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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.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
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).
That makes nothing you need.
In your prejudice, did you mean computers, laptops, smartphones, media players, tablets, and online music sale/rental stores? Or were you referring to Apple's products specifically? My other snarky comment is that assuming your statement is directed at Apple and it's true, they do a bang-up job of making things people want.
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.
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
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
I wish someone would steal from me like that.
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.
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.
Do you have Netcraft confirming that Windows is dead?
Because every OS out now has been "dead" according to the internet since it was made.
Modded down by fanbois, modded up by?
...fandroids. Kinda the flip side of the coin.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
What's wrong with people valuing better design?
Don't quote me on this.
Go listen to "When Patents Attack" by This American Life. They not only talk about the origin of the term "Patent Troll" but also talk to the guy that coined it up and he explains it's an allegory to the bridge trolls in fantasy, that will pop up as soon as you try to cross a bridge and just demand money.
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...
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'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 use Apple devices because they DO work better, for me. Windows has never been a good fit, always got in the way more than it ever enabled. Linux and other options are not and have not been viable for me. Sure I could use any PC to do work but effectively? No. Apples devices get out of my way. They do what I want them to, enable me, empower me.
Yes even the hardware. I can't stand non-Apple trackpads. So clumsy. Non-Apple PCs also generally have too much cruft. Too many useless function keys and buttons, all of which suck up resources, get in the way and are poorly thought out.
Same is true of Windows. Too much unnecessary crap getting in the way. Every window has a pointless toolbar, every controll panel has 50 tabbed views crammed in. Search never worked, still doesn't.
I can keep going but it really comes down to the fact that Apple's technology implementations were and are the best. That makes me more productive which means I am more successful.
So yeah I think they deserve their present success.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
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?!
Actually it's not really that strange once you think about it. A large portion of first world economies are now service-related. I started thinking about many of the companies I do business with, and even the print shop I manage. Do I really need most, or even any, of the things I get from Newegg or Gamestop? Do my customers need those personalized golf balls, T-shirts, or fine-art prints?
Then, I started thinking about the things I buy that I *do* need, and how I typically buy higher quality versions of those things instead of the bare minimum (I'm thinking of things like food or clothing, here).
It seems to me that Apple being the world's most valuable company says more about the world than it does about Apple. I wonder how far down the list you have to go to find the first company that makes some of the things we actually DO need.
Google the following: gates foundation site:techrights.org
Read all the article that appear.
You are welcome.
No, I didn't know that. Who was selling a monolithic tablet with WiFi, an XGA display with capacitive multitouch, and 8+ hour battery life, before Apple? You can point to vaporware like the CrunchPad, but nobody had ever successfully tackled the problems associated with tablet computing at the platform level.
Doctors have used portable touchscreen devices for a long time, but they've historically been saddled with things like Fujitsu Lifebook PCs running god-awful Pen Windows hackery.
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."
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.
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
I can point to a bunch of examples, but it doesn't matter. You'll refuse any example that differs even in a trivial way from the iPad.
Apple didn't invent the tablet. They didn't even invent iPad-style tablets. Get over it.
Tablets before the iPad were completely different beasts... you have tablets before the iPad, you have tablets after the iPad. You can easily see the difference, and when operating them you'd also find a huge conceptual difference.
When you are able to say "before" and "after" about a product - like the iPhone and the iPad - you can't avoid saying that the company behind those products has been innovative. How much of this should be protected is a separate matter.
...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.
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.
I seem to recall that Apple at the time still had a couple of billion in the bank as cash? Oh, I guess it was only $1.2 billion.
"Others have suggested Apple was just out of money and desperately needed Microsoft's help, ignoring the fact that Apple had just reported holding $1.2 billion in cash. Another $0.15 billion wasn't going to make any significant difference in the survival of the company."
http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/RDM.Tech.Q1.07/592FE887-5CA1-4F30-BD62-407362B533B9.html
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.
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).