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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.'"
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.
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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.
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.
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 finishes their products though (some use the term polish) unlike many other manufacturers. HTC/Samsung and the rest of the makers of smart phones and electronic gadgets have a tendency to rush things to market and just throw them out before they are complete. They are often not very well thought out and have major bugs and glitches or poor performance in comparison to Apple products.
Like my brand new Galaxy Nexus for example had a glitch where the sound would randomly go up and down, then they fixed that and now the phones connection is intermittently lost, to top it off the camera and speakers suck both hardware and software wise in comparison to the 4s iphone's. All that was needed was a little more time to iron out the bugs and add some polish, but typical big manufacturers just simply can't or choose not to do so.
While I dislike Apple's products due to the lack of options, such as a larger screen, removable battery etc.. you simply have to admit they spend an awful lot of time and care on their products to make sure they are polished and the major bugs are worked out.
You're thinking too much like a techie. Regardless of whether the new market was carved out of excellent tech or excellent marketing, Apple is still carving new markets. If the iPad didn't exist, do you think the tablet market would look anything like it does today? No? Then Apple pretty much created a new market.
Scorta futuere amo!
Despite the perceived "fanboyism", there is some truth in that too. I used to think Apple users were huge fanboys before. But this year I got MacBook Air and despite some quirks like different keyboard layout (I'm used to PC) and Finder trying to hide much of the file system, I am quite impressed with it. It is very polished, and despite the GP saying that Apple doesn't innovate, I haven't for example seen multi-touch trackpad in any other laptop. It makes a great difference. The quality of it is also much better than I have used before, as is screen and audio quality (I always wondered why my headphones sounded like shit with my old laptop even while it cost 3000 dollars!).
The overall product is very finished. On top of that you get a nice UNIX system on the background and tons of apps that come with it. For example Automator and the system-wide services menu for your scripts make a HUGE difference.
And of course, there are also many commercial games available for the platform and now that Steam is too, there should just be more. Linux just cannot compete that. Even if you are a geek, OS X is a very good choice, as it's pretty much what Linux on desktop should be.
I expect this to go away. This sort of perfection was the result of a giant cock up top who could say, "X is not acceptable, fix it, no alternative." Your average exec is an mba, who all about cost vs reward. Not the engineering mindset of X or nothing.
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
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
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