beeble42

Prior art decades before filing, even before FaceTime was invented. Another worthless patent that should never have been granted that is now clogging up the courts and wasting tax payers time and money, as well as Apple's. Making the loser pay costs is a nice idea but I don't think it'd work. You'd see thousands of companies that own one patent have zero assets. So when they lost, the company goes into bankruptcy and the innocent party still gets nothing but a big legal bill and the tax payer is out of pocket for the courts costs and time. Government of the people by the lawyers for the lawyers at work.

The only way to fix this is to fix the patent system. Protect inventions. Ideas alone aren't inventions. Make a prototype or proof of concept implementation of the idea. And the patent office needs to be a lot smarter in what they're granting patents on. They keep granting patents on things that are covered by prior art over and over and keep getting overturned by the courts. They are clearly failing in their purpose by any practical definition. The patent office should be accountable if they grant a patent that a court later rules was invalid. The patent holder should be able to get all their fees back and sue for damages. While that hits tax payers, it'll bring the patent office some much needed scrutiny.

EsquireCats said:

Second to this Job's didn't really have a vision for the iPad after launch, for years it simply went into decline - it's been under Cook's leadership that the device has found it's own niche, the guy can clearly think further ahead than this own immediate desires.

I'm pretty sure Steve Jobs didn't have much of a vision for anything other than his own survival at the time the iPad was released. Tim Cook was interim CEO at that point and permanent CEO very shortly afterwards with Jobs stepping back to just be Chairman for the remaining months of his life. The stagnation you refer to happened under Cook.

What made Jobs such a revolutionary in tech was that he wasn't trying to guess what the market wanted. He made the product he wanted to use and made it the best way he could. We hear the same philosophy over and over from those from that era like Ive. We don't hear that so much any more. Jobs didn't try and fulfill the need you thought you had. He figured out what you and everyone else wanted because he wanted it too. And no one knew that that was what they really needed all along until Jobs and crew released. No one knew they needed a touch screen phone, or a table for that matter, until Jobs and his team made the phone and tablet that they themselves wanted to use.

It was actually because he focused on what he wanted, rather than try and guess the whims of the market like Gates was doing, that these innovations happened. Not in spite of it.