Patent owner infographic shows contrast between Apple, Google inventor's cultures

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in General Discussion
A pair of visualizations comparing Apple's and Google's "innovation signatures" shows the difference in corporate cultures between the two giants, but doesn't tell the entire tale.




A series of graphics generated by link textdata analytics firm Periscopic, commissioned by Co.Design, has charted the last decade of patent filings by the pair of companies. Every patent filer has a single dot, which grows in correspondence with how many filings they have. A line links co-inventors of any given patent.

Google's graph is more of an amorphous blob, with even founders Larry Page and Sergei Brin not well represented.




Apple's graph is leader-centric with a clear nucleus. Apple founder Steve Jobs is well-represented, as are lead designer Jony Ive and his cadre.




"Over the past 10 years Apple has produced 10,975 patents with a team of 5,232 inventors, and Google has produced 12,386 with a team of 8,888," writes data explorer at Periscopic Wes Bernegger. "This seems to indicate a top-down, more centrally controlled system in Apple vs. potentially more independence and empowerment in Google."

Both companies sport a "halo" of poorly connected patent holders. They are attributed to recent acquisitions, "skunkworks labs and shell companies," and in rare occasions, one-up inventions from acqui-hires and lone employees, according to Co.Design.

Bernegger claims that despite the outward appearance of the graphs to the casual observer, they do not fully articulate the data. Inside Apple's walls, Bernegger says that there is more "connectivity and collaboration" than at Google.

"The average number of inventors listed on a patent at Apple is 4.2. At Google, it's 2.8," says Bernegger. "These combined effects mean an inventor at Apple has, on average, produced more than twice the patents than one at Google. Nine vs. four."

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 16
    lkrupplkrupp Posts: 10,557member


    Bernegger claims that despite the outward appearance of the graphs to the casual observer, they do not fully articulate the data. Inside Apple’s walls, Bernegger says that there is more "connectivity and collaboration" than at Google.
    Pfft! The tech blogs will run this as a negative for Apple no matter what the data doesn’t “fully articulate.” Google filed more patents, therefore Google is more innovative. Simple when you understand how the tech media works. Case closed. Apple fails again. Warren Buffet is just an old man with dementia ( I actually read a MarketWatch article questioning Buffet’s ability to understand why Apple is dead meat and he made a big mistake.)
    andrewj5790watto_cobraSoli
  • Reply 2 of 16
    It's interesting, but there's more to creativity and innovation than patent filings, and most research involves more people than those listed on the patent as the primary inventors.

    Each company has also deployed thousands of features which are not patentable for various reasons - either there is prior art, or based on patents from other companies (licensed or expired) or concepts considered "obvious" by the patent office.

    As we all know, there can be incredible amounts of innovation, creativity and design work in implementing a concept.  Two companies implementing the same concept rarely produce the same result.  cf. Windows vs. Mac, iOS vs. Android vs. Windows Mobile, XBox vs. PlayStation vs. Wii, etc.
    radarthekatdewmewatto_cobraSoli
  • Reply 3 of 16
    Apple makes products they sell to their customers.

    _ oo _ le sells users' personal data to make ads, and aren't ads what make life worth living?!
    andrewj5790fotoformatSpamSandwichmike1caliradarthekatcornchipwatto_cobraSoli
  • Reply 4 of 16
    Google's invention is like lets everybody invent anything and patent it, then put tons of money behind whatever looks to us to be the most innovative and see if it sticks. Problem is, they just have no taste, or plan.
    caliradarthekatcornchipwatto_cobra
  • Reply 5 of 16
    Apple makes products they sell to their customers.

    _ oo _ le sells users' personal data to make ads, and aren't ads what make life worth living?!
    I'd be curious to see statistics on how many people use Google services vs. own Apple hardware. And how many people who own Apple hardware use Google services.
  • Reply 6 of 16
    I'd be curious to see statistics on how many people use Google services vs. own Apple hardware. And how many people who own Apple hardware use Google services.
    I own lots of Apple hardware and I use Google services all the time.  Especially GMail, search and Maps.
    saltyzip
  • Reply 7 of 16
    shamino said:
    I'd be curious to see statistics on how many people use Google services vs. own Apple hardware. And how many people who own Apple hardware use Google services.
    I own lots of Apple hardware and I use Google services all the time.  Especially GMail, search and Maps.

    I think that's the point.  Everyone uses Google and almost everyone owns some Apple hardware.  It's only zealots who use Google and nothing Apple or vice versa.
    radarthekatSoli
  • Reply 8 of 16
    Can someone explain in 2 sentence any interesting conclusion from those 2 diagrams?  Seriously.  The Apple one looks like a diseased organism and the Google one looks healthier, but I have no idea what story they are trying to tell.
    saltyzip
  • Reply 9 of 16
    Why is this comparison even being made? Apple = electronics hardware company. Google = Internet software and services company. Their only areas of overlap: Apple produces the minimal amount of software and services required to sell their hardware. Before you retort macOS, iOS, tvOS and watchOS please note that a lot of computer science/architecture types consider the operating system to be a virtual hardware layer, which is why hardware companies tend to be the ones who make operating systems. And Google got into hardware - including Android and ChromeOS - in order to protect their Internet software and services business from being overtaken by Microsoft. And by the way ... Google didn't actually create Android or ChromeOS. Google BOUGHT Android, originally a company who wanted to use the OS as firmware for cameras and robots. ChromeOS meanwhile is basically Debian Linux with everything not necessary to run the Chrome browser stripped out. So a better point of comparison for Apple would be IBM - their original competitor - or HP. But I guess since IBM and HP are shells of their former selves - as is the American electronics and computer industry as a whole save Apple - there would have been no point. Ditto with Dell, who never was really that much for R&D but was just a Wintel clone company even in their heyday. AT&T was an R&D powerhouse (creator of the UNIX OS and the C programming language ... which means that Apple's revival with OS X and iOS owes a whole lot to AT&T I guess!) but they were never a consumer or even enterprise computer hardware company per se and they are also a shell of the companies that used to sit at or near the top of the Fortune 500. And Samsung? Their prowess is more due to having their hands in a lot of jars - components, appliances, Wintel (and ChromeOS) PCs, "dumb" electronics like TVs and radios, even shipbuilding - instead of innovating or excelling in any one area (save for components). They would have never even had the idea to join their appliances, dumb electronics and "smart" computer products together had Apple and Google not given them the idea first. A better point of comparison for Google? Yahoo no longer exists in any meaningful form, and they were more of an entertainment/media company than a software/services company anyway. (Note that Google wisely never attempted to directly compete with either Yahoo or Microsoft in entertainment, content, media or even being a web portal. That is, except for buying YouTube, whose reach and revenue crushes Yahoo and Microsoft combined in content and media. And that does not even count Google Play Movies, TV, Books and Music, which were actually created to compete with iTunes and not anything that Microsoft and Yahoo were doing.) Microsoft? Google did to them what Apple did to IBM and HP by crushing them in search, mobile and even web browsers. Likely because Microsoft saw Yahoo and Apple as their real competition and did not acknowledge Google until it was too late. (Thanks Ballmer!) And Google merely wants to believe that they are a threat to Microsoft in enterprise and cloud, but that is a delusion. Amazon? Tried to take on Google in mobile using Google's own operating system and lost badly. Despite what people believe, Amazon is not a direct threat to Google in search because Amazon does not do ads, and Amazon search is only relevant for things bought on Amazon's site. So that leaves cloud, where Microsoft is a bigger competitor to AWS and ACS than Google. Facebook? Similar to Amazon, the "Google is doomed" crowd claims that they pose some sort of threat in ads and apps, but the Facebook app revenue dried up and blowed away with no one mentioning how wrong they were to ever claim that it was a threat to Google Play in the first place (when was the last time you heard anyone speak of Facebook sensation Farmville ... exactly ... those folks moved onto Clash of Clans and Minecraft on iOS and Android ages ago) and the ad market is more than big enough to support both Google and Facebook. Not to mention only a tiny fraction of the population actually spends all their time immersed in Facebook all day as opposed to merely checking it from time to time ... and often doing so from the Chrome browser and/or their Android apps in the process. So I guess the reasons to compare them are their both being #1 in their respective realms with no real competition, and being #1 and #2 overall. But they still truly honestly have nothing to do with each other. Beyond the fact that Google makes a ton of money by having their software and services on iOS and macOS devices, and Apple benefited greatly by Android keeping Windows Mobile from becoming viable. A final word: yes the cultures are different. Apple is a legacy tech company from the 70s, meaning their approach to R&D is totally different. If you are a programmer, think "waterfall method" or structured design method where the emphasis is on building the product from bottom up, designing and fine tuning each piece, and finally coming out with a fully developed end product. Google is a newer tech company with a "rapid development" culture (again, think "agile" for programmers) where the emphasis is on getting a viable product out as quickly as possible, often by (haphazardly) mashing together and reusing components from other products and projects along the way. Which approach is better? Apple's is for Apple and Google's is for Google. If you make consumer hardware, well-thought, designed and engineered products that "just work" - as well as products that are legitimately new ways to do things such as a music player with permanent storage and downloadable content or a mobile phone with touchscreen interface and downloadable applications - is as good as it gets for most of the population. By contrast, Google's approach helped them A) win the search engine wars against Yahoo and Lycos then B) win the browser wars against Firefox and Microsoft then C) win the mobile OS race against Microsoft, Nokia, Blackberry and Sun/Oracle. The last one was key. Microsoft, Nokia, Blackberry and Sun already had their own mobile device platforms either on the market or in development and had been FOR YEARS. Google meanwhile was able to buy Android, use it to create a Blackberry OS clone in 2 years AND THEN react to the introduction of the iPhone by launching their own iPhone OS clone AND app store in less than 12 months! Microsoft, by comparison, didn't shift from Microsoft CE (the guts of Windows Phone 7 ... Windows Phone 7 was just Windows CE with the Zune Tiles UI) to a true mobile OS until 2012, by which time Google was on Android Jellybean, and Samsung had made Android a success with the Galaxy S3 - which sold 70 million units - and Galaxy Note 2. So while it is easy to laugh at Google's many failures and half-baked ideas in comparison with Apple's superior end user products and much lower failure rate, the reality is that if it were not for Google breaking all those eggs, Microsoft would have swallowed them up 10 years ago and Yahoo - whose existence Microsoft would have tolerated for antitrust reasons - would have inherited the scraps ... Yahoo would have eventually bought YouTube for instance. And a Microsoft that combines their own market share position in PC OS and enterprise software and cloud with Google's prowess in search and mobile would be truly monstrous. Especially when you consider that their partners Intel, IBM, HP and Dell would still be as powerful as ever ... IBM, HP and Dell would be making and selling Windows 8 phones and tablets by the truckload - viable in the marketplace by selling them at half the cost of the Apple equivalent just as they did during their PC dominance era, and just as Samsung does with Android devices now - all with Intel inside and bundled with Microsoft software, services and apps. It would be terrible for the market, terrible for innovation, horrible for the consumer, and it is chilling to ponder the economic, cultural and POLITICAL power that the colossus that Microsoft would have become. Apple and Google - though working separately and as enemies - had their cultures of innovation that tamed the Wintel beast and resulted in a tech landscape with 5 major players - Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft and Google - instead of one where it really would have been Microsoft and everyone else, because Microsoft would have been just that big had they been able to combine PC, enterprise, search and mobile. Think about it ... Microsoft never really did try to get into social networking, but they likely would have done that too, and may have even been successful if they had found a way to use Microsoft Office and their other enterprise platforms as a launching pad for a social network for professionals. And students. And everyone who uses Microsoft Office products, which back then WAS basically everybody, even if they used a Mac. So yes, such an effort would have been the rival for Facebook that Google's failed Google+ never was. That is just one example ... there are many more.
    cornchip
  • Reply 10 of 16
    calicali Posts: 3,494member
    Not even in the same league. Why are we comparing a company who can't launch a product to Apple?
    watto_cobra
  • Reply 11 of 16
    dewmedewme Posts: 5,335member
    Interesting correlation of data but attributing causation to it seems like a bit of a stretch. Perhaps it's a modern equivalent to the Rorschach Test for technology related innovation driven companies?  More diagrams please!  :|  
    cornchip
  • Reply 12 of 16
    icoco3icoco3 Posts: 1,474member
    freeper said:
    Why is this comparison even being made? ....
    Do you know how to use smaller paragraphs??  Some us us can't follow that giant mess on a screen.
    shamino
  • Reply 13 of 16
    icoco3 said:
    freeper said:
    Why is this comparison even being made? ....
    Do you know how to use smaller paragraphs??  Some us us can't follow that giant mess on a screen.

    On the plus side, there is some good analysis in that mega paragraph.  Welcome to AI!
    icoco3
  • Reply 14 of 16
    SoliSoli Posts: 10,035member
    Can someone explain in 2 sentence any interesting conclusion from those 2 diagrams?  Seriously.  The Apple one looks like a diseased organism and the Google one looks healthier, but I have no idea what story they are trying to tell.
    There isn't anything to be fleeced from the graphic. Even in the analysis, there's nothinbg about patents that directly relates to the validity or innovatioveness of the patent, much less to how that relates to innovative products.

    Does that even includes patent IP that were acquired by these companies? I doubt it since I assume the data was sourced by searching for keywords in the original patents.

    I'd think it would be more interesting to see how many shared patents are referenced in these patent filings.
    loquitur
  • Reply 15 of 16
    saltyzipsaltyzip Posts: 193member
    cali said:
    Not even in the same league. Why are we comparing a company who can't launch a product to Apple?
    What do you mean can't launch a product? https://store.google.com
  • Reply 16 of 16
    saltyzipsaltyzip Posts: 193member
    Can someone explain in 2 sentence any interesting conclusion from those 2 diagrams?  Seriously.  The Apple one looks like a diseased organism and the Google one looks healthier, but I have no idea what story they are trying to tell.
    Simples, Apple is a dictatorship, Google is a Glastonbury Festival
    edited March 2017
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