Who Cares If Samsung Copied Apple? 544
hype7 writes "The Harvard Business Review is running an article that's questioning the very premise of the Apple v Samsung case. From the article: 'It isn't the first time Apple has been involved in a high-stakes "copying" court case. If you go back to the mid-1990s, there was their famous "look and feel" lawsuit against Microsoft. Apple's case there was eerily similar to the one they're running today: "we innovated in creating the graphical user interface; Microsoft copied us; if our competitors simply copy us, it's impossible for us to keep innovating." Apple ended up losing the case. But it's what happened next that's really fascinating. Apple didn't stop innovating at all.'"
Patent System Broken (Score:5, Insightful)
Obviously the patent squabbles in these cases are ridiculous - the only reason we have functioning high-tech industry in the US is that most companies are not like Apple, and do not use patents offernsively.
It's a good time to review the reasons why, for example, software patents do not work, and can never be made to work:
http://en.swpat.org/wiki/Why_abolish_software_patents [swpat.org]
Apple Did stop Innovating. (Score:5, Insightful)
This isn't true. Apple DID stop innovating. You missed the section of time where Apple was minutes from bankrupt before Jobs came back with a load of money.
Re:What Innovfation? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Patent System Broken (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It's a blood feud (Score:5, Insightful)
So, apple "steals" from open source...
How can you steal from open source? Especially when they give back an enormous amount of development to the open source movement (such as http://www.apple.com/opensource/ ).
But, hey, why let facts and logic get in the way of a good ol' Apple bashing, right?...
Turn the argument around. (Score:5, Insightful)
Having other people copy your designs doesn't mean you can't innovate anymore. On the contrary: by innovating you will stay ahead of the pack.
Also, copies always mean the copier is playing catch-up. They always have to wait and see what you've done, before they can try to do the same. By innovating you will keep the advantage, having everybody copy your work just means you have to innovate even harder and faster. That's tough of course, much easier to stop the rest from picking up your innovative ideas.
Fair point (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:It isn't very easy to tell an original from a c (Score:5, Insightful)
Not all copies are inferior. Japan got huge in the 80s/90s by "copying and improving". And they were not the first that did this; it's how UK lost out to mainland Europe in the later stages of the industrial revolution: they were the first to industrialise, but the continent copied there methods and products, and improved on them.
China is currently very much in the copy phase, sooner or later they will also start to innovate themselves (some Chinese companies already do that), followed by a time in which the establised companies will be out-innovated. It may take a while, the Chinese don't seem to be very fast in picking up the innovation part, but if the world's history is anything to go by, sooner or later they will.
Re:Yeah they did stop innovating (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, and other people stepped up to innovate. Apple doesn't have some magical innovation juice. They are just a company. If they want to get lazy, then talent will move elsewhere. You mentioned "multi-tasking", but that would have been something that required talented and competent engineers, not innovators. Innovation is something you come up with while half-drunk. Everyone understood how multi-tasking was supposed to work, it was just a matter of "making it work". Apple innovated in the same way that George Selden innovated(the patent holder to the automobile). He didn't exactly create the greatest car in the world, he just had the idea for a car. Henry Ford developed some of the greatest ideas in automotive history, but he did it all while violating Selden's patent.
Re:Yeah they did stop innovating (Score:5, Insightful)
After Apple lost the "Microsoft coppied our GUI" case, their desktop GUI remained unchanged for 10 years. System 7 through 9 were basically identical..... they couldn't even multitask properly (used cooperative multitasking which led to misbehaving programs refusing to give-up the CPU & freezing the system). Apple said they would stop innovating their GUI if competitors simply copied their ideas, and that's essentially what happened.
There are two premises in play here; one is that if Apple's IP is not protected that they would choose not to innovate (perhaps so that they can take their ball and go home) and the other is that if their IP is not protected that they are at a competitive financial disadvantage and can no longer innovate since there is no revenue coming in. In the past, it could be argued that Apple was indeed at disadvantage because they lost to Microsoft and therefore had poor sales revenue, and that is what stunted their innovation because they kept creating the same lousy desktop experience over and over. However at this point Apple has more than enough money to innovate to any degree imaginable, so any "missing innovation" would be due solely to their will to restrain themselves.
Apple and the GUI (Score:3, Insightful)
However extracting this out, does apple really invent anything? Siri is just voice analysis which isn't new or clever or even that hard, as I did music genre detection for my final project in University, so I can tell you it's pretty simple. Apple didn't invent the smart phone, they didn't create the tablet, they didn't create Unix which is what OS X is based on and they didn't invent the intel CPU they run. So what does Apple invent? Having a little bit of software for messages or screen locking or even a GUI layout is hardly inventing anything, I consider more a look and feel which personally I don't think should be protected I mean anyone could do the same thing, you don't have to be a leader in the computer field.
So I rest with what does Apple invent? Seems to me they take and sue but thats about it.
Re:Apple Did stop Innovating. (Score:1, Insightful)
You missed the section of time where Apple was minutes from bankrupt before Jobs came back with a load of money.
I certainly did. Care to cite some sources? I'll start you out with a direct link to Apple's quarterly filings [apple.com], and you can start supporting your facts from there.
Re:Samsung Must Be Made an Example (Score:5, Insightful)
Right, because Yugos eventually (and wrongly) leaked into the consumer mindset that ALL cars are shit.
Spare us the confused consumer nonsense Fanboi Wan.
Re:The Chinese... (Score:1, Insightful)
Parallels (Score:5, Insightful)
The parallels of current Apple to early 90s Apple are numerous.
- They were first widely used in multitouch and gui
- Their OS is more user-friendly
- Development and modification of their OS is more tightly controlled
- Crucially, they don't license their OS
- Steve Jobs isn't there to save them with brand-new product lines
So now, they're stuck with a market-leading position that is being slowly eroded by the open ARM + Android platform (Armdroid as the new Wintel?), and are being forced to fight on several fronts at once: hardware design, OS design, and developer loyalty.
The litigation strategy is just one more parallel, and it seems destined to fail.
Re:Yeah they did stop innovating (Score:3, Insightful)
After Apple lost the "Microsoft coppied our GUI" case, their desktop GUI remained unchanged for 10 years. System 7 through 9 were basically identical..... they couldn't even multitask properly (used cooperative multitasking which led to misbehaving programs refusing to give-up the CPU & freezing the system). Apple said they would stop innovating their GUI if competitors simply copied their ideas, and that's essentially what happened.
The GUI look-and-feel that has more-or-less been unchanged since MacOS System 1.0, even through OS X, is not a sign of lack-of-innovation. Rather it is part of the consistency that makes users happy.
The LAST thing users want is change in the look-and-feel of their computer's OS.
This is what Apple has always understood, and what Microsoft is about to (doubtfully) learn with Metro.
The instabilities of MacOS are greatly over reported. I have been using Macs since they were Lisas, and crashes of my Macs were always much less often than the Windows 3.1, 95 and 98 systems I administered and used as well.
And all the time you complain about "no innovation" as far as "stability" goes under MacOS (Classic), remember that a BSOD on a Windows system was every bit as catastrophic (entire system was taken down) as on Macs of the day, and it took MS until XP SP2 before they got their BSOD problem under control. By that time (what was that, like 2003 for XP SP2?), Apple was already shipping OS X 10.3 (Panther), which was 100% stable. In fact, I have used OS X since 10.0.0, and I have only had TWO Kernel Panics. One was in 2001, caused by a sketchy third-party scanner driver that was obviously playing around too deep in the Kernel; and the second was in 2005, when I purchased some incorrectly-spec'ed RAM.
I say it's pretty good when Kernel Panics are so infrequent that you can remember each of the system-wide OS failures in over a decade of use.
Re:The Chinese... (Score:5, Insightful)
You're kidding right ? The war in Afghanistan has taken 11+ years, and costing trillions, and you're saying China should be Afraid ? HAHAHAHAHAH !
Poor understanding of IP categories (Score:5, Insightful)
If you go back to the mid-1990s, there was their famous "look and feel" lawsuit against Microsoft. Apple's case there was eerily similar to the one they're running today: "we innovated in creating the graphical user interface; Microsoft copied us; if our competitors simply copy us, it's impossible for us to keep innovating." Apple ended up losing the case.
The Apple v. Microsoft case was on copyright, not patents. Specifically, the court ruled that:
Apple cannot get patent-like protection for the idea of a graphical user interface, or the idea of a desktop metaphor [under copyright law]...
and look-and-feel simply isn't covered there.
With that distinction and proper categorization in mind, the article misses a crucial difference between the 1990s and today: Apple made a significant push to protecting its designs with patents. The lack of such protection almost killed Apple in the 1990s, and its with that protection now that Apple is well on its way to being the largest company ever.
Welcome to the Pirate Party, James (Score:5, Insightful)
The Pirate Party here in Sweden been arguing just these points for a long time now. Innovation is not happening in a vacuum. Great ideas inspire others to come up with even greater ideas. By sharing the information and sharing the data others can look at it and improve it and the speed of research will increase.
The patent system is not something that foster innovation. Its is something that hinder innovation. Remove it
Also the billions of money going to patents trolls and feeding lawyers to hand patents could be instead used to invest in research to further the science of mankind.
Re:The Chinese... (Score:5, Insightful)
We (The United States) offer them the ability to keep their land and people under peace and not the premise of war. We (The United States) have the military strength to undermine another sovereign state's ability to maintain control of factories and production of said goods. This is what we offer to them and will do so until we cannot do so.
I wonder if that's true in modern times - if we declared war on China because we wanted control of their factories and suddenly lost access to Asian electronic component imports (even if other Asian countries remained friendly to the USA, China's military may prevent them from manufacturing or exporting any goods), would we be able to keep our war machine running? Do we have the capacity to make the semiconductors, resistors, capacitors, and build the circuit boards that we rely on for our "smart" military? Could that capacity be ramped up as quickly as we ramped up our industrial manufacturing capacity during WWII? A single chip fab can take billions of dollars and years to bring online - and probably relies on many foreign imports to make it run.
Re:The Chinese... (Score:5, Insightful)
No, he's not kidding and what2123 shouldn't be downmodded as a troll. Just because we aren't terribly successful at winning the hearts and minds of the Afghan people doesn't mean we do not have a formidable military presence in the rest of the world.
The wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan were totally stupid and failed to meet the vast majority of political and military objectives that were publicly stated. They do manage to show the world that we will spend untold trillions of dollars and tens of thousands of lives (both ours and everyone elses) on fairly stupid, limited goals. China well knows that if it really tried to piss us off it could be turned into a vast repository of active nuclides so they won't.
It's going to be much like the "Cold War" which really was a warm warm using proxies (like Afghanistan). Look at China's attempts at getting at Africa's mineral resources. If they get terribly successful at it, plan on various guerrilla groups and proxy governments to join the fray.
I personally don't think this strategy is economically viable nor particularly sane, but then again, nobody votes for me....
TED Talk on innovating without copyright (Score:5, Insightful)
... in this case for the fashion industry, but hey, it's interesting and relevant:
http://www.ted.com/talks/johanna_blakley_lessons_from_fashion_s_free_culture.html [ted.com]
Execution, not innovation (Score:5, Insightful)
Apple didn't invent the MP3 player, they just made it better than most others, and marketed the hell out of it.
Apple didn't invent high-end laptops, they just made them better than most others, and marketed the hell out of them.
Apple didn't invent the smartphone, they just made it better than most others, and marketed the hell out of it.
Apple didn't invent the tablet, they just made it better than the others, and marketed the hell out of it.
That's why they're so threatened by Samsung. Because Samsung is doing the same thing. Samsung didn't invent the "iPhone," they just made it better. Just like they didn't invent the "iPad," they just made it better too.
Re:The Chinese... (Score:5, Insightful)
It is totally naive to think that just because someone can look at your product, they can execute the production, distribution, and support for your product.
IP is not our primary resource. And if it is, we deserve to fail utterly.
Companies should be successful for building, selling, distributing, and supporting products. There isn't any reason to Tax the world for their willingness to compete just because we pass a law that says they have to.
Today there are nearly 200,000 patents on various aspects of smart phones. Maybe even more! If we gave every patent holder a penny, a cell phone would cost 2,000 dollars for IP alone.
Get over it. IP is important to some extent. But Apple's abuse of the system is unethical and shouldn't be tolerated.
Just like the USA. Ask Charles Dickens. (Score:3, Insightful)
Or, rather, check up the history of the USA and copyright/patents and especially Hollywood.
Re:The Chinese... (Score:5, Insightful)
I write this knowing full well that it will probably get modded down to -1 but this is exactly the sort of attitude that we (foreigners) see from US citizens which makes us look down on your country.
You (vocal, arrogant and naive representatives of the USA) post inflammatory things (like the above) acting like you are the worlds police (Team America... F*ck YEAH!) without even realising that Chinas intellectual property laws are quite different from the USA's and they are not beholden to your laws.
In reality it is only the AMERICAN company (in this case Samsung USA) who imports the product who is responsible for making sure the product complies with the local laws of the USA.
Regardless it would be quite interesting to see what happens if the USA ever did declare war on China... a little flash video from Albinoblacksheep springs to mind:- http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/flash/end [albinoblacksheep.com]
Re:Fair point (Score:5, Insightful)
And more importantly, if an "innovation" can be copied by a competitor in nearly no time, then it's probably not an innovation at all (e.g. rounded corners)
Re:It's a blood feud (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The Chinese... (Score:4, Insightful)
Even though we still have a dominant 1st-world military, and we're trying to act like self-justifying warpigs in some areas, when an "ally" of one of our former enemies (who still has enough nukes to glaze the world over a couple of times, at least), we're suddenly reluctant.
China seems to want to take the long view on things more often than not. They're in a spot where they can invest in infrastructure in Africa with a currently far less obligatory reciprocity required from its target countries. In return, those countries are far more welcome to the Chinese investments. The US and Europe these days are edging to the worst excesses of the first colonial days, focused only on short-term, maximized resource extraction rate (aka "profits"), regardless of what is left behind. Sure, China will approach that, but at least the countries have 20-50 years to realize this. China is also new, different, not a lot of history. European & American countries have 100-200 or more years of colonial exploitation history...
China is happy to let us ADD ourselves into the spider web or quicksand. Hopefully, again in the future, we here in the West can come together, to a point, and pull our collective heads out of our asses (WWII), but hopefully not because of an epic world condition.
In the words of Steve Jobs (Score:5, Insightful)
"We have always been shameless about stealing great ideas." - Jobs, interviewed in Triumph of the Nerds on PBS (1996)
"I'm going to destroy Android, because it's a stolen product. I'm willing to go thermonuclear war on this." - Jobs, as quoted in Walter Isaacson's biography (2011)
So it's OK if Apple do it, but not otherwise?
Re:The Chinese... (Score:5, Insightful)
The Chinese don't give a shit about copying anything.
No; The Chinese care very much. China began writing long after the Mesopotanians, however, because ancient Chinese texts were carefully and repeatedly copied, they have survived much longer than texts almost anywhere else in the world. This gives them a real claim to be the oldest culture in existence. The current Chinese trend to "respect intellectual property" is a sign of their current governments disregard for the good of their culture and pandering to corporate interests over those of the Chinese people.
Re:Turn the argument around. (Score:2, Insightful)
I do like the irony that you took the content of an article that says copying is good for innovation, and just copied it.
He improved on it. It was much easier for me to read his post than it was to read the article.
If only Apple could do half a good job as he did then I might actually consider getting an iPhone.
Re:The Chinese... (Score:2, Insightful)
The US and Europe
Do not try to drag us(Europe minus the UK) into the mess the US(and its puppet, the UK) is getting itself into !
Labor mobility (Score:2, Insightful)
That does however mean we need a lot less people, or a lot more welfare.
No, it means those people will do something else other than manufacturing. When this country was founded, something like 80% of the workforce was in agriculture. Now the number is something like 2%. You will note that the population did not shrink (quite the opposite in fact) and the country did not become a welfare state. There is much more to an economy than simply farming or manufacturing. Needing fewer people in those sectors means we can use the labor force productively elsewhere.
Re:Yeah they did stop innovating (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, and other people stepped up to innovate.
OK, you're going to need to qualify that statement. The Microsoft/Apple user interface case in question was decided in September 1994, and Steve Jobs returned in December 1996 and started pushing innovation in the UI again. So which companies exactly are you claiming "stepped up to innovate" between those dates as a result of Apple's stagnation in the UI?
In theory, there should be others to step in and innovate, but in practice that's simply not what happened. The most innovative UI feature introduced in that timeframe was the Windows Start Button. The only other thing I could think of would be BeOS, which had been in development since 1991, but they didn't suddenly "step up" because there was a void in '94.
Re:Execution, not innovation (Score:4, Insightful)
Samsung was not interested in making a better iPad or iPhone. They were interested in riding the wave of Apple's success, and hoping to score some cheap marketing by making their products nearly identical to Apple's.
Lets be honest here. (Score:5, Insightful)
You can only win a war when you don't pretend your not at war. By that I mean, we no longer fight wars to finish them, we fight wars with the hopes of exhausting the resources of the other side before we exhaust the support of our own people.
If we had fought Afghanistan like we fought the Germans in WW2 it would be a lot closer to over if not. When you do not break the population supporting the other side the other side itself will never break. As it stands now, those in Afghanistan have no reason to quit fighting, they haven't really lost anything they value and those who live there are not to the point where they would put a stop to those supposedly fighting for them
That's what I expected. (Score:0, Insightful)
http://www.wired.com/thisdayintech/2009/08/dayintech_0806/ [wired.com]
http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-comeback-story-2010-10?op=1 [businessinsider.com]
http://macdailynews.com/2009/04/14/steve_jobs_engineered_apples_resurrection/ [macdailynews.com]
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/the-return-19972011-10062011.html [businessweek.com]
http://news.cnet.com/2100-1001-202143.html [cnet.com]
I could go on forever on this one. It's very well documented that in 1997 Apple was extremely close to bankruptcy (some speculate days away) when Steve Jobs, then brought back to Apple as an "interim CEO", negotiated with Bill Gates to have Microsoft invest in Apple to the tune of $150M.
Thank you, that's exactly the only-reading-the-headlines garbage I was expecting you to come up with.
So let's look at the facts, shall we? I already linked you to Apple's quarterly filings.
The CNet article you cited in which Microsoft promised $150,000,000 was published August 6, 1997.
Apple's quarterly report Filed 08/11/97 for the Period Ending 06/27/97 [shareholder.com] showed that Apple had $1,018,000,000 on hand.
Look at those numbers again:
150,000,000 - Amount Apple got from MS
1,018,000,000 -- Amount Apple had sitting in the bank
The number on top is less than 15% of the number on the bottom. That's not rescuing a company from bankruptcy. That's a bad tip at a restaurant.
You may want to review this important lesson on honestly representing the difference between millions and billions [xkcd.com].
Of course, Steve Jobs' ego knew no bounds, and he loved to say that he single-handedly rescued Apple with Bill Gates' money. But that's just not true. The benefit Apple got from BillG's pocket change was that it satisfied Microsoft that Apple was no longer a threat, so that Apple could build itself up to where it was a threat.
Re:The Chinese... (Score:4, Insightful)
The war in Afghanistan has taken 11+ years...
Winning is not the objective. Perpetuating war is. Making this war one of America's most successful ever. And we have secured the poppy fields from the Taliban who damn near shut down the opium trade back in 2001. Just in case you're wondering why we are really there. The numbers speak for themselves.
No, it's making trillions for the financiers of this little adventure.
But neither of these should or will frighten China.
Re:The Chinese... (Score:5, Insightful)
That's because in Afghanistan, we're not fighting a war, we're fighting an insurgency. Big difference there (for a /.-friendly analogy, the difference between CP/M and RHEL).
A war would be two armies, fighting on relatively equal ground (within an order of magnitude of each other, at least). And it would be destructive as *hell* (there's almost no way a real war now would not go nuclear), and would end only with the near-complete destruction of one side's forces and economy. That's what the US military is designed for, and what a war with China would be. Remember Iraq? The proper war with Iraq's rather significant military, many of them veterans of a very long, bloody war with Iran, and armed with reasonably modern weapons? I'm sure you *don't* remember, because we cut through them like butter. We blasted them with not even the full might of our military (we held the nukes back, at least), and they literally could not surrender fast enough.
An insurgency is different. You don't win by killing all the enemy combatants, destroying all their materiel and wrecking their supply chain. After all, they can recruit more insurgents from the population, can arm themselves with locally-made or stolen small arms, and have no supply chain worth speaking of. No, you win this sort of war by "winning over" the people, by trying to minimize civilian casualties (instead of maximize enemy casualties), by building up civilian infrastructure (instead of destroying militarily-useful infrastructure). It's a war of politics and propaganda, not of armies and fleets.
And it is, unfortunately, something very difficult to win. In fact, I think it is essentially impossible for a democracy with any semblance of a free press to win, because all but one of the examples I can think of of "successfully ending an insurgency" were done by brutal massacres and the sort of things the Geneva Conventions were designed to stop. The sole counter-example I can think of is Ireland, and that was not a "victory" as much as it was "stalemate".
Re:It's a blood feud (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Labor mobility (Score:4, Insightful)
No, it means those people will do something else other than manufacturing.
Like what, being artists and/or bankers? Most service jobs today are being replaced by software or outsourced.
Profits and wages for a small group of people have risen astronomically, while the rest is in decline!
Re:The Chinese... (Score:3, Insightful)
China began writing long after the Mesopotanians, however, because ancient Chinese texts were carefully and repeatedly copied, they have survived much longer than texts almost anywhere else in the world. This gives them a real claim to be the oldest culture in existence.
Who cares about being "the oldest culture in existence"? What matters is where you're now, and it'd be pretty silly to excuse poor performance by saying, "well, but we did all those awesome things like 2000 years ago".
(naturally, this is not specific to Chinese at all)
Follow the chain down (Score:5, Insightful)
If you follow the supply chain down, you start to hit China pretty quickly: seamless steel tubing, castings, bushings, bearings, more and more seals... Problem is, they are relentlessly climbing up that supply chain to such an extent, that our 'manufacturers' become more 'assemblers' (such as the Google a/v widget). Caltrans is saving millions on a new bridge... by buying most of the subassembly weldments from China.
Just has already happened in the food industry, more and more weasel words and definitions are being applied to US 'manufacturing' to put more money in the pockets of corporations all the while waving their American flags (probably also made in China).
Gah (Score:5, Insightful)
Such as selling each other mobile phone contracts, or asking paper or plastic, or would we like to super-size those fries.
Re:The Chinese... (Score:5, Insightful)
And what kinds of messes do certain Continental European countries create? Germany, France and Switzerland are major arms exporters. Believe me, Europe causes its fair share of misery and woe, and on the scales of history, has caused more misery than war than any other bit of geography I can think of. No one needs to be lectured by Continental Europe on how to behave.
Re:The Chinese... (Score:4, Insightful)
Who cares about being "the oldest culture in existence"? What matters is where you're now
Where you are at now is a product of where you came from. It's not an accident that Sun Tzu [wikipedia.org] is still studied in West Point. Time is an excellent filter of value in ideas. It's much easier to accept his teaching if you believe that he's an important part of your culture and if you have direct access to the original texts. Still; there's one perfectly valid point in what you are saying. Many of these texts are translated and everyone can learn from Chinese culture.
Re:Manufacturing strawman (Score:5, Insightful)
Strawman argument. The US has a $3.7 TRILLION manufacturing sector and it is growing. Just in case that isn't clear, measured by value the US has manufactures more than any other country in the world by a wide margin. By itself the US manufacturing sector would be in top 5 economies in the world. The notion that "we don't manufacture anything anymore" is complete nonsense. The only change is that products with a high proportion of labor cost (labor intensive) are now manufactured where labor is cheaper. However a huge number of products have a low proportion of labor cost (capital intensive) and those are made here. We manufacture automobiles, airplanes, pharmaceuticals, agriculture products, chemicals, integrated circuits, and much much more. The death of US manufacturing has been greatly exaggerated.
The change in manufacturing in the US is that it is evolving somewhat like farming did 100 years ago - fewer workers as a percent of population but producing more. As a proportion of the population manufacturing jobs are going to continue to decrease for some time. That does not mean that the US will cease being a manufacturing powerhouse however.
This might be slightly OT but you make a good point and this is something that we, as a society, will have to deal with eventually.
At some point in the future there won't be a need for as much manual labor as we have now. Robots/machines will eventually take over most tasks - look at Foxconn buying a million (!) robots to start converting some assembly of electronics to robotic assembly. Look at what Musk is doing at Tesla and how the cars are made almost entirely by robots.
Either:
Work weeks will get shorter and some form of guaranteed income (or massive increases in minimum wage) will take place, thus having the average person work many fewer hours per week for the same or much higher pay than people get now for 40 hours of work. I don't see this as a bad thing - I suspect many (if not most) first-world people would be glad to continue their current lifestyle while working fewer hours - they'd get to spend more time with their family, pursuing hobbies (including spending money on them), etc.
Or:
Most people are going to end up poor and unemployed (leading to a vicious downward spiral where less consumer $$$ means less economic activity, further depressing the need for output, leading to people willing to work for scraps, further putting downward pressure on economies around the world, repeat until riot/revolution). We already have a massive glut of capital, running around shoving money at anything that smells like yield (the primary driver of the financial crisis - too much cheap money desperately looking for a place to invest, though certainly not the only driver). If all the resources continue to accumulate at the top then we may end up with a brutal police state that crushes most people while a few lords live in mansions, consuming luxury goods produced by robots solely for the rich. Prices for everything would skyrocket (despite the minimal cost of production) because the money is just changing hands between the various rich factory/resource owners.
Re:The Chinese... (Score:4, Insightful)
A war would be two armies, fighting on relatively equal ground (within an order of magnitude of each other, at least). And it would be destructive as *hell* (there's almost no way a real war now would not go nuclear), and would end only with the near-complete destruction of one side's forces and economy. That's what the US military is designed for, and what a war with China would be.
area of iraq : 438,317 km2
area of china : 9,640,821 km2 (about 20 times as much)
populations : 31 million and 1300 million. (about 40 times)
and china also has nukes.
I hope you're not really contemplating attacking China ?
Re:The Chinese... (Score:2, Insightful)
I hope you're not really contemplating attacking China ?
No, I'm not. I'm just saying that "oh, the US just lost two desert counter-insurgencies, they would absolutely suck at fighting a monolithic Soviet-style military" is like saying "oh, the Raspberry Pi can't run Crysis, it must be useless".
[achievement unlocked: made first RPi reference in a /. discussion]
Basically, there is no correlation between an army's performance in a counter-insurgency, and their performance in a total war.