Slashdot Mirror
Woz Fears Stifling of Startups Due to Patent Wars
An anonymous reader writes "Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak says that Apple and other tech companies' patent hoarding could prevent entrepreneurs doing the same thing that he and Steve Jobs did in starting a computer company in a garage. Woz also says the jury is still out on Tim Cook as the right CEO to lead Apple forward after Steve Jobs."
He still gives Apple a bit of a break: "'Apple is the good guy on the block of all of them,' he says. 'It is creating so much and is so successful and it is not just following the formulas of other companies – [Apple is] totally establishing new markets that didn't exist.'"
because it goes against the corporate way...
Be seeing you...
Of course patent chests are there to stave off the attacks of other massive companies - heck, look at the Facebook response to Yahoo's patent attack - it snaps up a quick 800 patents and uses the new ones against yahoo in retalliation - but they are also used (probably much less noticably) to swat at the small flies that the big boys want to get rid of.
What better way to make some easy cash, when a start-up has a good idea, point out that your patents invariably make their product "infringe" then come out with their product under your own name - and possibly use your new patents to broker another settlement with some other big player in THEIR new emerging technology.
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
That's why most startups don't do real business anymore: their model is to hype an idea and be bought up early, by a large corporation with its own protective patent portfolio.
He still gives Apple a bit of a break: "Apple is the good guy on the block of all of them,” he says. “It is creating so much and is so successful and it is not just following the formulas of other companies – [Apple is] totally establishing new markets that didn’t exist."
I'm not a huge Apple fan but that seems pretty much true to me. They weren't all 100% original (what is?) but iPod, iTunes, iPhone and iPad have pretty much all created new markets or massively expanded existing ones. I mean I can't remember seeing rows of tablets on sale at my local electronics store prior to the iPad but now every company and his dog seems to have a tablet product. In fact the only tablets I remember hearing about before the iPad were laptops with touchscreens and huge price tags slapped on."
Everyone is going to forget about how apple tries to stop everyone with vague patents: lock screens, touch screens, tablets, launching applications by touching icons.
Um... you do realize that AirPrint support is built in to most recent linux distributions, right?
Apple implemented it in CUPS 1.4.6 (and you can get it running on earlier versions with a little work, since it's mostly just combining a few existing standards).
But why let facts get in the way of apple bashing.
Apple's savior is an MP3 player. They didn't invent the market, they just made it shinier than it was before.
If you've read Jobs's bio, he was ready to go nuclear on Google over Android, so yes, Apple's just as ready as anybody else to pound you into sand if you dare try to make anything resembling their products. Apple is not a good guy. If you love Apple products, they're just YOUR bad guy.
Finally, few people are qualified to tell whether the newly appointed head of a half TRILLION dollar company is going to be successful. Woz is probably more qualified than I am, but not by much. Tbh, I truly believe the only people who are really qualified to know are living in 2017, if not 2022 or so. Ask one of them.
Really? Woz is actually going to say anything about patent trolling being bad after his company has just about sued everyone who makes something with a rectangular screen for patent infringement? THAT is f'n priceless.
I disagree. Apple is following the formula of Microsoft, which is to abide by no morals and have no shame.
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
You say yourself that there was no market because they sucked.
Make things that don't suck, and the market emerges.
Look, I get tired of the mindlessness of the Apple critics.
I was a smartphone user for years and held off for two years on getting an iPhone once iPhone was released because I was sure that it couldn't be that much better, that it was all hype. After all, I already HAD a smartphone that I was completely satisfied with (a high-end Treo).
Boy did I feel stupid when I finally got my first iPhone (a 3GS, some months after it had been released). I realized that I had been walking around using a Treo when I could have been about 10x as functional and connected on the go using an iPhone, which was a device in a completely different *universe* if you actually wanted to get stuff done with your phone.
Listen, everyone *knew* there was no market for tablets before iPad. That was exactly the critique and it was spot-on. But Apple executed so well (and at half the price that people had imagined) that they CREATED a market out of whole cloth. Hell, half the people on Slashdot still argue that the iPad market is non-existent and will dry up just as soon as people "wake up" and realize that the device they're using is... I don't remember how the argument goes, exactly. Useless? Overpriced? Stupid? Whatever. I dont' care. The market didn't exist until iPad.
Listen, in 2007 I was a hardcore Linux user. Slackware 2, 3 -> Red Hat 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 -> Fedora 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11. I walked around with a Treo. I was one of the few tablet users with a Toshiba Portege m200, an upgrade from the separate Thinkpad T-series and Vadem Clio tablet team I'd used previous to that.
In 2009 I finally grudgingly tried an iPhone and a day later had one of my own. By 2010 I was all Apple with an iPhone, an iPad, and a Macbook Pro. It's not because I'm an apple fanboy. I *was* a Linux fanboy and an irrational Apple critic, and I realize that only in retrospect.
Maybe you don't like Apple products, but to question whether or not they created the market for capacitive touch low-button smartphones or capacitive touch tablets that run a mobile OS? That makes you sound like an irrational Apple critic of the same sort that I was.
Apple makes fabulous stuff. They are *not* the Apple of 1997, but most Slashdot Apple critics don't realize that because they're steadfastly trying to convince themselves either that (1) Apple is incompetent at everything but marketing (despite a decade and a half of growth) or (2) Apple is the second coming of Microsoft (who was never, ever as creative or innovative on their very best day).
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Seriously, what a fucking blind spot, Woz. If anything, Apple is the most vicious patent suer of all. I really hope B&N fucks Apple's patent portfolio for good.
I am particularly irritated by Woz's assertion, because it just plays into the zombie-Jobs reality distortion field.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
iPhone? a jump? the only thing it did "first" was capacitive touchscreen.
same goes for a lot of other tech and "markets". they didn't create application selling.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Apple is innovating in the iDevices department, nobody can say the contrary. They own the market, everybody is rushing after them and so far, failing. However a tablet is purely a consumer device. What about the developer market, the enterprise, and the innovators that have made Apple possible ?
Here I do hear you, they are letting OS X go fallow. Mountain Lion is already a huge disappointment, as was Lion before it. Its cloud support is lackluster, the server parts are even more dreadful than before. OS X cannot really be recommended for developers on the desktop anymore. Think that the only halfway decent software RAID solution for OSX is the one coming from the abandoned port of ZFS all these years ago and picked up by enthusiasts. GCC is stuck at 4.2 and LLVM is not really progressing compared to the GCC behemoth. As far as I can tell, we are not sure Apple is going to ever upgrade the Mac Pro again. The list goes on.
Street Smarts is a nice way of saying Snakeoil Salesman.