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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!
you bet. an entire industry of lawyer specializations!!!
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."
Google creates cloud print ... release the code and makes it available to everybody ... patent encumbers it and puts barbed wire around it and anybody with a similar idea
Apple creates Airprint
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.
I'm trying to do the indie developer thing and I know that after these years of working full-time on a product with an upcoming initial release, the biggest threat to me isn't product failure but a frivolous patent suit burying me and likely making me give up the results of all the thousands of hours I've invested. I still plan on releasing this particular product, but the extensions and off-shoots I'll write for it will either stay private (and I'll make my money in a completely different field) or I'll end up moving to another country without software patents. It's shitty that the U.S. patent system is basically set up to force non-rich people to work for others (and thus have some indemnity), or pair up with lawyers to become pure patent trolls. In my worse moments, I've considered the latter as a sort of "this is what you've turned me into!" revenge fantasy.
When it comes to patents stifling competition is, at the minimum, part of the equation, I wonder what would happen with no patents at all, the ultimate form of competition?
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
As long as we have a patent system that blindly issues a patent to damn near anything applied for, even though there's no real innovation involved ... e.g. stuff that the best engineers/programmers in their field could do without much effort if given a task that needs it, then we'll be having these wars. Patents need to be limited to the kinds of innovation that that we simply would not have if the applicant had not figured it out or spent the extensive effort and cost to come up with it.
Fundamentally, patents are themselves a government sanction theft of intellectual property from those that invent it, just because they didn't invent it first. Only because we can't know whether someone did invent it, or did steal it, do we justify a patent (which is really nothing more than government sanctioned exclusivity). But our patent office is not working to filter genuine innovation from trivia ideas. A few years ago I scanned over some random patents, selecting those in areas I happened to know, and found that the vast majority were easily doable, and not innovation. The ratio was around 500 (junk) to 1 (innovation). This was one sampling, so that can be off. I only used higher numbers spanning about the last 5 years at that time.
So it's not really the corporations doing this. They have to react this way under such a system, or end up being a loser. This is why we need an epic-major overhaul of the patent system itself, and not some minor tweaks that politicians have paid lip service to.
I have written more detail about this recently here.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
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?
My wife saw me print a document the other day by typing "lpr name.pdf" and she made me show her how to do it, because it is way faster than starting an application and clicking your way through a bunch of dialogs.
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
EXCELENT.
It's nice to see that "normal" people (or at least, some of them) are realizing that U.I. is not that marvelous panacea for all the computer problems.
Indeed it makes a lot of things easier. But not all of them, and not always!
Lisias@Earth.SolarSystem.OrionArm.MilkyWay.Local.Virgo.Universe.org
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
He still gives Apple a bit of a break: "Apple is the good guy on the block of all of them,”
And I would do the same.
I'm not stupid to bash and kill my own cash cow.
Anyway, I always liestened to what this guy said all these years.
He is a good engineer, but not just it: he likes and encourages good technology no matters from who.
Lisias@Earth.SolarSystem.OrionArm.MilkyWay.Local.Virgo.Universe.org
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.
Yeah, iPods, iTunes, iPhone and iPad are so new... because nobody ever heard of a walkman, online music store, mobile phone or tablet before. Nor is Apple all that succesfull, yes, they sell a LOT of a single model but in total sales, many others surpass them. (Android activations outstrip in a matter of days, total iPhone sales. iTunes sells a lot of online music but only if you don't count traditional retailers)
The parent poster claims he can't remember seeing rows of tablets before. Well, then he must not have been looking. Archos has been in the market for a long time. Of course, you could further specify that a tablet only counts if it is 8.9 inches and a certain thickness and color but most reasonable people know that tech gadgets evolve. Tablets were once laptops, then thin laptops, then those hybrid laptops whose keyboard could be hidden with a touch screen. In fact, weren't THOSE devices once called tablets?
What Apple is really good at is taking existing tech, investing a LOT in large scale production and thus beat everyone else on price. 64GB iPad when most competitors just can't afford to buy memory that cheap to compete.
But new and revolutionary? Maybe if you have blinders on and only see mainstream products but for the early adapters, the i* brandline is and always has been old hat. For example, retina display? The next thing might well be glasses type displays, holding a tablet is so last month.
And for all that mainstream innovation we get one of the most evil patent company out there. Mind you, I have long had the impression Woz is a willing slave. Jobs screwed him over so many times and still he comes back begging for more. He knows a thing or two about computers but socially, he is a tool. Crying patents will destroy innovation while defending a company that only copies and sues everyone under the sun seems to me to suggest a person with a limited grasp of the world. Gosh, a geek with problems understanding the world. How unusual.
Stop trying to excuse your need for a shiny toy with trying to think Apple is cool or nice or different. It is not. Buy your shiny and accept your dollars support slavery and patent wars and the removal of jobs from the west. Just don't be a hypocrite about it.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Woz's always the geek, while Jobs the guy with street smarts
The geeks innovate
The lawyers? Rent seeking
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
It don't think this patent debacle stifles innovation or startups, I think it does so in the US because of a broken patent system and borked legal system. Incubate your startup company somewhere where it can either fail, or grow large enough to stand up to the patent trolls before they ever find themselves in that situation.
If I started a company in the US, an attorney or patent advisor would be person #3 involved. In europe I'd be confident to run a much larger innvoation-heavy a startup with without legal advise. I'm not shitting you: you can run a company for years with dozens of employees and not even have a business card from a lawyer in your office.
Precisely.
Woz's biography (I don't remember which one it was, but it focused more on the early days leading up to the Apple II and Lisa and had Captain Crunch/Draper and Jobs' drug use and partying featured fairly prominently), as well as The Cuckoo's Egg (Cliff Stoll) and The Happy Hacker, were pivotal to my formative years as a technologist.
His statements here don't really make sense, within the context of the autobiography. It was written in the late 1980s or early 1990s, and I read it right around when OSX was making its emergence (it's not on Amazon, afaik), so it didn't have the color of the iRevolution (gag) to falsely tinge things sepia.
Frankly, I can't help but think that the statements in the biography I read were right: something crucial in Woz's brain burnt themselves out when he made the Apple II. He obviously is not paying attention to the changing
Apple hasn't done anything "first" or creative since they first released the iPhone. Yes, the iPhone was quite a jump over what existed at the time, and it was precisely in the direction that people wanted to go. However, it wasn't as capable as many devices on the market at the time in both computing capabilities and audio capabilities (and the i* products still aren't, in any way, better).
Apple software in particular is lacking innovation (since at least 2007). We have osX which is still lackluster at best at context switches (still, after over a decade with negligible improvement) and is removing functionality in leaps and bounds (using a butchered and buggy Microsoft stack for SMB/CIFS and butchering the cups project? seriously, is that what passes for innovation?). This butchery will only be surpassed by Windows 8 in recent memory. iOS is positively crippled compared to Android, with some of the most frustrating UI inconsistencies and shortcomings in capabilities (eg. map navigation which is rivaled by a 7 year old in-car Garmin; killing downloads if you switch to something else). iTunes is now a fractured by platform as well, with tablets not being able to re-download games and apps someone has already paid for on their phones. The hell?
The hardware in the workstations is, admittedly, nice: but aside from the incrementalism of the 1990s which ultimately failed them until they switched to x86, how are they distinguishing themselves today in this department? Bigger, brighter, and more expensive displays with "Thunderbolt" technology - a technology which Apple (and Intel, for whatever reason) have let completely languished for the year and a half that it's been out, turning what has absolutely awesome potential into a completely proprietary display interface which offers nothing but cost over HDMI (or for that matter, DVI, really). The lackluster nature of iOS has done the same with the iPhone and iPad: no true multiprocessing? No contextual use with peripheral emphasis? No WiDi or similar?
("But Caimlas, you asshole", I'm sure someone will say. "We have jiggapixel retina displays!" Yes; yes you do - you also pay for that with horrendous battery life, despite the meager 3.5" display on the phones.)
Sorry. Woz has lost the plot and is not paying attention. Apple has done some absolutely fantastic things since 2000. They've made great progress, pushing other companies to innovate and copy, and have shown even greater potential. And then, the innovation stopped: they started to be litigious bastards at almost precisely the same time.
I would personally love for Apple to come back as the company they were in 2005, when they were kicking ass and taking names. We'd see a lot of cool things happening. But since roughly the time of iTunes, there hasn't been much other than market daring with the iPad to come out of their company I'd consider even remotely 'innovative'. The more I have to deal with Apple products in a support role, the more I feel like they're not even giving their hardware software enough development attention to keep them running stable, with some serious engineering problems that make Windows-self-clobbering-via-antivirus seem benign.
Very disappointing statements from the Woz.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Mac OS used to have something even better: drag the file to the printer on the desktop.
Quite pathetic that OSX doesn't have that. Not even the printers on the desktop. So handy!
Circumcision is child abuse.
Why is it anytime something with Apple comes up people are so quick to get into a *#*ssing match over who did what. To simply belittle and discredit the company because every aspect of their product was not 100% unique and of their own design smacks of arrogance and jealousy, perhaps because in retrospect people think "if only I had done that". The long thread on multi-touch, and the others are just more examples of this time and time again when ever apple is mentioned.
To say that apple is not innovative is simply wrong. It's equal to saying that a great author can't exist because the word "the" had been used before they didn't create it. They used the same alphabet that's been used for years! they just have a good pulisher / marketing firm!. A great composer can't happen because all the notes have been used; yes apple took things that existed and put them together in a way that gained acceptance by the masses.
Masses is a critical part of their success, the 5% of geeks need to climb off their high horse and understand that Apples success is not grown from "If your to stupid to figure it out you shouldn't have our product" but that their success is driven from "Lets make this simple for you!" it's the same approach that put AOL ontop of the ISP wars who's only downfall came from connectivity limitations causing a cascade affect.
On the subject of patents I've got nothing, the system is horrible and does quash innovation out the gate. I see patent disputes so many times a year they make my head spin. I can't stand to be forced into a patent review that reads one "line" in a patent and says "see you have phone service over a coax medium!" and insists you owe them $$. Last year I had to deal with one that was based on receiving a fax and converting it to digital medium for delivery through an ip transport system using from: to: fields for delivery between individuals. That's right! some lawfirm had an obscure patent that had a small bit about fax -> email and and felt that it applied. Your options spend $$$ to invalidate the claim or spend $$ to just make them go away.
My wife saw me print a document the other day by typing "lpr name.pdf" and she made me show her how to do it, because it is way faster than starting an application and clicking your way through a bunch of dialogs.
Not trying to take away from your point, but wouldn't you have to start the Terminal application first, then type in the path to the file, then type "lpr name.pdf" to print it?
Waiting for you by the bridge
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.
Back in 2005, Apple was still "struggling" with the PowerPC platform. When did SMB/CIFS in OS X become a "butchered and buggy Microsoft stack"? It was based on the open source Samba stack until 10.6 and starting with 10.7, an Apple built system. Samba along with gcc were banished/limited from OS X due to GPLv3 more so then Apple's decisions.
As for iTunes... its a bloated mess nowadays. Its basically Apple's Outlook, a far cry from what Jobs called "The best damn Windows App Ever" in 2003. Its one of the many apps that requires a ground up re-work at this point.
Finger-friendly app development.
Before iPhone there was Palm, Windows Mobile, Blackberry OS, and a couple others I can't remember - all of them required the use of a stylus to properly operate. Sure, you could have used them with your finger (like my old Treo), but it was an exercise in frustration.
The iPhone ushered in an era where all OS and app functionality was built with the expectation that the user would be using his/her fingers - not a stylus. It may seem obvious now, but it wasn't always that way before the iPhone.
-ted
Uh, you can put a printer on the desktop in modern OSX. You can then drag a doc to it and get it printed.
System Preferences-->Print & Scan-->Drag printer to Desktop-->Drag doc to printer for printing.
Or if you don't want to bother with that, just click on the file you want printed and press Command P on your keyboard.
You can even imagine you are doing that from the CLI if you are so inclined.
We have osX which is still lackluster at best at context switches (still, after over a decade with negligible improvement)...
You moan about MacOS X being "lacklustre at context switches", while I enjoy the ease with which Grand Central Dispatch and blocks allow me to create multithreaded applications.
Troll.
Apple (both OSX and iOS) use amongst developers is growing not shrinking.