Woz Fears Stifling of Startups Due to Patent Wars 300
An anonymous reader writes "Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak says that Apple and other tech companies' patent hoarding could prevent entrepreneurs doing the same thing that he and Steve Jobs did in starting a computer company in a garage. Woz also says the jury is still out on Tim Cook as the right CEO to lead Apple forward after Steve Jobs."
He still gives Apple a bit of a break: "'Apple is the good guy on the block of all of them,' he says. 'It is creating so much and is so successful and it is not just following the formulas of other companies – [Apple is] totally establishing new markets that didn't exist.'"
Oh Please ... (Score:2, Informative)
Apple creates Airprint
Re:Oh Please ... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Oh Please ... (Score:4, Informative)
Erm, well except for the fact that Apple created AirPrint first (Sept 15, 2010), and THEN google released theirs (Jan 10, 2011). Silly facts always getting in the way of a good point.
Re:Oh Please ... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:What break? (Score:5, Informative)
Wait, so did Apple innovate or not? How did they get that (supposed) patent if someone else had done it before?
It is called acquisition. They purchased the company Fingerworks [wikipedia.org] for all their patents.
Woz and Jobs (Score:3, Informative)
Woz's always the geek, while Jobs the guy with street smarts
Re: [Apple is] totally establishing new markets th (Score:5, Informative)
Precisely.
Woz's biography (I don't remember which one it was, but it focused more on the early days leading up to the Apple II and Lisa and had Captain Crunch/Draper and Jobs' drug use and partying featured fairly prominently), as well as The Cuckoo's Egg (Cliff Stoll) and The Happy Hacker, were pivotal to my formative years as a technologist.
His statements here don't really make sense, within the context of the autobiography. It was written in the late 1980s or early 1990s, and I read it right around when OSX was making its emergence (it's not on Amazon, afaik), so it didn't have the color of the iRevolution (gag) to falsely tinge things sepia.
Frankly, I can't help but think that the statements in the biography I read were right: something crucial in Woz's brain burnt themselves out when he made the Apple II. He obviously is not paying attention to the changing
Apple hasn't done anything "first" or creative since they first released the iPhone. Yes, the iPhone was quite a jump over what existed at the time, and it was precisely in the direction that people wanted to go. However, it wasn't as capable as many devices on the market at the time in both computing capabilities and audio capabilities (and the i* products still aren't, in any way, better).
Apple software in particular is lacking innovation (since at least 2007). We have osX which is still lackluster at best at context switches (still, after over a decade with negligible improvement) and is removing functionality in leaps and bounds (using a butchered and buggy Microsoft stack for SMB/CIFS and butchering the cups project? seriously, is that what passes for innovation?). This butchery will only be surpassed by Windows 8 in recent memory. iOS is positively crippled compared to Android, with some of the most frustrating UI inconsistencies and shortcomings in capabilities (eg. map navigation which is rivaled by a 7 year old in-car Garmin; killing downloads if you switch to something else). iTunes is now a fractured by platform as well, with tablets not being able to re-download games and apps someone has already paid for on their phones. The hell?
The hardware in the workstations is, admittedly, nice: but aside from the incrementalism of the 1990s which ultimately failed them until they switched to x86, how are they distinguishing themselves today in this department? Bigger, brighter, and more expensive displays with "Thunderbolt" technology - a technology which Apple (and Intel, for whatever reason) have let completely languished for the year and a half that it's been out, turning what has absolutely awesome potential into a completely proprietary display interface which offers nothing but cost over HDMI (or for that matter, DVI, really). The lackluster nature of iOS has done the same with the iPhone and iPad: no true multiprocessing? No contextual use with peripheral emphasis? No WiDi or similar?
("But Caimlas, you asshole", I'm sure someone will say. "We have jiggapixel retina displays!" Yes; yes you do - you also pay for that with horrendous battery life, despite the meager 3.5" display on the phones.)
Sorry. Woz has lost the plot and is not paying attention. Apple has done some absolutely fantastic things since 2000. They've made great progress, pushing other companies to innovate and copy, and have shown even greater potential. And then, the innovation stopped: they started to be litigious bastards at almost precisely the same time.
I would personally love for Apple to come back as the company they were in 2005, when they were kicking ass and taking names. We'd see a lot of cool things happening. But since roughly the time of iTunes, there hasn't been much other than market daring with the iPad to come out of their company I'd consider even remotely 'innovative'. The more I have to deal with Apple products in a support role, the more I feel like they're not even giving their hardware software enough development attention to keep them running stable, with some serious engineering problems that make Windows-self-clobbering-via-antivirus seem benign.
Very disappointing statements from the Woz.
Re:What break? (Score:5, Informative)
Patents don't prevent you from using a technology, they prevent you from using a technology royalty free.
...unless the patent owner refuses to grant you a licence at any price, which is entirely within their rights.
for some patents, in some circumstances, when specified by government or courts, you can force a patent holder to grant licences, but otherwise it's entirely up to the patent holder whether they let you use 'their' technology and at what price.
Re:What break? (Score:5, Informative)
The only tablets I remember before the iPad were laptops with touchscreens.
There have been plenty of tablets before the iPad. Even Apple [wikipedia.org] had a model that predated the iPad.
A polished convergence of the touchscreen PDAs and cell phones, without a stylus.
So in other words quite original.
Not really. The convergence of PDA and phone had been done before, by Nokia in 1996, Microsoft in 2000 and Handspring (later Palm) in 2002. You could argue that it was the iPhone interface that made it so original, but if you compare the screenshots in the picture above you will see that it is not much different to what they had in the previous decade.
But it was sleek, slim, nice to use, and integrated with iTunes.
The wheel interface was definitely original, but iTunes didn't appear until the third generation iPod, two years later.
What market did Apple create, other than the App Store, again?
Basically all of the above plus iTunes.
Well, I'm not sure about the other things you mentioned, but you have to give credit to Apple about iTunes. While it wasn't the first download-music store, they had the weight to bully the labels into playing ball, with low prices and (eventually) DRM free tracks. The integration with their devices was great, although it was a step backwards not being able to just drag and drop your music files onto your computer without installing the iTunes software. I do miss that feature that I had with my $20 MP3 player!
Re:Different Business Model (Score:5, Informative)
That's why most startups don't do real business anymore: their model is to hype an idea and be bought up early, by a large corporation with its own protective patent portfolio.
Topical case in point: Facebook buys Instagram photo sharing network for $1bn [bbc.co.uk]. Instagram was launched in 2010, has 13 employees and has just been bought out at a minimum rate of around $30 million per employee per year. That's an astonishing yield and all without actually taking the business to the full term.
Re:What break? (Score:3, Informative)
But it was sleek, slim, nice to use, and integrated with iTunes.
The wheel interface was definitely original, but iTunes didn't appear until the third generation iPod, two years later.
iTunes was released before the iPod. I think you're a little confused between iTunes (the application) and iTunes Store (the online music store).
Re:And they will probably declare him a nut (Score:4, Informative)
Almost nobody copies patents. It's a common misconception, and is usually not even alleged in patent cases.
http://thepriorart.typepad.com/the_prior_art/2009/02/copying-in-patent-law.html [typepad.com]
"But Americans tend to believe that patent lawsuits are about copying—and they believe there's a whole lot of copying going on. These beliefs persist, even though most defendants aren't copying—and aren't even accused of copying—and often have never heard of the patent-holder or his alleged inventions."