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Who Cares If Samsung Copied Apple?
hype7 writes "The Harvard Business Review is running an article that's questioning the very premise of the Apple v Samsung case. From the article: 'It isn't the first time Apple has been involved in a high-stakes "copying" court case. If you go back to the mid-1990s, there was their famous "look and feel" lawsuit against Microsoft. Apple's case there was eerily similar to the one they're running today: "we innovated in creating the graphical user interface; Microsoft copied us; if our competitors simply copy us, it's impossible for us to keep innovating." Apple ended up losing the case. But it's what happened next that's really fascinating. Apple didn't stop innovating at all.'"
couldn't care less!
Delta-Mike November Bravo Tango
Obviously the patent squabbles in these cases are ridiculous - the only reason we have functioning high-tech industry in the US is that most companies are not like Apple, and do not use patents offernsively.
It's a good time to review the reasons why, for example, software patents do not work, and can never be made to work:
http://en.swpat.org/wiki/Why_abolish_software_patents
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This isn't true. Apple DID stop innovating. You missed the section of time where Apple was minutes from bankrupt before Jobs came back with a load of money.
So, apple "steals" from open source...
How can you steal from open source? Especially when they give back an enormous amount of development to the open source movement (such as http://www.apple.com/opensource/ ).
But, hey, why let facts and logic get in the way of a good ol' Apple bashing, right?...
Having other people copy your designs doesn't mean you can't innovate anymore. On the contrary: by innovating you will stay ahead of the pack.
Also, copies always mean the copier is playing catch-up. They always have to wait and see what you've done, before they can try to do the same. By innovating you will keep the advantage, having everybody copy your work just means you have to innovate even harder and faster. That's tough of course, much easier to stop the rest from picking up your innovative ideas.
"Good artists copy. Great artists steal. And at Apple, we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas."
[Source: Isaac's authorized biography]
Apparently he never liked it if someone else followed this axiom, though.
Not all copies are inferior. Japan got huge in the 80s/90s by "copying and improving". And they were not the first that did this; it's how UK lost out to mainland Europe in the later stages of the industrial revolution: they were the first to industrialise, but the continent copied there methods and products, and improved on them.
China is currently very much in the copy phase, sooner or later they will also start to innovate themselves (some Chinese companies already do that), followed by a time in which the establised companies will be out-innovated. It may take a while, the Chinese don't seem to be very fast in picking up the innovation part, but if the world's history is anything to go by, sooner or later they will.
Apple did a lot of work to make their UI as a GUI for consumer level users. Xerox interface was for a limited use. Trying to get it in a system that is under 5k.
For Example Supercomputers can perform Ray Tracing Animations in real time. For our normal PC we cannot (at least at the same quality). In order to attempt this we take a lot of the ideas and find what to reduce and shortcuts that have the smallest visual effects. So we took an idea and make a new product off of it... Innovation.
But this is a difference case of Samsung and Apple They are both on the same market, selling a product at around the same price with similar specs. So it more of a case of copying then innovating.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Yes, and other people stepped up to innovate. Apple doesn't have some magical innovation juice. They are just a company. If they want to get lazy, then talent will move elsewhere. You mentioned "multi-tasking", but that would have been something that required talented and competent engineers, not innovators. Innovation is something you come up with while half-drunk. Everyone understood how multi-tasking was supposed to work, it was just a matter of "making it work". Apple innovated in the same way that George Selden innovated(the patent holder to the automobile). He didn't exactly create the greatest car in the world, he just had the idea for a car. Henry Ford developed some of the greatest ideas in automotive history, but he did it all while violating Selden's patent.
After Apple lost the "Microsoft coppied our GUI" case, their desktop GUI remained unchanged for 10 years. System 7 through 9 were basically identical..... they couldn't even multitask properly (used cooperative multitasking which led to misbehaving programs refusing to give-up the CPU & freezing the system). Apple said they would stop innovating their GUI if competitors simply copied their ideas, and that's essentially what happened.
There are two premises in play here; one is that if Apple's IP is not protected that they would choose not to innovate (perhaps so that they can take their ball and go home) and the other is that if their IP is not protected that they are at a competitive financial disadvantage and can no longer innovate since there is no revenue coming in. In the past, it could be argued that Apple was indeed at disadvantage because they lost to Microsoft and therefore had poor sales revenue, and that is what stunted their innovation because they kept creating the same lousy desktop experience over and over. However at this point Apple has more than enough money to innovate to any degree imaginable, so any "missing innovation" would be due solely to their will to restrain themselves.
You mean the ones that Apple copied - after Jobs and Xerox negotiated a deal to allow Xerox to but 100,000 shares of pre-IPO Apple stock.
In other words, Apple was happy to give value for value received. Why is this story constantly repeated as an example of Apple being underhanded?
Right, because Yugos eventually (and wrongly) leaked into the consumer mindset that ALL cars are shit.
Spare us the confused consumer nonsense Fanboi Wan.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Mother of all demos.
Have gnu, will travel.
The parallels of current Apple to early 90s Apple are numerous.
- They were first widely used in multitouch and gui
- Their OS is more user-friendly
- Development and modification of their OS is more tightly controlled
- Crucially, they don't license their OS
- Steve Jobs isn't there to save them with brand-new product lines
So now, they're stuck with a market-leading position that is being slowly eroded by the open ARM + Android platform (Armdroid as the new Wintel?), and are being forced to fight on several fronts at once: hardware design, OS design, and developer loyalty.
The litigation strategy is just one more parallel, and it seems destined to fail.
The English word fart is one of the oldest words in the English vocabulary.
how can it be counterfeiting? it has samsung written on the front and no apple logo's or other trademarks in sight.
Counterfeiting is about trying to pass 1 product off as another. They certainly look alike but without trying to pass it off as an apple product it can't be counterfeiting.
These comments are my personal opinions and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the other voices in my head.
If you want to get nit-picky about it, Microsoft stole nothing either despite things like the mouse cursor being pixel by pixel the same as Mac OS. Apple inadvertently licensed everything to Microsoft under the pretext of developer tools and office applications. I guess the point is, cant we just agree that they're all jerks?
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Apple should start playing by they own rules.
If a company infringes someone elses patents then they should lose the right to defend their own.
Apple doesn't license other peoples patented technologies - they just infringe. Ask Nokia how they magically got around $650 million from Apple last year along with an ongoing royalty payment for every iPhone. Because Apple refused to license key Nokia technology and just blatently infringed when they refused the terms Nokia offered. They then went to the courts claiming that Nokia were unfair to them in the terms and so shouldn't be allowed to hold the patent.
And it wasn't a "key technology" like rounded corners - it was GSM to make it work like a phone!
Whilst I am hoping that Samsung largely wins its case, I can see that there should be limits to what can be copied and how much a rival product can simply imitate the originator. Apple should be able to protect the unique aspects of its design, and both Samsung and Apple should be able to patent technological innovation where it is appropriate to do so.
Having said that, I feel Apple is trying to grab too much in this case. It is obvious that Apple didn't come up with the general idea for the layout of a tablet, even if they were the first to market with a genuine product that consumers wanted. It is similarly obvious that everyone wanted to go to a touch screen phone layout at around the same time, and the ergonomics and layout for that are obvious.
Whilst the gap is narrowing, Apple should realise that they really make their money from producing a product that, whilst on the leading edge of techology, is a polished design where all the parts have been carefully put together. I have a Samsung phone at the moment, and whilst there are aspects of it that are probably better than an iPhone, the whole product lacks the design harmony of its rival. The UK judge who, in dismissing Apples case, said that the Samsung product was 'not as cool' probably expressed it best.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
If you go back to the mid-1990s, there was their famous "look and feel" lawsuit against Microsoft. Apple's case there was eerily similar to the one they're running today: "we innovated in creating the graphical user interface; Microsoft copied us; if our competitors simply copy us, it's impossible for us to keep innovating." Apple ended up losing the case.
The Apple v. Microsoft case was on copyright, not patents. Specifically, the court ruled that:
Apple cannot get patent-like protection for the idea of a graphical user interface, or the idea of a desktop metaphor [under copyright law]...
and look-and-feel simply isn't covered there.
With that distinction and proper categorization in mind, the article misses a crucial difference between the 1990s and today: Apple made a significant push to protecting its designs with patents. The lack of such protection almost killed Apple in the 1990s, and its with that protection now that Apple is well on its way to being the largest company ever.
The Pirate Party here in Sweden been arguing just these points for a long time now. Innovation is not happening in a vacuum. Great ideas inspire others to come up with even greater ideas. By sharing the information and sharing the data others can look at it and improve it and the speed of research will increase.
The patent system is not something that foster innovation. Its is something that hinder innovation. Remove it
Also the billions of money going to patents trolls and feeding lawyers to hand patents could be instead used to invest in research to further the science of mankind.
Just saying it like it are.
http://www.wired.com/thisdayintech/2009/08/dayintech_0806/
http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-comeback-story-2010-10?op=1
http://macdailynews.com/2009/04/14/steve_jobs_engineered_apples_resurrection/
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/the-return-19972011-10062011.html
http://news.cnet.com/2100-1001-202143.html
I could go on forever on this one. It's very well documented that in 1997 Apple was extremely close to bankruptcy (some speculate days away) when Steve Jobs, then brought back to Apple as an "interim CEO", negotiated with Bill Gates to have Microsoft invest in Apple to the tune of $150M.
Fifty watts per channel, baby cakes.
Jobs was hell bent on stopping Android because he believed Google copied from them. At the time Schmidt sat on the board of Apple and was given advance early looks at the iPhone. As Android started to look more like iOS, Jobs was starting to believe that it wasn't a coincidence.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
How can something be 100% stable and have 2 kernel panics?
If you exclude "sketchy third-party" drivers, you could knock every BSOD that I've experienced with Windows off the table.
With Gnome taking a bit of a dive, Unity a bit on the rise, and Metro just starting out, these are certainly interesting times. Just grab some popcorn and see what happens.
The UK lost out because at a certain point, the innovations necessary to continue to progress required more and more specialized technical education. The British University system was simply not set up to handle that. It was designed to turn the sons of Lords into Lords, and the upper middle-class into educated Lordly-like young men, optimized for leading business, but NOT in leading technical innovation (or military strategy, for that matter). Such a hands-on education was beneath them.
In addition, they always felt they didn't need such innovation in re-inventing that which they already had because of their extensive colonial might. Why invent a blue dye and undercut the price tag you were already commanding by being able to bring in the dye from the east-asian source?
Germany, on the other hand, spent most of the last decades of the 19th century realizing that trade schools, which the British wouldn't invest in, were precisely the means by which Germany could catch up to the rest of the world. German innovation happened most in the field of chemistry, where they were more and more able to invent (from coal and coal tar) products that could make up for places they lacked both colonies or military power. The process for sodium-nitrates alone (originally to be a fertilizer) produced enough explosives to preserve the German army for years through WW1.
"But remember, most lynch mobs aren't this nice." (H.Simpson)
-- Joe
... in this case for the fashion industry, but hey, it's interesting and relevant:
http://www.ted.com/talks/johanna_blakley_lessons_from_fashion_s_free_culture.html
"Innovation" is rarely little more than just a buzzword. The truth is that Apple rarely "innovates" (That's not an insult) At least not in the big picture. What Apple is good at is the *execution*.
Apple didn't invent the MP3 player, they just made it better than most others, and marketed the hell out of it.
Apple didn't invent high-end laptops, they just made them better than most others, and marketed the hell out of them.
Apple didn't invent the smartphone, they just made it better than most others, and marketed the hell out of it.
Apple didn't invent the tablet, they just made it better than the others, and marketed the hell out of it.
That's why they're so threatened by Samsung. Because Samsung is doing the same thing. Samsung didn't invent the "iPhone," they just made it better. Just like they didn't invent the "iPad," they just made it better too.
The Internet King? I wonder if he could provide faster nudity.
If we hardly manufacture anything now and IP is our primary "resource"...
Strawman argument. The US has a $3.7 TRILLION manufacturing sector and it is growing. Just in case that isn't clear, measured by value the US has manufactures more than any other country in the world by a wide margin. By itself the US manufacturing sector would be in top 5 economies in the world. The notion that "we don't manufacture anything anymore" is complete nonsense. The only change is that products with a high proportion of labor cost (labor intensive) are now manufactured where labor is cheaper. However a huge number of products have a low proportion of labor cost (capital intensive) and those are made here. We manufacture automobiles, airplanes, pharmaceuticals, agriculture products, chemicals, integrated circuits, and much much more. The death of US manufacturing has been greatly exaggerated.
The change in manufacturing in the US is that it is evolving somewhat like farming did 100 years ago - fewer workers as a percent of population but producing more. As a proportion of the population manufacturing jobs are going to continue to decrease for some time. That does not mean that the US will cease being a manufacturing powerhouse however.
And more importantly, if an "innovation" can be copied by a competitor in nearly no time, then it's probably not an innovation at all (e.g. rounded corners)
Who was it again who said "Good artists copy, great artists steal"? Steve Jobs? Oh right, he stole that quote from Picasso. No it isn't ironic, he did so deliberately, but the point is: "stealing" is what artists (and tech companies, and nearly everyone ever) do. It isn't a bad thing: in fact, it's very very good. You take good ideas, and you make them better. You add competition, with some (minor) improvement, then the original creator steals back your improvement (which Apple has done plenty of), improves on that, then you steal that, and so on and so forth. You know who wins in that arrangement? Literally everyone, but especially the customers. You know who wins when you protect the original with lawyers so that no-one else can make something similar? The lawyers. Not even the original creator, in the end: just lawyers. Which is not surprising, considering lawyers also wrote the law in the first place.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
"We have always been shameless about stealing great ideas." - Jobs, interviewed in Triumph of the Nerds on PBS (1996)
"I'm going to destroy Android, because it's a stolen product. I'm willing to go thermonuclear war on this." - Jobs, as quoted in Walter Isaacson's biography (2011)
So it's OK if Apple do it, but not otherwise?
Yes, and other people stepped up to innovate.
OK, you're going to need to qualify that statement. The Microsoft/Apple user interface case in question was decided in September 1994, and Steve Jobs returned in December 1996 and started pushing innovation in the UI again. So which companies exactly are you claiming "stepped up to innovate" between those dates as a result of Apple's stagnation in the UI?
In theory, there should be others to step in and innovate, but in practice that's simply not what happened. The most innovative UI feature introduced in that timeframe was the Windows Start Button. The only other thing I could think of would be BeOS, which had been in development since 1991, but they didn't suddenly "step up" because there was a void in '94.
That's a pretty asinine statement. Apple *did* stop innovating for a while (or at least nearly did as all attempts to innovate were dismal failures). They started copying the IBM-clone business model and started looking to outside OS's for the next-gen Mac OS. IIRC BeOS was a strong contender until Apple decided to buy NeXT and turn NeXTStep into Mac OS X. The innovation began again after they brought Steve Jobs back and he killed everything that had been done in the 1990's (after he was ousted). Apple very nearly died not long after that original trial and most analysts thought that even the second coming of Jobs wasn't going to save the company.
All "evidence" of innovation in this article happened *after* Jobs came back when the company was at death's doorstep. Even more damning for the author is that all of that "evidence" was patented trade dress, design, and technology that Apple has successfully defended (e.g. eMachines tried to make a rip-off of the iMac and got sued by Apple, I owned one because it's what my parents bought me in High School).
-OS X - Not really Apple's big innovation. It was their acquisition of NeXTStep that lead to OS X and the return of Steve Jobs and innovation at Apple.
-iMac (original CRT version) - Design championed by Steve Jobs after his return, successfully sued eMachines over copying nearly exactly (even came in several bright colors, I had blue)
-iPod - Several years *after* the company had regained some footing, IIRC several patents involved with the iPod were also successfully defended
-iPhone - MANY years *after* the company had become a powerhouse even bigger than before
You can only win a war when you don't pretend your not at war. By that I mean, we no longer fight wars to finish them, we fight wars with the hopes of exhausting the resources of the other side before we exhaust the support of our own people.
If we had fought Afghanistan like we fought the Germans in WW2 it would be a lot closer to over if not. When you do not break the population supporting the other side the other side itself will never break. As it stands now, those in Afghanistan have no reason to quit fighting, they haven't really lost anything they value and those who live there are not to the point where they would put a stop to those supposedly fighting for them
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
If you follow the supply chain down, you start to hit China pretty quickly: seamless steel tubing, castings, bushings, bearings, more and more seals... Problem is, they are relentlessly climbing up that supply chain to such an extent, that our 'manufacturers' become more 'assemblers' (such as the Google a/v widget). Caltrans is saving millions on a new bridge... by buying most of the subassembly weldments from China.
Just has already happened in the food industry, more and more weasel words and definitions are being applied to US 'manufacturing' to put more money in the pockets of corporations all the while waving their American flags (probably also made in China).
Such as selling each other mobile phone contracts, or asking paper or plastic, or would we like to super-size those fries.