The very same. And maybe that's part of the problem. Apple has released buckets of their IP into the public domain in one way or another, so the "community" got caught off-guard when the company drew a line and said "this far, no further."
Then "the community" is pretty stupid - Apple was pretty clear at the iPhone launch what they considered valuable and what they would defend. Anyone who is really paying attention wasn't caught off guard. The people "caught off guard" are hopeless idealists that feel there should be no patents or protection for innovation, and while that sounds nice it's just not practical.
When ad-hoc groups of people start kicking out kit like an iPhone I might pay attention more to arguments for the abolition of patents. But the problem is something like an iPhone takes an increadible amount of work to produce with the polish and useability that it has. Open Source projects have a reputation for looking at the end user experience last - and while it has gotten better, the core ethos for Open Source is still "scratch and itch you have" and the people with the skills to write their own code to scratch their own itch are generlaly not who you need to polish a product so that a non-technical person can use it.
OpenSource has it's place, and commercial software has it's place. While patents can be abused, what we need are sane reforms of the system - not wholesale trashing of it. There is validity in providng protection and financial rewards for innovation.
Otherwise something like Andrew wouldn't need the financial funding of someone like Google to make it happen - it would just happen as the radicals like Stallman would love for you to believe. That's just an unrealistic fantasy....
Apple's lawyers in this case are from the firm Kirkland and Ellis, a highly regarded international law firm. Heading the case for Kirkland and Ellis is Robert Krupka who is considered one of the top experts in IP law in the world. You can bet your bippie that there is a sophisticated strategy behind which patents have been chosen, which firms are being attacked and in what order, which courts to file in, what the time scales are likely to be, etc. Apple will be paying 10s or 100s of millions of dollars for this lawsuit. This I feel reasonably certain is something that all these mobile phone firms are thinking about too, they see what and who they are up against and it must give them a moment of pause.
I'll add that Robert Krupka has a reputation for winning big, difficult IP cases and he also has a reputation for taking cases all the way to judgement rather than settling out of court.
NIce to know, thanks for that info, I have faith Apple know what they are doing and I wish them success.
March 12 (Bloomberg) -- Nokia Oyj, the world?s largest maker of mobile phones, asked a U.S. judge to throw out Apple Inc.?s claims that it is trying to monopolize the wireless technology market and seize access to iPhone technology.
Apple?s antitrust and breach of contract allegations are implausible and are ?designed to divert attention away from free-riding off of Nokia?s intellectual property,? the Finnish company said yesterday in papers filed in federal court in Wilmington, Delaware.
What's hypocrytical? Why does everything have to be a binary yes/no or bad/good?
If the concepts that Apple used for the iPhone were so obvious how come, as a TOTAL OUTSIDER, they were the first to produce an iPhone? How come all the other "innovation" that people want "competition" to drive Apple with happend AFTER the iPhone?
What's hypocrytical is those calling from innovation against the one company that drove real innovation in the smart phone market.
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is exactly why so many people are upset over this case.
"people" are upset because Apple came out of left field as a total newcommer and took over an entire market segment. Worse, they didn't "play by the rules" - they aren't focused on checklists, features and geek-oriented concepts, they are focused on those loathsome end users and "normal people".
It's techie class warfare and it's getting a little tiresome. Bunch of insecure geeks whining...
Every singlke one of Apples patents fail either the "obviousness" or the "prior art" test. If HTC is smart, they will go to trial (and make sure the venue is not East Texas). Then Apple will pay a lot of money to have their patents overturned.
Here's what Nokia is doing:
March 12 (Bloomberg) -- Nokia Oyj, the world?s largest maker of mobile phones, asked a U.S. judge to throw out Apple Inc.?s claims that it is trying to monopolize the wireless technology market and seize access to iPhone technology.
Apple?s antitrust and breach of contract allegations are implausible and are ?designed to divert attention away from free-riding off of Nokia?s intellectual property,? the Finnish company said yesterday in papers filed in federal court in Wilmington, Delaware.
The really ironic thing about the number of people beating up on Apple is they're claiming that somehow Apple is stifling innovation.
- Try to remember what a phone meant before the iPhone. Try to remember how you worked it.
- Apple changed everything with the iPhone. It's popularity is an indication of how much of an improvement it was over everything else in almost every way (blackberry keyboard lovers may disagree on the keyboard point).
- These innovations took time and human ingenuity to develop and Apple paid to do that with no guarantee that they would be paid back. They took a risk on a good idea. It paid off.
- Now Google has come out with Android. It's pretty much a copy of the innovation that Apple came up with in the first iPhone.
- Google didn't come up with Android because it thought the world should have an Open Source choice to Apple's product. They came up with Android because Google makes its money from advertising and almost nothing else.
- Search drives people to Google's advertising on the desktop
- Search on the desktop is leveling off which is problem for Google's future growth
- Most observers feel that the next big growth area for advertising is on mobile phones
- If Apple overwhelmingly controlled the smartphone market they could cut off Google from Advertising if they so choose, eg, maybe Bing woud offer more to Apple or Apple would decide to take on the advertising themselves as in through sponsored apps where Google (depending on the FTC's decision on Admob) has no presence at all.
- Google developed Android (and bought Admob if it goes through) as a strategy to keep their revenues growing and make sure they weren't hostage to Apple.
- And of course in developing Android they had Apple's iPhone as a model to copy to sort out the many difficult problems of making a smartphone which Apple had to think through during its orignal development. Android only had to copy or modify Apple's hard work. There's some innovation on the Android but its not disruptive innovation the way Apple's innovation worked with the iPhone.
- And of course the presence of Android as an open source "free" alternative meant that the phone makers could suddenly compete with Apple in the smart phone market without doing any of their own development. No innovation there.
So how exactly is Apple stifling innovation by suing HTC for what ever patents they think they can justify to protect the market share and profits they hope to reap from their hard and innovative work? It seems to me that these other firms will drive out any real innovation in their copy and make it cheaper mentality as we see throughout the PC/windows world, 10,000 me-too products which all basically suck because nobody wants to put in any innovation except to beat costs down through distribution models like Dell or sell cheap plastic things which have the durability of ice in a warm climate.
God bless the blogosphere. Anything for a buck. Wait, that's what they're blaming Apple for
They seem to be becoming way to much of a control freek company.
Apple has always been about control. It's nothing new. However it's not for control for the sake of control as many try to imply - they are anal retentative about control because they are focused on the end user experience. You can't have a good end user experience if there is total chaos - witness the Windows ecosystem.
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They seem to be becoming a company that wants to succed through fear and intimidation more than one that wants to succeed through innovation.
Your absolutely right. The iMac, Mac OSX, the iPod and now the iPhone succedded because Apple instilled fear and intimidation and not through innovation and bringing something new and different to market.
Seriously? Did you even re-read your post out loud after you typed it?
Patent reform ought not, and never will, be about preventing companies and individuals who are actually innovating and producing products from protecting their IP. Necessary patent reform is about putting an end to the parasitic siphoning off of resources from real companies by those who have no interest in producing anything, but just living off the ingenuity and efforts of others.
It's not "patent trolling" when you are defending your own tangible products from copycats.
Most sane post in this entire thread and well worthy of repeating.
Actually the patents are about the user interface, and other aspects that Apple wants protected in their IP - in their innovation if you will. And when you make glossy statements like "it is widely believed that" you need to specify to what audience you refer. If a group of seven-year-olds "widely believe" something that has a different weight than " a group of industry experts "widely believe" something. And let's understand a group of bloggers techies, geeks or fans is not an authoritative group to widely believe anything. Now if you are talking about a group of intellectual property experts, or technology experts, or stock market experts (obviously not simply self-proclaimed) then you start having a group that is worth paying attention to. And saying "it's 50/50 that they win is as about a lame a hedge as there is, you can't lose with that call now can you.
And what's this about hurting iPhone OS development? How will this "hurt" iPhone OS dev exactly? That statement makes no sense without an explanatory comment. This whole meme of Apple's bullying HTC, or "our buddies on Android" makes little sense. If, for example a gorgeous woman tells you she is attracted to you, fawns all over you and later you find your wallet missing and a bunch of changes on your hitherto pristine change cards, do you feel better because it was an attractive woman doing it? (well some of you might) But no. The expectation seems to be, "hey, Apple - look the other way while a bunch of other manufacturers use not just a look and feel approach to knocking off your innovation in a pretty well stagnant user interface market, but let them use exactly the same methodology, the same technology and ignore the years of effort (not to mention the expense of purchasing an existing firm that will give you an advantage in the interface)", because well actually doing something about it isn't very nice. And Android came from Linux, which is our ideological state of free and open everything - and therefore an ideological unicorn with fairy wings. It's not nice to challenge anything even remotely associated with that".
Android is not at Apple's door (as if it had been hanging around out the street, waiting for an opportunity to door-knock), Android has been around for a while, and is still getting built out as a mobile platform OS. But it still has some serious dev work to accomplish to be a true competitor.
Scared shitless companies don't execute a tightly targeted defense of IP. They flail around like SCO did, whacking at everything in sight. No this is a very specific strategy which has probably been planned for some time. You assume because you don't have the resources to monitor the market, that Apple is simply knee-jerking to whatever stimulus suddenly pops-up. Apple has demonstrated that they are pedantic and controlled in their approaches to product release and management - far beyond the type A controll-freakiness rep that Jobs has.
Apple already faces Nokia (NOK). What other established and canny mobile and computing patent holders does Apple also want to take on? Motorola (MOT)? Samsung? HP (HPQ)? These companies, most of which have abundant resources for legal battles, also own a depth of mobile and handset IP that dwarfs Apple?s holdings. Include the prior art on multitouch interfaces, and I don?t see how Apple keeps its patent for long. In this case, threatening legal action is a fool?s stratagem. That?s a pity for Apple, because the patent, even if fundamentally weak, could be a great bargaining chip in dealing with companies like Nokia. Apple either has to back down or risk losing what it already has.
Unnecessarily losing the multitouch patent is minor compared to a bigger problem. Apple is about to shift from a company that constantly stays ahead to one that spends time trying to keep others from catching up. Outside Apple?s ill-fated suit of Microsoft for copying the Mac look-and-feel, I can?t think of another time when Apple strategy relied primarily on lawyers, not designers. This is a potentially fatal change of direction for the company. Apple is effectively saying that it is dependent on patents and can?t maintain the pace of innovation necessary to stay at the front of its markets. That will eventually eat away at employees and investors. For its own good, and the good of the industry, Apple should stand down, welcome tough competitors, and prove itself more than equal to the situation.
Android gaining steam, while not at Apple's marketshare they certainly are gaining (and even exceeding) on features
42.7 million people in the U.S. owned smartphones in an average month during the November to January period, up 18 percent from the August through October period. RIM was the leading mobile smartphone platform in the U.S. with 43.0 percent share of U.S. smartphone subscribers, rising 1.7 percentage points versus three months earlier. Apple ranked second with 25.1 percent share (up 0.3 percentage points), followed by Microsoft at 15.7 percent, Google at 7.1 percent (up 4.3 percentage points), and Palm at 5.7 percent. Google?s Android platform continues to see rapid gains in market share.
Come on, they have every right to defend their IP but it doesn't mean they should use them offensively.
And for people to say HTC doesn't have any IP is a bit shortsighted seeing as they've been in the phone game long before Apple.
What's hypocrytical? Why does everything have to be a binary yes/no or bad/good?
I wanna make something really clear here, 'cause I think I'm the one who introduced the word "hypocrisy" into this particular discussion:
I, speaking for myself, absolutely don't think Apple is being hypocritical, or anything like it. What I was saying was that I get the feeling there are people out there who see Apple giving away source code on the one hand, and filing patent infringement lawsuits on the other, and declare that to be hypocritical. Just for the record, I think these people are wrong. But I'm engaging in a little armchair psychology here, since the article that launched this thread was kind of about people's mindsets.
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"people" are upset because Apple came out of left field as a total newcommer and took over an entire market segment. Worse, they didn't "play by the rules" - they aren't focused on checklists, features and geek-oriented concepts, they are focused on those loathsome end users and "normal people".
I don't know how widespread it is, but I've definitely seen that attitude. Do you guys know about "tall poppy syndrome?" It might be something that's only talked about where I live. But the basic idea is that when somebody becomes too successful, people start to resent him. Oh sure, he's a nice guy, he loves his family, he volunteers at the soup kitchen, but he's just too good at whatever it is he does. He's makin' us look bad.
I think there's a lot of that attitude toward Apple. And understandably so, really. I mean, here's this company that for years was an outlier at best, and they come along and make this bizarre thing called an "eye-pod," and next thing you know everybody and his sister owns at least one and often a couple. Then they make their very first phone ever, and it's the greatest phone in the history of the world, and it totally revolutionizes the phone market as well as opening up whole new markets on the side. Oh, and they're also the #1 online retailer of music, despite publicly stating over and over again that they have no interest in the music business.
Apple's that annoying jerk from high school who was all-state in football, captained the swim team, dated the head cheerleader and still managed to graduate valedictorian. They make it look easy, and we resent the heck out of them for it.
Well. Not all of us. But at least a few very vocal people.
(Microsoft, on the other hand, is the socially awkward president of Future Business Leaders of America who sits in the cafeteria by himself at lunchtime and can occasionally be heard mumbling ominous things about how someday they're all gonna pay.)
- Try to remember what a phone meant before the iPhone. Try to remember how you worked it.
Before my iPhone, I had a Palm Treo. It did many things better than the iPhone. On balance, the iPhone is better, but the Treo still beats it in some areas.
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Originally Posted by All Day Breakfast
- Apple changed everything with the iPhone. It's popularity is an indication of how much of an improvement it was over everything else in almost every way (blackberry keyboard lovers may disagree on the keyboard point).
Are you aware that for every iPhone that a consumer buys, three other consumers choose a different smartphone?
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Originally Posted by All Day Breakfast
- If Apple overwhelmingly controlled the smartphone market they could cut off Google from Advertising if they so choose, eg, maybe Bing woud offer more to Apple or Apple would decide to take on the advertising themselves as in through sponsored apps where Google (depending on the FTC's decision on Admob) has no presence at all.
Given that Apple "controls" barely a quarter of the smartphone market, this seems pretty far fetched.
I get the feeling there are people out there who see Apple giving away source code on the one hand, and filing patent infringement lawsuits on the other, and declare that to be hypocritical. Just for the record, I think these people are wrong.
Gotcha and I agree with your analysis.
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I don't know how widespread it is
Pretty wide spread with people who aren't shy about sharing their opinions
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Do you guys know about "tall poppy syndrome?" [...]
Apple's that annoying jerk from high school who was all-state in football, captained the swim team, dated the head cheerleader and still managed to graduate valedictorian. They make it look easy, and we resent the heck out of them for it.
Yup. Ironically lots of those people are the ones calling for others to provide competition to Apple to force Apple to innovate.
Talk about having a backwards world view
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(Microsoft, on the other hand, is the socially awkward president of Future Business Leaders of America who sits in the cafeteria by himself at lunchtime and can occasionally be heard mumbling ominous things about how someday they're all gonna pay.)
If we give them their red stapler back do you think we will be safe?
Thank you for a rational exchange and discussion. What a breath of fresh air!
A humble request to all you fanbois clucking how Apple is right in this... please explain in a little more detail how in your opinion e.g this specific part of the lawsuit is right:
Apple is claiming that HTC phones that DON'T have swipe to unlock infringe on Apple's swipe to unlock patent.
OK, I'm a big fan of Apple and they certainly have the right to protect their IP, but most of those patents listed should never have been granted on the basis of either prior art or being totally obvious.
I'll just take one example, Patent #6,424,354: Object-Oriented Event Notification System With Listener Registration Of Both Interests And Methods. This is nothing more than the Observer design pattern which was one of the patterns detailed in the now famous Design Patterns book by the 'Gang of Four', published in 1994, four years before the patent was applied for and 8 years before it was granted. Given that it appeared in the book in 1994 it was clearly a well known design pattern long before that. So how the hell did the USPTO grant that one??
Apple is taking existing public domain IP and patenting it as their own ideas. That stinks. However, I realise that Apple is just playing by the system, and the US Patent system, at least as it applies to software, is rotten to the core
Where did you think the ``Gang of Four'' got this famous Design Pattern from? They published it from a patent by NeXT. The entire Gang of Four book is a well-known design patterns book from guys tipping their hats to NeXT.
Just look at these patents below from Engadget's list. I am sure these patents cover desktop Linux just as much as Android. The Open Source community should be even more concerned than they are, because this is the most open attack on open source operating systems ever, with the biggest collection of patents.
Its not all about Slide to Unlock.
Like I said, check out the collection below. There are some very serious patents here which cover how an GUI and OS work, and seem to have nearly nothing to do with phones.
Some of the Patents are also regarding Apple's Taligent [aka Pink] patents.
Before my iPhone, I had a Palm Treo. It did many things better than the iPhone. On balance, the iPhone is better, but the Treo still beats it in some areas.
I'm not sure what things your Treo did better than an iPhone but I do notice that the relative market share of the iPhone and Treo's. The point wasn't about individual differences in something that was useful, the point was that Apple revolutionised the way people interact with their phones and other companies are trying to ride on their hard work and innovation. My point was about innovation. If Treo is your idea of innovation, so be it.
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Originally Posted by iGenius
Are you aware that for every iPhone that a consumer buys, three other consumers choose a different smartphone?
Of course I'm aware of that. The smartphone market is rapidly undergoing seismic shifts caused by what the iPhone is and how one operates it and that both the size of the smartphone market and the iPhone's share of it are growing rapidly. And if you include Palm's "Pre" OS and Android and Microsoft's dumping of Windows Mobile 6.5 for their new mobile OS you can see that they understand the point about what the future is for smartphones. This is the effect of Apple's innovation. I don't know what market percentage Apple will control when all this levels out but I suspect "iPhone like" phones will almost completely replace the older smartphone OSs like Symbian et al.
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Originally Posted by iGenius
Given that Apple "controls" barely a quarter of the smartphone market, this seems pretty far fetched.
What Google is/was afraid of is that the iPhone could eventually have the market share of the iPod. You disagree? Fine. I don't find the threat of Apple domination in the face little or no competition far fetched at all.
They way I read this is that Apple is going to vigorously defend their revolutionary products and hard work in regards to the device(s) that have redefined what a phone, music player, reader, etc. is.
They got scr3w3d by M$ ripping off MacOS the last time, and I don't think they're going to let that happen again.
Comments
The very same. And maybe that's part of the problem. Apple has released buckets of their IP into the public domain in one way or another, so the "community" got caught off-guard when the company drew a line and said "this far, no further."
Then "the community" is pretty stupid - Apple was pretty clear at the iPhone launch what they considered valuable and what they would defend. Anyone who is really paying attention wasn't caught off guard. The people "caught off guard" are hopeless idealists that feel there should be no patents or protection for innovation, and while that sounds nice it's just not practical.
When ad-hoc groups of people start kicking out kit like an iPhone I might pay attention more to arguments for the abolition of patents. But the problem is something like an iPhone takes an increadible amount of work to produce with the polish and useability that it has. Open Source projects have a reputation for looking at the end user experience last - and while it has gotten better, the core ethos for Open Source is still "scratch and itch you have" and the people with the skills to write their own code to scratch their own itch are generlaly not who you need to polish a product so that a non-technical person can use it.
OpenSource has it's place, and commercial software has it's place. While patents can be abused, what we need are sane reforms of the system - not wholesale trashing of it. There is validity in providng protection and financial rewards for innovation.
Otherwise something like Andrew wouldn't need the financial funding of someone like Google to make it happen - it would just happen as the radicals like Stallman would love for you to believe. That's just an unrealistic fantasy....
Apple's lawyers in this case are from the firm Kirkland and Ellis, a highly regarded international law firm. Heading the case for Kirkland and Ellis is Robert Krupka who is considered one of the top experts in IP law in the world. You can bet your bippie that there is a sophisticated strategy behind which patents have been chosen, which firms are being attacked and in what order, which courts to file in, what the time scales are likely to be, etc. Apple will be paying 10s or 100s of millions of dollars for this lawsuit. This I feel reasonably certain is something that all these mobile phone firms are thinking about too, they see what and who they are up against and it must give them a moment of pause.
I'll add that Robert Krupka has a reputation for winning big, difficult IP cases and he also has a reputation for taking cases all the way to judgement rather than settling out of court.
NIce to know, thanks for that info, I have faith Apple know what they are doing and I wish them success.
March 12 (Bloomberg) -- Nokia Oyj, the world?s largest maker of mobile phones, asked a U.S. judge to throw out Apple Inc.?s claims that it is trying to monopolize the wireless technology market and seize access to iPhone technology.
Apple?s antitrust and breach of contract allegations are implausible and are ?designed to divert attention away from free-riding off of Nokia?s intellectual property,? the Finnish company said yesterday in papers filed in federal court in Wilmington, Delaware.
These are software patents. Unless you plan to sneak in to his house and steal source code, you would have to re-implement (which is hard).
I'm sure he can just email me the code. That would be selfish and evil of him not to do that.
I agree, that sense of hypocrisy
What's hypocrytical? Why does everything have to be a binary yes/no or bad/good?
If the concepts that Apple used for the iPhone were so obvious how come, as a TOTAL OUTSIDER, they were the first to produce an iPhone? How come all the other "innovation" that people want "competition" to drive Apple with happend AFTER the iPhone?
What's hypocrytical is those calling from innovation against the one company that drove real innovation in the smart phone market.
is exactly why so many people are upset over this case.
"people" are upset because Apple came out of left field as a total newcommer and took over an entire market segment. Worse, they didn't "play by the rules" - they aren't focused on checklists, features and geek-oriented concepts, they are focused on those loathsome end users and "normal people".
It's techie class warfare and it's getting a little tiresome. Bunch of insecure geeks whining...
Every singlke one of Apples patents fail either the "obviousness" or the "prior art" test. If HTC is smart, they will go to trial (and make sure the venue is not East Texas). Then Apple will pay a lot of money to have their patents overturned.
Here's what Nokia is doing:
March 12 (Bloomberg) -- Nokia Oyj, the world?s largest maker of mobile phones, asked a U.S. judge to throw out Apple Inc.?s claims that it is trying to monopolize the wireless technology market and seize access to iPhone technology.
Apple?s antitrust and breach of contract allegations are implausible and are ?designed to divert attention away from free-riding off of Nokia?s intellectual property,? the Finnish company said yesterday in papers filed in federal court in Wilmington, Delaware.
- Try to remember what a phone meant before the iPhone. Try to remember how you worked it.
- Apple changed everything with the iPhone. It's popularity is an indication of how much of an improvement it was over everything else in almost every way (blackberry keyboard lovers may disagree on the keyboard point).
- These innovations took time and human ingenuity to develop and Apple paid to do that with no guarantee that they would be paid back. They took a risk on a good idea. It paid off.
- Now Google has come out with Android. It's pretty much a copy of the innovation that Apple came up with in the first iPhone.
- Google didn't come up with Android because it thought the world should have an Open Source choice to Apple's product. They came up with Android because Google makes its money from advertising and almost nothing else.
- Search drives people to Google's advertising on the desktop
- Search on the desktop is leveling off which is problem for Google's future growth
- Most observers feel that the next big growth area for advertising is on mobile phones
- If Apple overwhelmingly controlled the smartphone market they could cut off Google from Advertising if they so choose, eg, maybe Bing woud offer more to Apple or Apple would decide to take on the advertising themselves as in through sponsored apps where Google (depending on the FTC's decision on Admob) has no presence at all.
- Google developed Android (and bought Admob if it goes through) as a strategy to keep their revenues growing and make sure they weren't hostage to Apple.
- And of course in developing Android they had Apple's iPhone as a model to copy to sort out the many difficult problems of making a smartphone which Apple had to think through during its orignal development. Android only had to copy or modify Apple's hard work. There's some innovation on the Android but its not disruptive innovation the way Apple's innovation worked with the iPhone.
- And of course the presence of Android as an open source "free" alternative meant that the phone makers could suddenly compete with Apple in the smart phone market without doing any of their own development. No innovation there.
So how exactly is Apple stifling innovation by suing HTC for what ever patents they think they can justify to protect the market share and profits they hope to reap from their hard and innovative work? It seems to me that these other firms will drive out any real innovation in their copy and make it cheaper mentality as we see throughout the PC/windows world, 10,000 me-too products which all basically suck because nobody wants to put in any innovation except to beat costs down through distribution models like Dell or sell cheap plastic things which have the durability of ice in a warm climate.
God bless the blogosphere. Anything for a buck. Wait, that's what they're blaming Apple for
They seem to be becoming way to much of a control freek company.
Apple has always been about control. It's nothing new. However it's not for control for the sake of control as many try to imply - they are anal retentative about control because they are focused on the end user experience. You can't have a good end user experience if there is total chaos - witness the Windows ecosystem.
They seem to be becoming a company that wants to succed through fear and intimidation more than one that wants to succeed through innovation.
Your absolutely right. The iMac, Mac OSX, the iPod and now the iPhone succedded because Apple instilled fear and intimidation and not through innovation and bringing something new and different to market.
Seriously? Did you even re-read your post out loud after you typed it?
Patent reform ought not, and never will, be about preventing companies and individuals who are actually innovating and producing products from protecting their IP. Necessary patent reform is about putting an end to the parasitic siphoning off of resources from real companies by those who have no interest in producing anything, but just living off the ingenuity and efforts of others.
It's not "patent trolling" when you are defending your own tangible products from copycats.
Most sane post in this entire thread and well worthy of repeating.
Excellent!
Actually the patents are about the user interface, and other aspects that Apple wants protected in their IP - in their innovation if you will. And when you make glossy statements like "it is widely believed that" you need to specify to what audience you refer. If a group of seven-year-olds "widely believe" something that has a different weight than " a group of industry experts "widely believe" something. And let's understand a group of bloggers techies, geeks or fans is not an authoritative group to widely believe anything. Now if you are talking about a group of intellectual property experts, or technology experts, or stock market experts (obviously not simply self-proclaimed) then you start having a group that is worth paying attention to. And saying "it's 50/50 that they win is as about a lame a hedge as there is, you can't lose with that call now can you.
And what's this about hurting iPhone OS development? How will this "hurt" iPhone OS dev exactly? That statement makes no sense without an explanatory comment. This whole meme of Apple's bullying HTC, or "our buddies on Android" makes little sense. If, for example a gorgeous woman tells you she is attracted to you, fawns all over you and later you find your wallet missing and a bunch of changes on your hitherto pristine change cards, do you feel better because it was an attractive woman doing it? (well some of you might) But no. The expectation seems to be, "hey, Apple - look the other way while a bunch of other manufacturers use not just a look and feel approach to knocking off your innovation in a pretty well stagnant user interface market, but let them use exactly the same methodology, the same technology and ignore the years of effort (not to mention the expense of purchasing an existing firm that will give you an advantage in the interface)", because well actually doing something about it isn't very nice. And Android came from Linux, which is our ideological state of free and open everything - and therefore an ideological unicorn with fairy wings. It's not nice to challenge anything even remotely associated with that".
Android is not at Apple's door (as if it had been hanging around out the street, waiting for an opportunity to door-knock), Android has been around for a while, and is still getting built out as a mobile platform OS. But it still has some serious dev work to accomplish to be a true competitor.
Scared shitless companies don't execute a tightly targeted defense of IP. They flail around like SCO did, whacking at everything in sight. No this is a very specific strategy which has probably been planned for some time. You assume because you don't have the resources to monitor the market, that Apple is simply knee-jerking to whatever stimulus suddenly pops-up. Apple has demonstrated that they are pedantic and controlled in their approaches to product release and management - far beyond the type A controll-freakiness rep that Jobs has.
http://industry.bnet.com/technology/...st-plain-dumb/
Apple already faces Nokia (NOK). What other established and canny mobile and computing patent holders does Apple also want to take on? Motorola (MOT)? Samsung? HP (HPQ)? These companies, most of which have abundant resources for legal battles, also own a depth of mobile and handset IP that dwarfs Apple?s holdings. Include the prior art on multitouch interfaces, and I don?t see how Apple keeps its patent for long. In this case, threatening legal action is a fool?s stratagem. That?s a pity for Apple, because the patent, even if fundamentally weak, could be a great bargaining chip in dealing with companies like Nokia. Apple either has to back down or risk losing what it already has.
Unnecessarily losing the multitouch patent is minor compared to a bigger problem. Apple is about to shift from a company that constantly stays ahead to one that spends time trying to keep others from catching up. Outside Apple?s ill-fated suit of Microsoft for copying the Mac look-and-feel, I can?t think of another time when Apple strategy relied primarily on lawyers, not designers. This is a potentially fatal change of direction for the company. Apple is effectively saying that it is dependent on patents and can?t maintain the pace of innovation necessary to stay at the front of its markets. That will eventually eat away at employees and investors. For its own good, and the good of the industry, Apple should stand down, welcome tough competitors, and prove itself more than equal to the situation.
Android gaining steam, while not at Apple's marketshare they certainly are gaining (and even exceeding) on features
http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events...r_Market_Share
42.7 million people in the U.S. owned smartphones in an average month during the November to January period, up 18 percent from the August through October period. RIM was the leading mobile smartphone platform in the U.S. with 43.0 percent share of U.S. smartphone subscribers, rising 1.7 percentage points versus three months earlier. Apple ranked second with 25.1 percent share (up 0.3 percentage points), followed by Microsoft at 15.7 percent, Google at 7.1 percent (up 4.3 percentage points), and Palm at 5.7 percent. Google?s Android platform continues to see rapid gains in market share.
Come on, they have every right to defend their IP but it doesn't mean they should use them offensively.
And for people to say HTC doesn't have any IP is a bit shortsighted seeing as they've been in the phone game long before Apple.
The thing is that Apple wants to chose which parts it gives the open source community, and not have the open source community take whatever it wants.
Yeah! Those bastards!
Apple change the game in the Cell phone market, prior to the iphone the service providers dictated features and what phone the consumer got,
Not quite true. I had a Palm Treo on Verizon which had not been crippled in any manner.
Apple has done some good things, but your example is not one of them.
What's hypocrytical? Why does everything have to be a binary yes/no or bad/good?
I wanna make something really clear here, 'cause I think I'm the one who introduced the word "hypocrisy" into this particular discussion:
I, speaking for myself, absolutely don't think Apple is being hypocritical, or anything like it. What I was saying was that I get the feeling there are people out there who see Apple giving away source code on the one hand, and filing patent infringement lawsuits on the other, and declare that to be hypocritical. Just for the record, I think these people are wrong. But I'm engaging in a little armchair psychology here, since the article that launched this thread was kind of about people's mindsets.
"people" are upset because Apple came out of left field as a total newcommer and took over an entire market segment. Worse, they didn't "play by the rules" - they aren't focused on checklists, features and geek-oriented concepts, they are focused on those loathsome end users and "normal people".
I don't know how widespread it is, but I've definitely seen that attitude. Do you guys know about "tall poppy syndrome?" It might be something that's only talked about where I live. But the basic idea is that when somebody becomes too successful, people start to resent him. Oh sure, he's a nice guy, he loves his family, he volunteers at the soup kitchen, but he's just too good at whatever it is he does. He's makin' us look bad.
I think there's a lot of that attitude toward Apple. And understandably so, really. I mean, here's this company that for years was an outlier at best, and they come along and make this bizarre thing called an "eye-pod," and next thing you know everybody and his sister owns at least one and often a couple. Then they make their very first phone ever, and it's the greatest phone in the history of the world, and it totally revolutionizes the phone market as well as opening up whole new markets on the side. Oh, and they're also the #1 online retailer of music, despite publicly stating over and over again that they have no interest in the music business.
Apple's that annoying jerk from high school who was all-state in football, captained the swim team, dated the head cheerleader and still managed to graduate valedictorian. They make it look easy, and we resent the heck out of them for it.
Well. Not all of us. But at least a few very vocal people.
(Microsoft, on the other hand, is the socially awkward president of Future Business Leaders of America who sits in the cafeteria by himself at lunchtime and can occasionally be heard mumbling ominous things about how someday they're all gonna pay.)
- Try to remember what a phone meant before the iPhone. Try to remember how you worked it.
Before my iPhone, I had a Palm Treo. It did many things better than the iPhone. On balance, the iPhone is better, but the Treo still beats it in some areas.
- Apple changed everything with the iPhone. It's popularity is an indication of how much of an improvement it was over everything else in almost every way (blackberry keyboard lovers may disagree on the keyboard point).
Are you aware that for every iPhone that a consumer buys, three other consumers choose a different smartphone?
- If Apple overwhelmingly controlled the smartphone market they could cut off Google from Advertising if they so choose, eg, maybe Bing woud offer more to Apple or Apple would decide to take on the advertising themselves as in through sponsored apps where Google (depending on the FTC's decision on Admob) has no presence at all.
Given that Apple "controls" barely a quarter of the smartphone market, this seems pretty far fetched.
I get the feeling there are people out there who see Apple giving away source code on the one hand, and filing patent infringement lawsuits on the other, and declare that to be hypocritical. Just for the record, I think these people are wrong.
Gotcha and I agree with your analysis.
I don't know how widespread it is
Pretty wide spread with people who aren't shy about sharing their opinions
Do you guys know about "tall poppy syndrome?" [...]
Apple's that annoying jerk from high school who was all-state in football, captained the swim team, dated the head cheerleader and still managed to graduate valedictorian. They make it look easy, and we resent the heck out of them for it.
Yup. Ironically lots of those people are the ones calling for others to provide competition to Apple to force Apple to innovate.
Talk about having a backwards world view
(Microsoft, on the other hand, is the socially awkward president of Future Business Leaders of America who sits in the cafeteria by himself at lunchtime and can occasionally be heard mumbling ominous things about how someday they're all gonna pay.)
If we give them their red stapler back do you think we will be safe?
Thank you for a rational exchange and discussion. What a breath of fresh air!
Apple is claiming that HTC phones that DON'T have swipe to unlock infringe on Apple's swipe to unlock patent.
OK, I'm a big fan of Apple and they certainly have the right to protect their IP, but most of those patents listed should never have been granted on the basis of either prior art or being totally obvious.
I'll just take one example, Patent #6,424,354: Object-Oriented Event Notification System With Listener Registration Of Both Interests And Methods. This is nothing more than the Observer design pattern which was one of the patterns detailed in the now famous Design Patterns book by the 'Gang of Four', published in 1994, four years before the patent was applied for and 8 years before it was granted. Given that it appeared in the book in 1994 it was clearly a well known design pattern long before that. So how the hell did the USPTO grant that one??
Apple is taking existing public domain IP and patenting it as their own ideas. That stinks. However, I realise that Apple is just playing by the system, and the US Patent system, at least as it applies to software, is rotten to the core
Where did you think the ``Gang of Four'' got this famous Design Pattern from? They published it from a patent by NeXT. The entire Gang of Four book is a well-known design patterns book from guys tipping their hats to NeXT.
Just look at these patents below from Engadget's list. I am sure these patents cover desktop Linux just as much as Android. The Open Source community should be even more concerned than they are, because this is the most open attack on open source operating systems ever, with the biggest collection of patents.
Its not all about Slide to Unlock.
Like I said, check out the collection below. There are some very serious patents here which cover how an GUI and OS work, and seem to have nearly nothing to do with phones.
Some of the Patents are also regarding Apple's Taligent [aka Pink] patents.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taligent
Patent #5,519,867:
COPYRGT. Copyright, Taligent Inc., 1993 void example1(TThreadHandle& aThread) TRY { aThread.Kill( ); // terminates aThread immediatly } CATCH(TKernelException) ( printf("Couldn't kill thread n"); // error occured trying to kill } ENDTRY; //. . . } CODE EXAMPLE 1 void TThreadHandle::Kill( ) { kern.sub.-- return.sub.-- t error; if((error = thread.sub.-- terminate(fThreadControlPort)) != KERN.sub.-- SUCCESS) THROW(TKernelException( )); // Error indicator }
Before my iPhone, I had a Palm Treo. It did many things better than the iPhone. On balance, the iPhone is better, but the Treo still beats it in some areas.
I'm not sure what things your Treo did better than an iPhone but I do notice that the relative market share of the iPhone and Treo's. The point wasn't about individual differences in something that was useful, the point was that Apple revolutionised the way people interact with their phones and other companies are trying to ride on their hard work and innovation. My point was about innovation. If Treo is your idea of innovation, so be it.
Are you aware that for every iPhone that a consumer buys, three other consumers choose a different smartphone?
Of course I'm aware of that. The smartphone market is rapidly undergoing seismic shifts caused by what the iPhone is and how one operates it and that both the size of the smartphone market and the iPhone's share of it are growing rapidly. And if you include Palm's "Pre" OS and Android and Microsoft's dumping of Windows Mobile 6.5 for their new mobile OS you can see that they understand the point about what the future is for smartphones. This is the effect of Apple's innovation. I don't know what market percentage Apple will control when all this levels out but I suspect "iPhone like" phones will almost completely replace the older smartphone OSs like Symbian et al.
Given that Apple "controls" barely a quarter of the smartphone market, this seems pretty far fetched.
What Google is/was afraid of is that the iPhone could eventually have the market share of the iPod. You disagree? Fine. I don't find the threat of Apple domination in the face little or no competition far fetched at all.
They got scr3w3d by M$ ripping off MacOS the last time, and I don't think they're going to let that happen again.