look little and weak, at the mercy of the Evil Overlord Bill.
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
No, they didn't.
It's best to know what you're talking about, before you start talking about it.
Pray tell, how can one "flood" a market which is based on intangible goods whose duplication cost is near zero?
So packaging, manuals, distribution, development, advertising, warehousing, and all the other work that went into software in the 80s & 90s cost "near zero?"
My god man, custom runs of floppy disks alone were $1 or more, and most products included multiple floppies. When CDs first came out there were substantial mastering costs involved in pressed discs, and the per-disc price was also measured in dollars, not cents.
You really need to realize that Steam wasn't available in 1986.
Windows 7 is not a "low quality product."
No it isn't, but Vista, the preceding product, was. It was such a low quality product that Microsoft was forced to roll up their sleeves and fix all the problems in it, then had the gall to charge us all for it.
When they did the same thing in Windows 98 Second Edition, at least they released a megapatch that updated long-suffering Windows 98 owners to Windows 98 SE. Similarly, when Apple released OS X 10.1 they gave it away free to everyone who owned OS X 10.0.
Seriously, what the hell.
Really? Bill Gates held a gun to their heads and forced them, did he?
If by gun you mean requiring them to pay him money for a Windows license even if they didn't ship a copy of Windows with the system or, if they didn't want to agree to those terms, pay a substantially inflated price for Windows licenses that would have made their business uncompetitive... then yes he did.
Moof!
...Jobs went to Microsoft on his knees and begging for money to stop the final death of his company.
Good to see that at least one point in his career, Jobs understood the word "humility".
Windows 10 is great - I used it to download Linux.
they probably never thought it as impossible to do, just impossible to do with the processor speeds, memory bandwidth and memory amounts they had.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Sure, they had products. But I would still call Apple both lowlife and bottom feeders.
Look at the iMac and you'll se what I mean.
It's more than that. For performance, in Smalltalk-80, each window was allowed to write to a portion of the display buffer directly. The bit bilt operation was invented specifically to get the required performance for Smalltalk-72 and was implemented in microcode for Smalltalk-74. When each window has a rectangle that it is allowed to draw into, it's trivial for the system to do clipping for the drawing - just check that the destination of the bit blit is within that rectangle. Once you have overlapping windows, you have to check that the destination is within that rectangle and isn't within anyone else's rectangle. More importantly, you also have to split up some blits because you can't just copy an entire rectangle, you have to copy 2 subrectangles to get the non-overlapped part of the shape. This imposes a quite serious performance penalty (when you're talking about something like an Alto - less so when you're talking about an 8MHz 68000).
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
A successful patent troll gets the payment before the thing is finished in courts.
however, much of the point is that Apple needed the money there and then, their products at the time were shit, thus they needed money. The troll part was that Gates didn't necessarily know that Apple needed the money there and then and that gates could easily just have said no and let the things drag in court and possibly, just maybe pay Apple a billion dollars later. the excerpt says "Microsoft was walking over Apple’s patents" and he used that as a way to reason to ms that they would be better off investing the 150 mil and getting the patent things buried under the rug.
How this is news though.. beats me, since it's based on an excerpt from a book published quite many months ago now.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
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.
From dictionary.com:
innovate [in-uh-veyt] Show IPA verb, -vated, -vating.
verb (used without object)
1. to introduce something new; make changes in anything established.
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Society has already established the definition of the word 'innovate'. You don't like that term being applied to Apple so you try to redefine it so that it no longer applies to Apple. You might as well say the definition of innovate is "everything that other companies do but that Apple doesn't do".
As someone who design computers for a living--I do consider Apple to be innovative and I am consistently shocked at how many "technical" people genuinely don't understand the point of technology.
One small problem with your suggestion - the idea of storing graphics (such as windows) in memory and then compositing them (as the technique is called) was pretty much unheard of - graphics were rendered into a graphics buffer (either front or back, and sometimes a third buffer) and erased and redrawn, an idea reinforced by the graphics buffer being a separate piece of memory and hardware on some systems (as they are often today, but I don't know about the 8010/Star). Hardware graphics did have buffer copy operations, but the number of windows you could create using this technique was limited to the number of buffers you had and the size of them, whereas on the Lisa/Mac the number of buffers you could have was only limited by memory because like the Apple ][, they shared video buffer memory with main memory, and thus copies could be done from any location in memory into the video buffer. Note that this is different than how sprites were rendered in consoles at the time - sprites were given a dedicated slot of memory and you could only have a fixed number of them. If you wanted a different sprite, you had to remove one of the ones you had in sprite memory.
Also, as I recall, the 8010/Star actually did have overlapping windows, but only small tool windows that could be copied to and from a backbuffer and application windows could not overlap. at $50000+, it is entirely possible the 8010/Star had graphics hardware that would make implementing the Apple model for windowing impossible, even though it would render graphics much faster than Apple's hardware could.
Current value of those shares if held to the present day would be 8,000,000 x $500 = $4 Billion and still climbing (of course that would have required nerves of steel). Even Doctor Evil would be impressed. (N.B. Apple stock has split three times).
By the way anyone who accuses Apple (or any other company that actually creates and sells products based on their patents) a patent troll indicates gross ignorance on the part of the accuser. The only definition I've heard of that term is a company that has no products of its own so that cross licensing is never an option for negotiation. Patent trolls are "purely abstract" companies that game the patent system to change it from an attempt to encourage innovation to one that kills innovation (cf. Intellectual Ventures and its vile ilk).
Youngin's today have no idea how limited processing power and memory were in those days. For years when a user moved a window around the screen a ghostly outline of the boundary of the window is all you got for feedback. When you let go of the window the old one was erased and the window was redrawn in its new position. And we had to walk to school uphill and into the wind both ways, etc.
Exactly. Remember in the 80's Microsoft was the leading toolset maker. their compilers were everywhere. MS Word was a n original Mac program for years before MS had an OS that could RUN it. That's the point really. Apple was happy to bring Microsoft along as a toolset and software maker.. But Microsoft basically reverse engineered Mac OS from the documentation they were granted to write MSWord... Just like they did to IBM. With Compaq... Just like Google and Samsung did to Apple over Android. Of course Steve was furious... It was happening again!
Of course Bill deserves some credit. Gates is Professor Moriarty to Job's Sherlock Holmes. Neither would have accomplished such great things, if their mortal archenemy hadn't been challenging, and dare I say inspiring, the other.
*golf clap*
I drank what? -- Socrates