Obviously, the legal issues behind how, what, why, etc. Apple being able to sue for release of a trade secret are large and complex.
I'd like to make the point that, at a high-level view, their desire to hide these "leaks" has general merit. Apple is a prime example of why.
Looking at past product releases by Apple, especially during their "turn-around phase" when they finally started making money again, impressive product releases have a huge impact on their (and other) business beyond the "Cool! Wow!" marketing value.
A prime example:
Past product releases have had a significant impact on Apple stock price. Probably more so than any company I've ever tracked the stock of. Early release of Cube news could have significantly reduced the impact the news had on their stock price.
I believe it's within their right to have the ability to control this information and time it to their advantage, stock price or otherwise. The ability to hold liabel third-parties for releasing this information they know to be obtained illegally is critical in this respect.
Slightly off-topic -- non-hotmail point, about OE:
I'm running OE on the Mac laptop, only because of one key feature it has, and just switched back to it from Mailsmith, actually.
The feature was the ability of it to automatically detect what proxy settings to use with my home Wingate machine without having to adjust anything in OE itself. I haven't seen another program be able to do that. I just tell the Mac about my Proxy IP, OE (and IE, for that matter) sense the configuration change in the Apple system files and adjust appropriately. No manual, or otherwise, adjustments needed in my browser or mail client needed!
But, now I'm a little concerned about OE, even though it doesn't speak VBscript on the Mac, because other malicious content can be sent to it. I'd say it's running 60/40 on the PC only vs. Mac,too OE bug effectiveness meter. Don't quote me on that...
Has anyone seen a Mac mail client that is that versatile, eh? I think not. But OE also scares me, none-the-less. I'd use Linux, but our foreign language translation business really demands the use of a Mac, believe it or not.;-P
Comments and thoughts, and suggestions of other mail clients are welcome and invited...
What I found interesting is that Microsoft has more bugs to be fixed. This in itself isn't a surprise, as much as the fact that the general public doesn't seem to want to face-up to this fact.
And, with Windows 2000 on the way, won't it just get worse?
Not an incredibly insightful comment, I know. That's why I'm hoping for some insightful responses.:-)
This is the typical defense of any unethical action taken by a business enterprise, and probably by any unethical person trying to justify their behavior: "If I can do it then I should do it. It's up to the Patent Office/Congress/police to not let me." It's a bit like the old "It's not wrong unless I get caught."
Unethical, no. Wrong, maybe, but who's to judge? Certainly not you. And it's definitely a murky area at best. Given the current state of affairs, yes it is the responsibility of a company to do everything they can to protect their intellectual property. It's not justification, it's survival in a brutal corporate world. These companies, Amazon included, are simply playing by the rules to the best of their abilities. We all write them, they are using them. Which do you think is more effective, changing the corporate attitudes or changing the rules by which they play?
Your "all information and ideas should be free" attitude doesn't hold water, at least not until the rules change.
And yes, you could create a one-click shopping system just like theirs. Would you ever have thought of it if they hadn't done it? Hell no, not very likely. That's what they are protecting, their right to come up with the idea and be the only ones to use it.
I personally feel it and many other patents are pretty weak, but certainly worth more exploration. Change is probably needed. But once again, would anyone have thought of one-click shopping if they hadn't? Is that grounds for a patent? Close, maybe, possibly not, maybe so, but certainly not unethical or "wrong".
What the heck were you thinking when you said, "we need to show companies that just because they can patent something, they don't need to. "
If they can patent something, they absolutely DO need to. It's up to the Patent office to not allow patents of ridiculous things. It's up to the companies to patent everything they can to be as competitive as possible.
Somewhere there needs to be a balance, and the way to control the balance is at the "server" (patent) level and not the "user" (amazon?) level.
Our company holds what I think is a completely unenforcable patent, so I will tell you what it is. We made some charting software, an add-in for Excel. The patent was on part of the actual process of making charts! Specifically, charts that display annualized data alongside monthly data, e.g. 3 yearly bars followed by 12 monthly bars. There was some other errata and bs in the patent, but that was the gist of it.
Pretty pathetic, eh? Of course we filed for a patent. We wanted to keep anyone else from displaying their charts in that format, since that was one of our major selling points (as well as having an Altman's Z-score chart built right in:-).
IMHO, we never should have received that patent. Likewise, if there was actually a market for the type of charting software we made then we probably would have actually tried to enforce the stupid thing.
It seems to me, after all the discussion, that webmasters/hosts should have to generate their own index of a site based on certain criteria (of course).
For instance, I run a little program called swish-e (which some of you may have heard of, if not, check it out) to run small search engines on several of my sites. What if every host/domain/site had to run a "swish-e" index of their space and post a "spiderindex.txt" file in their main directory. Generate the index for the spider before it even gets there.
That would open up a whole new can of worms, probably, and add another layer of complexity to creating your own site, which is a good thing IMHO. Professionally produced sites, or those produced by the web-wise at least, with "spiderindex.txt" in them get indexed better than Joe Smith's personal home page with a few meta tags.
Sure, they just launched the engine now, and they don't have clutter, or banner ads, or other cross-selling junk, but it won't last.
We had a local radio station that went commercial-free for months just to bolster its listener base. They, of course, started advertising because someone's gotta' pay the bills.
At Google, just like everywhere else, something has to pay the bills. The clutter will come, it's a fact.
I'm starting to get the incling that the pace at which new distributions from various vendors come out is going to be to much to handle for most people, including me...
Slashdot Mirror
Now you will all discover the truth!
The world is flat, and everyone will be able to see it from their perch high atop the space elevator!
Obviously, the legal issues behind how, what, why, etc. Apple being able to sue for release of a trade secret are large and complex.
I'd like to make the point that, at a high-level view, their desire to hide these "leaks" has general merit. Apple is a prime example of why.
Looking at past product releases by Apple, especially during their "turn-around phase" when they finally started making money again, impressive product releases have a huge impact on their (and other) business beyond the "Cool! Wow!" marketing value.
A prime example:
Past product releases have had a significant impact on Apple stock price. Probably more so than any company I've ever tracked the stock of. Early release of Cube news could have significantly reduced the impact the news had on their stock price.
I believe it's within their right to have the ability to control this information and time it to their advantage, stock price or otherwise. The ability to hold liabel third-parties for releasing this information they know to be obtained illegally is critical in this respect.
What the heck?! Can't get through to apple.com. Gee, must me the
Oh wait, all the Mac weenies in the world are hitting the site, too.
Unfortunately, Wired stopped running these types of articles a few years ago in favor of more info on the Wired Index fund.
Slightly off-topic -- non-hotmail point, about OE:
;-P
I'm running OE on the Mac laptop, only because of one key feature it has, and just switched back to it from Mailsmith, actually.
The feature was the ability of it to automatically detect what proxy settings to use with my home Wingate machine without having to adjust anything in OE itself. I haven't seen another program be able to do that. I just tell the Mac about my Proxy IP, OE (and IE, for that matter) sense the configuration change in the Apple system files and adjust appropriately. No manual, or otherwise, adjustments needed in my browser or mail client needed!
But, now I'm a little concerned about OE, even though it doesn't speak VBscript on the Mac, because other malicious content can be sent to it. I'd say it's running 60/40 on the PC only vs. Mac,too OE bug effectiveness meter. Don't quote me on that...
Has anyone seen a Mac mail client that is that versatile, eh? I think not. But OE also scares me, none-the-less. I'd use Linux, but our foreign language translation business really demands the use of a Mac, believe it or not.
Comments and thoughts, and suggestions of other mail clients are welcome and invited...
What I found interesting is that Microsoft has more bugs to be fixed. This in itself isn't a surprise, as much as the fact that the general public doesn't seem to want to face-up to this fact.
:-)
And, with Windows 2000 on the way, won't it just get worse?
Not an incredibly insightful comment, I know. That's why I'm hoping for some insightful responses.
This is the typical defense of any unethical action taken by a business enterprise, and probably by any unethical person trying to justify their behavior: "If I can do it then I should do it. It's up to the Patent Office/Congress/police to not let me." It's a bit like the old "It's not wrong unless I get caught."
Unethical, no. Wrong, maybe, but who's to judge? Certainly not you. And it's definitely a murky area at best. Given the current state of affairs, yes it is the responsibility of a company to do everything they can to protect their intellectual property. It's not justification, it's survival in a brutal corporate world. These companies, Amazon included, are simply playing by the rules to the best of their abilities. We all write them, they are using them. Which do you think is more effective, changing the corporate attitudes or changing the rules by which they play?
Your "all information and ideas should be free" attitude doesn't hold water, at least not until the rules change.
And yes, you could create a one-click shopping system just like theirs. Would you ever have thought of it if they hadn't done it? Hell no, not very likely. That's what they are protecting, their right to come up with the idea and be the only ones to use it.
I personally feel it and many other patents are pretty weak, but certainly worth more exploration. Change is probably needed. But once again, would anyone have thought of one-click shopping if they hadn't? Is that grounds for a patent? Close, maybe, possibly not, maybe so, but certainly not unethical or "wrong".
What the heck were you thinking when you said, "we need to show
:-).
companies that just because they can patent something, they don't need to. "
If they can patent something, they absolutely DO need to. It's up to the Patent office to not allow patents of ridiculous things. It's up to the companies to patent everything they can to be as competitive as possible.
Somewhere there needs to be a balance, and the way to control the balance is at the "server" (patent) level and not the "user" (amazon?) level.
Our company holds what I think is a completely unenforcable patent, so I will tell you what it is. We made some charting software, an add-in for Excel. The patent was on part of the actual process of making charts! Specifically, charts that display annualized data alongside monthly data, e.g. 3 yearly bars followed by 12 monthly bars. There was some other errata and bs in the patent, but that was the gist of it.
Pretty pathetic, eh? Of course we filed for a patent. We wanted to keep anyone else from displaying their charts in that format, since that was one of our major selling points (as well as having an Altman's Z-score chart built right in
IMHO, we never should have received that patent. Likewise, if there was actually a market for the type of charting software we made then we probably would have actually tried to enforce the stupid thing.
--
It seems to me, after all the discussion, that webmasters/hosts should have to generate their own index of a site based on certain criteria (of course).
For instance, I run a little program called swish-e (which some of you may have heard of, if not, check it out) to run small search engines on several of my sites. What if every host/domain/site had to run a "swish-e" index of their space and post a "spiderindex.txt" file in their main directory. Generate the index for the spider before it even gets there.
That would open up a whole new can of worms, probably, and add another layer of complexity to creating your own site, which is a good thing IMHO. Professionally produced sites, or those produced by the web-wise at least, with "spiderindex.txt" in them get indexed better than Joe Smith's personal home page with a few meta tags.
-Mark
Sure, they just launched the engine now, and they don't have clutter, or banner ads, or other cross-selling junk, but it won't last.
We had a local radio station that went commercial-free for months just to bolster its listener base. They, of course, started advertising because someone's gotta' pay the bills.
At Google, just like everywhere else, something has to pay the bills. The clutter will come, it's a fact.
Is it the 9/9/99 bug?
Whoops, it's solar and I had the panel covered with my hand.
I'm starting to get the incling that the pace at which new distributions from various vendors come out is going to be to much to handle for most people, including me...