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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?"
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.
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Gates deserved credit for many reasons, not just those related to IT. The man, once the world's richest, has basically given away his fortune to humanitarian aid and to help develop the world. I can't think of any other guy who is like Bill Gates. Say what you want about Microsoft, but that man has done some good.
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
Andrew Carnegie?
John D. Rockefeller?
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
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
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.
Cow Cube
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
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!
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.
Not to mention everyone seems to forget Gates' main contribution was to calm a spooked market that was filled with "Is this the death of Apple?" articles that had investors spooked and developers abandoning the platform. When gates came out and said "We will have not only Office but a division working on mac products because we think it has a future" the investors said "hey, if Gates thinks there is money to be made, maybe there is" and the same thing happened with developers.
Remember folks it didn't have squat to do with the money, jobs could have pulled 150 million out of his ass. What mattered was WHERE the money was coming from and WHO was investing it. At the time Win98 was everywhere and WinNT was pretty much THE business OS, so to have its CEO say a company has a future, well that was good enough for many.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
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.
Like the parent poster said, do some basic research. This took me 30 seconds to find:
http://www.badseed.info/GMO-genetically-modified-crop-news/35309_bill-gates-ties-up-with-monsanto.html
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.
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!
Apple does what it does very, very well, but innovation is not the correct word for it.
Innovation is doing something for the first time. Granted, Apple does have patents, as do most successful technology companies. But those patents, those actual innovations, are not what the public associates with Apple.
Apple is known for being the first to do something well. Not the first to do it, not to invent it, but the first to do it well. That's not innovation, that's called execution. Execution may well be more important than innovation. It's worth celebrating, it brings in lots of money, it's the key to success.
Xerox PARC innovated like crazy, but executed poorly. It took other companies, such as Apple, to take Xerox's innovations and turn them into successful products. Ethernet was an innovation that was limited to the niche of Xerox-only networks until Xerox teamed with Intel and DEC. Intel executed well, making chips that made Ethernet affordable. DEC executed well, incorporating Ethernet into nearly all of their products. 3Com and Novell then took it into the PC market. That's the difference between innovation and execution. Xerox innovated. Intel, DEC, 3Com, and Novell executed Xerox's innovation well.
Apple is very good at recognizing when the time is right to meld multiple innovations into a product. They don't need to be their own innovations. In other words, Apple excels at product development rather than research. The issue is muddled because most companies and the press usually lump the two together as R&D, but innovation comes out of research rather than development.
Apple does many things well, you've pointed out some of the things that Apple does well, but you've used the wrong word to describe it. You aren't the first and won't be the last to misuse the word; advertising agencies and marketing departments misuse the word daily.
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();
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).