101–110 of 138 posts
The article goes a great length to mention other companies' and persons' accomplishments in the field, all the while completely ignoring Apple's research on it since the 80s. They get to the point themselves: Indeed, what made the iPhone such a great product was precisely that Apple drew together a number of innovations already developed separately—touchscreen phones, capacitive touchscreens, sophisticated multitouch…
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If the resulting synthesis is something new, why wouldn't we want to protect it legally? To make a literary analogy, any book written in an established genre necessarily synthesizes work that went before it… are these new works less worthy of legal protection because the ideas and tropes (and in the case of works synthesized from the Commons characters, setting, etc.) are things we've already seen? In the technology…
So... imagine if the first company to synthesize a laptop got the eternal monopoly? Or the first company to synthesize a flatscreen?
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If the resulting synthesis is something new, why wouldn't we want to protect it legally? To make a literary analogy, any book written in an established genre necessarily synthesizes work that went before it… are these new works less worthy of legal protection because the ideas and tropes (and in the case of works synthesized from the Commons characters, setting, etc.) are things we've already seen? In the technology…
The book written establishes a copyright, not a patent. Bringing this back to technology with an example: Palm synthesized the smart phone and color LCD screen in ~2004. I'm pretty glad all smartphones have color screens today.
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If the resulting synthesis is something new, why wouldn't we want to protect it legally? To make a literary analogy, any book written in an established genre necessarily synthesizes work that went before it… are these new works less worthy of legal protection because the ideas and tropes (and in the case of works synthesized from the Commons characters, setting, etc.) are things we've already seen? In the technology…
aren't the useful arts strengthened by legal protection in exchange for continued disclosure of innovation No, they're not, at least not in software. Nobody reads software patents, for two reasons. First, the majority are either non-novel or written in a way that they are not useful to others. Second, by reading patents you increase the damages in a possible infringement suit since at that point you knowingly infring…
This conversation should have ended years ago... Are people really still bickering?
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> We're talking November 12 2007 iPhone was announced January 2007 and released June 2007. That's hardly pre-iPhone.
And I think the real point of contention was that Eric Schmidt was a member of the Apple board starting a year before that and as such had seen early iPhone prototypes. That in particular is what Jobs was angry about.
Steve Jobs must have really sold the board on the viability of next-gen smart phones: "guys - our work on iPods shows us we are just about at the point where almost-PC-class processors, RAM, and hard drives can be crammed into a mobile-phone sized package, without wiping out the battery in 12 hours. You know what will happen next?"
If that was the reason Google put so much effort into Android, then Google effectively stole Apple's strategy. Sure, some random Googlers would have thought of it, but it may not have been sold as well at the top level. Remember, Steve Jobs was an unbelievably good strategy salesman.
It's inevitable then that Android would follow the market leader - that's what products do.
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Nobody was making products that resembled the iPhone before Apple Years before the iPhone I was carrying around an iPaq. Now it isn't quite the same, most notably because the original device didn't even function as a phone. Yet I would argue that the phone part of smartphone is by far the least important part (and the only reason it is so prevalent is that carrier subsidization allows people to stomach $700 iPhones).…
Apple stepped in at the perfect confluence of technologies and made the iPaq v2.0. And isn't the iPaq v1.0 just the Newton v2.0?
If you focus only on the single feature that is multi-touch, sure, but it's the entire package that likely pissed Jobs off. Pre-iPhone, Android's demo phones looked like a BlackBerry clone: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Android_mobile_phone_platf...
> If you focus only on the single feature that is multi-touch, sure, but it's the entire package that likely pissed Jobs off. The "entire package" of Android included a huge number of features that the iPhone did not, many of which later got incorporated into iOS. > Pre-iPhone, Android's demo phones looked like a BlackBerry clone As I understand it they had full screen touch-based prototypes as well. They were experi…
wrong.
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I think Apple can rightly be credited with making smartphones and tablets mainstream. Smartphones and tablets were niches before the iPhone. Microsoft had tried for years pushing Windows Tablet Edition, but it only became a niche. Do you think that was only because those devices lacked a capacitive touchscreen? If so, then why did every other company have to scratch their mobile platform after the iPhone came along?…
No one would deny the incredible commercial success of Apple: It has changed the industry. Few would argue against the notion that Apple brought a fit and finish and UI model that completely changed the baseline of the industry as well, significantly raising the bar. The Apple quality tide lifted all boats, though some are still trying to bail out water and catch up. For those right choices Apple has yielded incredib…
History of their company in making such products automatically creates a media hype around the products. Its like so long as products are not very bad, they are always good. And assumed to be so! They have done a lot of work to make that happen and deserve it too.
Don't forget that iPhone and iPad got the push because iPod generation of devices did a very good job convincing common folks that handheld devices can be usable. Again apple needs to be credited for this.
Android can be told to have copied iPhone's trend. Not as a product.
As you said others have done a better job building ecosystem to ensure such an innovation happens.