Apple Never Invented Anything

Its an old idea to remove everything until just the essence is left. Apple succeed in identifying markets that was making over complex products.

The silly part is that complexity goes in cycles. New products need to differential themselves with old ones, so they add new features. After a while, you end up with a car stereo with 20 buttons, and suddenly a "new" competitor comes out with a clean design with just 3 buttons and the 20 button design looks ill-designed in comparison.

Stereos is one of the earlier examples, but you can see the same phenomena in web-design with today’s White and clean design vs the old dark and complex design.

I think the article is right in what it says but is wrong because of what it doesn't say. Apple succeeded where others had failed, and that is certainly commendable, but now we have a problem: Apple doesn't have a patent on "an iPad" meaning a device with all the individual characteristics that make an iPad an iPad and make it successful, instead they have individual patents on all the individual features.

But the individual features are the things that Apple didn't do. Yet that's what they sue over because that's how patent law is set up.

So now we see Samsung lose big in court and popular reaction is split, and here's why: People looking at the actual facts of the case are outraged that Apple could win that way because the actual grounds of the win had nothing to do with copying or Samsung's actions and everything to do with the fact that anyone with a million over-broad patents on obvious "inventions" and laws of nature and mathematics can win in court against anyone who produces a computing device, arguing that any actual copying on the part of Samsung is irrelevant. On the other hand, we have the people who look at the result and the fact that Samsung's devices do actually look entirely too much like Apple's and think Samsung got what was coming to them, ignoring that in order to do it Apple had to adopt a long list of bully tactics that they've now demonstrated that they or anyone else with a sufficient patent arsenal can successfully use against their competitors (including those whose devices aren't intentionally copied, because there are too many patents to possibly even attempt to avoid them all).

Nobody seems willing to say that Apple should potentially have some remedy against Samsung for actual copying but that what they got is the wrong remedy in the wrong way, not least which because the same tactics can be used against anyone whether they've done anything wrong or not.

I don't suppose you made it to the next paragraph where the author says:

> "By this myopic logic, Einstein didn’t invent the theory of relativity..."

i.e. he agrees with you.

I think this article makes some good points but overlooks the crucial question - what inventions are patentable? Like a great chef that combines known ingredients, apple has made excellent products, but apple has not produced new innovation that is worthy of patent protection. Apple's path to success should be winning customers, just like the chefs he describes, not through patent litigation.

The examples given by the OP actually support this point. It's true that Einstein didnt discover relativity first - both lorentz and poincare had worked out the mathematics, but Einstein articulated the concepts best. I often use this case study as an example of how innovations often arise independently from different inventors simultaneously because the conditions are right. The other famous and illustrative example is newton and leibniz inventing calculus independently.

As a VC, I see this all the time - the market conditions are right for a new idea, and suddenly 4 or 5 companies appear doing variations on the same thing, none aware of the others. Let good execution and the market decide which one is best, not the date on a patent filing for something each came up with on their own.

I do not fully agree with no-innovation comment. Many of their products, such as the iphone were indeed innovative.

I however, do agree with the latter that it has no footprint of its contributions. Research, and computing in general, builds on others work and in that sense apple comes as across as a douchebag - no white papers, publications or even blogs from employees. Only public documentation is usually served by an army of lawyers.

Until a year ago, they had steve jobs to justify this selfish behavior. And now there is no steve jobs and such behavior will create a huge PR hit for apple. Unless they can create a fantastic product record pre-jobs, it will be very hard. For example, the first feature sans jobs was Siri and it wasn't an universal success by any means. Good time to buy microsoft stock.