Jobs Wanted To Destroy Android 988
hype7 writes "It's clear Steve Jobs didn't pull any punches from the interviews for his forthcoming biography. In the latest release from the book, hosted over at AP, 'Isaacson wrote that Jobs was livid in January 2010 when HTC introduced an Android phone that boasted many of the popular features of the iPhone. Apple sued, and Jobs told Isaacson in an expletive-laced rant that Google's actions amounted to "grand theft." ... "I'm going to destroy Android, because it's a stolen product. I'm willing to go thermonuclear war on this." ... In a subsequent meeting with Schmidt at a Palo Alto, Calif., cafe, Jobs told Schmidt that he wasn't interested in settling the lawsuit, the book says. "I don't want your money. If you offer me $5 billion, I won't want it. I've got plenty of money. I want you to stop using our ideas in Android, that's all I want." The meeting, Isaacson wrote, resolved nothing.'"
and what about xerox's stuff? (Score:5, Insightful)
Odd coming from someone who stole the GUI and the mouse from Xerox.
Re:and what about xerox's stuff? (Score:5, Insightful)
Odd coming from someone who stole the GUI and the mouse from Xerox.
This actually did amuse me. Apparently tapping icons on a phone screen isn't a natural progression from clicking icons on a computer screen, which as you point out Apple didn't come up with in the first place. It's something new and unique and magical that only they could have worked out, so now anybody else that does it has stolen their ideas.
Of course, he didn't specify which ideas had been stolen, but I struggle to think of anything that the iPhone does which isn't just using a Mac/Windows boiled down to a phone-sized device. I'm sure someone will point one out to me.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:and what about xerox's stuff? (Score:5, Insightful)
Have you ever used Windows 95? When you install software it leaves icons on a grid on the desktop.
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I'm pretty sure Windows 3.x did that.
Re:and what about xerox's stuff? (Score:5, Insightful)
I recently powered up my old GEM desktop from the atari ST. nice slow old 68000 cpu at a handful of mhz for clock. rows of icons came up. this system dates back to the early 80's.
the fact that anyone even thinks they can 'own' the concept of the rowcolumn widget is just insane in itself.
Re:and what about xerox's stuff? (Score:5, Informative)
From those of us that have used touchscreens for 20 years. Yes tapping an icon is the same as clickong on an icon. It's not revolutionary in any way.
I had the first Tablet PC, a Dauphin DTR-1 it ran windows 3.11 and acted just like a iPhone except for swipes and gestures.
Honestly, you think tapping an icon is revolutionary?
Re:and what about xerox's stuff? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:and what about xerox's stuff? (Score:5, Interesting)
Even outside the context of the copying of Xerox's ideas it's rediculous. Apart from it's UI the iPhone borrowed heavily in every other way from existing phones, or is Job's saying only UIs aren't allowed to have ideas that are a natural progression be utilised in other devices? Even assuming that's the case the iPhone's UI was hardly that groundbreaking, some Windows XP tablets had single click icons and an auto-hiding start bar enabled by default when I tried them as far back as 2003, so single pressing the Windows desktop icons worked in pretty much the same way. If anything the iPhone's standout was merely about polish on existing ideas, why should anyone see Android as any different?
Of course, the hypocrisy becomes even more galling when you consider iOS5 is full of features copied from Android.
People who genuinely care about contributing to society like Newton instead use quotes such as the classic "standing on the shoulders of giants" (or however you believe it was originally phrased). They don't have an easily dented ego, they just care about making things better whether improving existing things or coming up with new. This to me just reaffirms that Jobs was an arrogant selfish dick with no care for anything other than his own ego.
I don't know what the point in releasing these quotes is now though, I'm not one for painting an unrealistic angelic picture of someone just because they're dead, but I also understand that some people would rather any criticism of him at least waits a while until after he's dead. Were these quotes designed to rally anti-Android sentiment by Apple? or were they leaked as a counter to Steve's post-death saint like image painted by the media?
I suspect people will respond to these quotes based largely on their pre-defined thoughts about Steve anyway, but something strikes me as a little tasteless about digging into them right now, when Apple vs. Android and arguably Steve's death can still be considered current events. It strikes me as a rather misguided attempt to exploit his death one way or another.
Of course, the other possibility is it's merely about drumming up profits for whoever is publishing his autobiography, but there you have it I guess. Anyone know who is getting the profits for that now? As a somewhat related aside, anyone know what happened to Steve's fortunes? have they all just gone to his family, or did he finally do something charitable with his departing wishes?
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People who genuinely care about contributing to society like Newton instead use quotes such as the classic "standing on the shoulders of giants" (or however you believe it was originally phrased). They don't have an easily dented ego, they just care about making things better whether improving existing things or coming up with new. This to me just reaffirms that Jobs was an arrogant selfish dick with no care for anything other than his own ego.
Newton was just as petty and and seemed to have a *staggeringly* large ego, despite his famous quote you mention. You can get an idea of his craziness from his Wikipedia page [wikipedia.org], though to get a better idea just google around to see plenty of fun stories about Newton's interations with Leibnitz (Math), Hooke (Optics), and Flamsteed/Halley (Astronomy). I'm sure there are more I'm forgetting, too.
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It's actually very easy to conceive of good ideas. It is far far harder to navigate the IP/corporate controlled world and make any of those a reality.
Take GPS based alerts. Had that idea since the first week I had my iPhone 3G. Why did it take nearly 4 years for Apple to add the feature?
Numerous other ideas are merely obstructed by IP law. I've TRIED sharing ideas with companies but they are so afraid of lawsuits they won't even accept free ideas that would improve their products.
So frankly, no idea that's
Re:and what about xerox's stuff? (Score:4, Insightful)
It is precisely because of people like Steve Jobs and corporations like Apple that everyone is so scared to do anything new.
Fuck Steve, Fuck Apple, Fuck Steve, Fuck Microsoft, Fuck Darl, Fuck SCO, fuck them all.
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Re:and what about xerox's stuff? (Score:4, Interesting)
> Take GPS based alerts. Had that idea since the first week I had my iPhone 3G.
> Why did it take nearly 4 years for Apple to add the feature?
Actually, you can find old archived posts going all the way back to the first bluetooth-enabled PalmOS phones about using an external GPS paired to the phone to enable location-based alerts. I myself had a few threads around the same time about my idea of driving around with your phone and sniffing the relative strength of visible CDMA towers, then using it to build a personal database of waypoints for a similar purpose.
Apple innovated nothing besides maybe making things guys from XDA-developers.com were doing with hacked ROMs and custom extensions 5-10 years ago usable by people who couldn't tell you the difference between JPEG and pdf if you put a gun to their head and threatened to shoot if they couldn't identify at least one difference, no matter how trivial.
Part of the reason why there's so much hate between Android fans and iPhone fans is due to Steve's determination that EVERYONE, not just clueless users, should be forced to do without features that couldn't be dumbed-down and uniformly offered to everyone in exactly the same way. Android allows you to tweak your phone to individual perfection. Apple makes sure a complete stranger can pick up your phone and figure out how to make a call, even if it limits what you can do to make the phone work the way YOU want it to work. After all, your individual preferences don't matter, because Steve Jobs was omniscient, and your dissatisfaction with His Work was merely due to your lack of enlightenment and understanding.
Re:and what about xerox's stuff? (Score:4, Informative)
Multitouch and pinch zoom predates the iphone with at least a decade. Apple bought a multi-touch specialist (FingerWorks) in 2005.
Touch frienldy UI? try two decades (IBM Simon)
Proximity sensors? Nokia 7650 in 1997-1998
Apple didn't "innovate" any of this stuff.
They polished old ideas and let their marketing department do the rest.
There was never anything *new* in the iphone.
Apple was/is good at chosing the right stuff to polish and combine, and have a kick ass marketing department.
Strange you should mention proximity sensors.... (Score:3)
In a far off, seldom visited corner of my companies campus is a wall of patents granted over the years. A few weeks ago I found myself browsing them and noticed one of them was for a proximity sensor on a phone. In this case it was designed to automatically switch the phone from normal mode to speaker phone depending on proximity but it doesn't take a genius to see other uses for this. It was granted in 1998. Apple "steals" from other companies just as much as they claim people steal from them.
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I don't think that you can use Android for more than 5 or 10 minutes and think that it's only a minor difference from Apple. The way it works, flows and notifies is substantially different. Maybe if you hit the apps menu and then only looked at that for hours on end, you could be mistaken for getting confused, but who does that?
Like I said above, Android builds on the foundations and nobody would pretend that it's not inspired by Apple's efforts. But to claim that it's only slavish copying kowtows to Apple'
Re:and what about xerox's stuff? (Score:5, Informative)
If by "stole" you mean "bought and used with permission" then yes, you are correct.
Steve Jobs and Bill Gates on stealing and piracy (Score:5, Interesting)
Steve Jobs:
"We have always been shameless about stealing great ideas."
"Good artists copy; great artists steal."
http://www.neowin.net/forum/topic/452150-bill-gates-isnt-too-bothered-by-piracy/ [neowin.net]
Bill Gates:
"It's easier for our software to compete with Linux when there's piracy than when there's not."
"Although about 3 million computers get sold every year in China, people don't pay for the software. Someday they will, though," Gates told an audience at the University of Washington. "And as long as they're going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They'll get sort of addicted, and then we'll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade."
Ariel Katz, a law professor at the University of Toronto and an expert on the economics of piracy:
"Microsoft benefits from piracy, then says, 'If you think prices are high, blame the Chinese, because they are the thieves,' "
"They like us to feel guilty — to think that piracy is wrong and immoral. Economically, it's not necessarily true, but it resonates with the public."
Re:and what about xerox's stuff? (Score:5, Insightful)
I hope that he worked this conflict out and achieved some semblance of nirvana prior to his death.
Re:and what about xerox's stuff? (Score:5, Funny)
Volatile personality, bald head and eager to "fucking kill google."
Are we talking about Apple or Microsoft?
Re:and what about xerox's stuff? (Score:4, Insightful)
That was my first thought. I want to know if he threw anything, or was excessively sweaty at the time.
But really, calling it a "stolen product?" I never thought he believed his own bullshit.
Re:and what about xerox's stuff? (Score:4, Informative)
Hey Apple, the kettle just called. He said "you're black."
Re:and what about xerox's stuff? (Score:4, Informative)
That is the least of it. This article about multi-touch [billbuxton.com] from Bill Buxton at Microsoft Research shows lots more. Things to note; Capacitive interfaces in 1985; touch based smart phone in 1992; Starfire the movie from 1992 (note hand drawn picture showing grid interface)
"Good Artists Borrow, Great Artists Steal" - Steve Jobs, 1996 - apparently stolen from Picasso
BTW; apparently there was a commercial deal between Xerox and Apple related to the WIMP interface; that becomes a contract issue rather than a theft issue.
Re:and what about xerox's stuff? (Score:4, Interesting)
Apple's Multitouch was invented by a company that Apple bought ... the original inventor who founded the company credits and acknowledges Bill Buxton in his Doctoral Thesis on Multi Touch ...
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I don't get why you'd need to use a movie as an example of icons in a grid interface.. pretty much any computer I've ever used has allowed you to sort the icons into a grid. Some allow you to move the icons arbitrarily after that, but I really hope they didn't manage to make the grid thing stick in court.. so crazy.
Not that I even think that's the best way to represent things. When dealing with large numbers of icons, I prefer a list view. The grid is okay on a desktop, but it's just annoying for browsing t
Re:and what about xerox's stuff? (Score:5, Insightful)
And Picasso stole it from T.S.Eliot.
"One of the surest tests [of the superiority or inferiority of a poet] is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different than that from which it is torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest."
Now that really does explain the difference between Apple and the "me too" competitors.
People did say Steve Jobs was an asshole (Score:5, Insightful)
But they were usually modded down quickly by Apple fanboys. Bill Gates is often evil figure in computing but it was a blessing that EVERYONE else, including Steve Jobs, screwed up completely and we our home computers became machines based on cloned hardware and even cloned software. Or what do you think Apples response would have been to either Compaq or DrDos? Oh wait we KNOW. Clone a Mac and get sued. Luckily IBM was asleep at the wheel and Compaq cloned the IBM and we all bought IBM compatibles at a fraction of the price. And because they were clones, they weren't locked down and some drunk Fin wrote an OS and the rest is history and the future.
None of this would have happened if Apple had won the race. Or if IBM had won the race. Or commodore or any of the others. Don't be fooled by the "nice" image of Apple or the "open" base of OSX. That happened because they were to small. Want to see what PC's would have looked like if Apple had produced them? Buy an iPhone. Expensive option is the only option and totally closed down.
Real history doesn't have heroes. If we are lucky it is a tale of the lesser of two evils having the upperhand. In this case it was Bill Gates. Who won't be remembered as a great man but just as not as totally evil if the people he defeated had won. It is sorta like how the world is better of for America having dominated for the last half century. Oh, not because the Americans are so nice but the world would have been a lot worse under Nazi/Japanese/British/USSR rule.
But hey, the punters who want their shinies got to believe that their guru is a hero else they might have to ask themselves why very expensive phones with a gigantic profit margin can't be produced in America or at least without near slave labor. Dennis Ritchie? Richard Stallman? Not sexy enough, to difficult with him asking troublesome questions.
So, the fanboys turn Jobs into a man he never was and put their fingers in their ears whenever someone dares to ask why he is considered such a hero.
Cue mod down by a fanboy.
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Nope. Cisco's trademark of the name iPhone had been lost through non-use. Cisco tried deception to claim they had still been using it. See the outrageously amateur mockup of a box with the word "iPhone" on a sticker outside the shrink-wrap.
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/burnette/cisco-lost-rights-to-iphone-trademark-last-year-experts-say/236 [zdnet.com]
Apple paid $1M in stock for PARC visit (Score:4, Informative)
Stop rehashing the same myth over and over. Jobs paid Xerox PARC $1M in pre-IPO Apple stock for the right to look over their technology [slashdot.org].
"So Jobs proposed a deal: he would allow Xerox to buy a hundred thousand shares of his company for a million dollars—its highly anticipated I.P.O. was just a year away—if parc would “open its kimono.” A lot of haggling ensued. Jobs was the fox, after all, and parc was the henhouse. What would he be allowed to see? What wouldn’t he be allowed to see? Some at parc thought that the whole idea was lunacy, but, in the end, Xerox went ahead with it."
Re:and what about xerox's stuff? (Score:5, Informative)
What's more pertient is that Apple didn't invent those things any more than Google did.
Jobs was a giant fake. Better at using the work of others than at coming up with a single thing on his own.
As I recall, there was this guy they called Woz who did most of the heavy lifting for Cult Of Steve Jobs.
Schimtt was on apple's board of directors (Score:4, Informative)
You sir are a dupe. The Macintosh and Lisa projects were well underway before Jobs Ever heard of the PARC XEROX project. You should google Jeff Raskin who created the mac and learn he was planning it well before 1979. Here's a bit of history:
http://www-sul.stanford.edu/mac/parc.html [stanford.edu]
the real issue here however is not that but rather, the fact the Schimtt was on apple's board of directors. This is why it is stealing not copying.
Re:and what about xerox's stuff? (Score:4, Insightful)
First off what they did was take this [hubpages.com] :
"At $16,000 for the Star workstation and an additional $50,000 to $100,000 for the complete system Xerox only sold about 25,000 units."
And turn it into first the $9,995 Lisa and then into the $2,495 mac. You think it's easy cramming $100.000 worth of technology into a $2,495 machine ? Those guys were friggin' geniuses. They may have gotten the general idea of which way computers were headed from Xerox (who by the way gave plenty of presentations to other companies before Apple and none of them recognized the value of what they saw there) and redeveloped and adapted this stuff for the puny home computers.
You can follow the whole development through a series of screenshots taken during coding here on flolklore.org [folklore.org]. To appreciate the complexity of the task think about how long it took Microsoft to catch up with Apple even after they were given Macs by Apple to develop their software on.
Second, Woz is a great guy and engineer but after the Apple 2 his time had passed. I loved the Amiga at the time who were doing sort of the same thing as Woz with clever designs based around custom chips, but that was a dead end. The company started with Woz' technical prowess but it would've died then and there without Job's intuition about where computing was going next : easy to use interfaces, nicely designed boxes and business savvy.
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Let's see what the people actually involved in the project [folklore.org] say :
"There's no doubt that Jef was the creator of the Macintosh project at Apple, and that his articulate vision of an exceptionally easy to use, low cost, high volume appliance computer got the ball rolling, and remained near the heart of the project long after Jef left the company. He also deserves ample credit for putting together the extraordinary initial team that created the computer, recruiting former student Bill Atkinson to Apple and then
Re:and what about xerox's stuff? (Score:5, Informative)
Where does this ahistorical gibberish come from? Xerox sued Apple in 1989 [nytimes.com], claiming that that Apple ''intentionally and purposefully concealed'' the derivation of the Lisa and Macintosh software from Xerox software and that Apple's copyrights were invalid. (Xerox's suit was barred for technical reasons of standing.)
Odd, given that the Mac "borrowed" so much (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Odd, given that the Mac "borrowed" so much (Score:5, Informative)
Apple did not steal from Xerox. Apple was already developing a GUI back in the late '70s.
The first GUI computer, the Xerox Alto, was designed in 1973, 2 whole years before Jobs & Wozniak started developing the Apple I, and 5 years before work started on the Lisa, Apple's first GUI computer.
Re:Odd, given that the Mac "borrowed" so much (Score:5, Informative)
Keep repeating a myth and people believe it. Apple did not steal from Xerox. Apple was already developing a GUI back in the late '70s.
And yet Xerox PARC [wikipedia.org] had it in '73. Wikipedia also has an interesting read on the history of GUI [wikipedia.org].
Myth - my old hairy ass. (Score:4, Informative)
Keep repeating a myth and people believe it. Apple did not steal from Xerox. Apple was already developing a GUI back in the late '70s.
Awe....aren't you cute. Can't deal with the truth about St. Jobs? Dude - dudedette, for those of us who were around back then, in the early '80s, Jobs himself admitted to seeing PARC's GUI and basing the whole Mac GUI on that.
At the time, Xerox was your typical complacent big corporation that had a R&D arm. And as such, they're managers were too short sighted to see the potential of their GUI OR felt that it was irrelevant to their business and therefore let it slide. Jobs saw the potential and ran with it.
BUT....unlike Google, Jobs didn't borrow/steal from a product being currently marketed - it was just a prototype in PARC's lab at the time and absolutely no indication from Xerox that they'd be using it. So, St. Jobs' reputation is still intact as the wizard of technology and marketing.
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> Keep repeating a myth
This wasn't any myth. This was the statements of a younger Steve Jobs.
Re:Odd, given that the Mac "borrowed" so much (Score:4, Informative)
How do we work this (Score:3, Interesting)
On one hand, yes, the features probably are largely stolen.
On the other hand, that’s kind of how technology evolves.
Locking down products and ideas to the person who originally introduced them doesn’t work patents don’t work and I don’t think a free for all would either (copying something is always cheaper than development). So what is the solution here?
Re:How do we work this (Score:5, Informative)
What features were stolen?
Icons in a grid? Nokia phones had those for years.
On-screen keyboard? Palm had those since day dot.
Multipoint touch gestures? I remember seeing those in Minority Report
Re:How do we work this (Score:5, Funny)
Android preemptively copied the notification drop-down and that is outrageous!
Re:How do we work this (Score:4, Funny)
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Lets not forget voice commands, multitasking and copy and paste. Steve obviously did those long before android but held off on adding them to iOS so he could show it off at a press conference and charge more for the new model
Re:How do we work this (Score:5, Insightful)
Duh - Slab based multi touch phone (Score:3)
There were so many slab based finger gestured multi-touch phones with almost no buttons before the iphone. Really?
The ability to install applications without going through the carrier buy in was pretty novel too.
And Eric Schmidt was on the apple board, and at the iphone intro so google knew were this was going. If you look at andriod prototypes before the iphone, they are basically blackberrys.
One expects the ideas to be copied eventually, but not verbatim. I think Jobs was in the right to
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If I recall correctly, yes there was a slab-like device before the iPhone. Can't remember it's name though. Hopefully someone can help me here.
But in any case, the iPhone came largely because the technology to do a slab phone came of age. This had nothing to do with Apple; the technology (capacitive touch screens, multi-touch) was developed by various companies, such as Synaptics. The processors required for the iPhone were also first developed outside Apple. Even a couple of years before the iPhone la
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And Apple bought the company that first commercialized multi-touch gestures (Fingerworks), so they likely own the patents on that too.
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Re:How do we work this (Score:4, Informative)
Re:How do we work this (Score:4, Informative)
"Stolen" implies that a bunch of masked bandits from Google raided Apple's Cupertino HQ and pilfered the vault of all the valuable iPhone widgets and touch screens.
Spring-boarding off of the iPhone (and doing some things better) is what Android did. Jobs sounded like he didn't want competition from something that might lap his phone. Rather than innovate ("great artists steal"), he decided to throw down the lawsuit hammer (or at least try to), thereby making Apple nothing more than Microsoft or IBM with a hip wardrobe fetish.
Everything these days comes from previous innovations.... there are a few exceptions, but most of the time true progress comes from expanding or improving an existing product or idea. Jobs did that with the iPhone, but it seems he didn't want anyone else to do so... That's what's broken here. (And I do agree that patents need reform just as much as copyright.)
Re:How do we work this (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:How do we work this (Score:5, Interesting)
I think Steve's grudge was not just about the "copying" but about the betrayal story behind it. Google's CEO was part of Apple's board of directors. He was aware of what was going there, and he either lied to everyone at Apple about their phone OS plans, or went on their backs and told the Android team what was Apple's take and made them drop the BlackBerry race and go Touch.
Steve trusted Schmidt, just like he trusted Gates about MacOS, and he suffered the same fate (I do have to admit, for such a secretive man, he should had known better.) I guess the difference is now Apple having enough money to pursue infinite legal battles and a spice of leftover grude of the last time this happened.
Samsung's case is likely more specific, too. Samsung is a big manufacturer of iDevice parts and it's likely enthrusted with a lot of design information. There are supposed to be division walls that prevent this type of secret information from spreding into divisions that compete with client's interest, but witnesses in the current lawsuits have pointed at there being leaks on such walls. So thats another company they must feel betrayed by.
You may notice, despite the noise that went about when Palm Pre with WebOS was announced, there was no real legal battle there. I doubt it had much to do with Palms ability to use their patents to defend themselves and more with the fact that they had no presonal grudge there, just business interests.
It is easy for us to say how childish, and counter productive these lawsuits can be, but its hard to understand it without actually standing in their shoes. Try just to imagine a smaller case scenario of equal personal impact. Perhaps a co-worker stealing credit or stealing your job and being rewarded for it. A comic book artist creating a character or story to have a friend rip it off and publish it with small alterations. Heck, there was no lawsuit there, but look at the Babylon 5 vz Deep Space 9 issue. It still is possible to find remnants of Straczynski early 90s web and usenet rantings expressing his anger at the plagiarism.
When you are the victim of these idea thefts, it can be extremely upsetting. When it is done by a trusted business partner or friend, it can be insanely infuriating. It does not matter how good the competition is for the industry, or the alternatives for the consumers, your emotions will go highwire. The closest your relationship to the individual or entity in question the worse will be.
Dont take me worng, I am very sad for Job's passing, but with him gone I predict the current cases may keep going for the next couple of years, but in about 2 years, maybe just 1, we will start seeing settlements and a reduction of said cases. The momentum will be carried for at least a year or two, but after that, I take it we will see more willingness to do settlements. Not saying lawsuits are going to stop. Just as Microsoft protects their "business interest" and patents, Apple will likely be the same way, they will just not try to be as destructive about it.
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Problem with fashion is the name means more than the look itself.
Even if someone made a $10 knock off that was absolutely identical to 's design.. people would spend the $$ on the origional because it's an authentic .
Tech doesn't have that kind of name recognition. Ok.. maybe apple does.. but if someone built a feature for feature, damn near exact clone of the iphone and started selling it for $50 .. you'd see apple losing some business.
Re:How do we work this (Score:4, Insightful)
Trouble yourself to understand why this is. If you don't have proprietary lock-in/ownership of killer app, all you have to trade on is the quality of your manufacturing work.
That is what fashion labels offer. My wife likes to buy and sell these designer purses online. Fake ones are looked on very differently, because the quality of manufacture just isn't the same.
If software companies were banking on the quality of their finished product rather than the patented features of their sloppy-ass third-rate implementation of protected intellectual property, don't you think the IT industry would have a much better reputation? As it is people find computers relentlessly buggy and difficult to use, EVEN THE DAMN IPHONE. Maybe if quality was the #1 job, instead of 'safely-protected revenue stream,' our nation's economy wouldn't be such a horrorshow, either.
After all, for the last 20 years at least, it seems that American businesses value being first (and alone) in line to capture a revenue stream, rather than being the best product on the market.
It's no wonder our economy sucks.
Re:How do we work this (Score:5, Insightful)
overpriced Apple smart-phones, tablets and MP3 players
I think the other phone, tablet & MP3 manufacturers would disagree with this. They don't seem to be able to compete on price without a subsidy.
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Good for the goose. (Score:3)
Can't make a phone, AAPL thought of it first?
Like the GUI and everything else, and Disney invented Snow White. It's all bullshit.
Re:Good for the goose. (Score:4, Interesting)
Can't make a phone, AAPL thought of it first?
Like the GUI and everything else, and Disney invented Snow White. It's all bullshit.
Yep. HTC were making Windows CE-based phones years before the iPhone was released. And then there were the Palm-based phones, which I think predated even those. Both of those systems had similar features to iPhones before iPhones were released.
But, hey, who ever let reality get in the way of PR?
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Yep. HTC were making Windows CE-based phones years before the iPhone was released. And then there were the Palm-based phones, which I think predated even those.
The PDAphone is eleven years old [cnet.com], approximately.
Karma? (Score:3, Funny)
The Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field Killed Him (Score:5, Insightful)
"I've asked [Jobs why he didn't get an operation then] and he said, "I didn't want my body to be opened...I didn't want to be violated in that way," Isaacson recalls. So he waited nine months, while his wife and others urged him to do it, before getting the operation, reveals Isaacson. Asked by Kroft how such an intelligent man could make such a seemingly stupid decision, Isaacson replies, "I think that he kind of felt that if you ignore something, if you don't want something to exist, you can have magical thinking...we talked about this a lot," he tells Kroft. "He wanted to talk about it, how he regretted it....I think he felt he should have been operated on sooner."
Which means that the Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field ultimately claimed the life of it's creator.
re steve (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm going to fucking kill Google. I've done it before and I will do it again.
-Steve...Jobs?
So Apple has come full circle with the 1984 ad. (Score:5, Insightful)
As much as he wanted to destroy Android, it sounds like Steve Jobs became the guy on the telescreen in their 1984 commercial.
(Design) Purification Directive?
The lawsuits are ridiculous but... (Score:3, Informative)
Don't forget what Android looked like pre-iPhone [andrewwarner.com]
If Android had launched like that, the iPhone would've destroyed it. Yes, phones before the iPhone had capacitive touch, but no one was doing multitouch. Or at least, not on a wide scale like Apple did.
Re:The lawsuits are ridiculous but... (Score:5, Insightful)
Because multitouch was not at that point cheap enough to manufacture.
Apple had the manufacturing power to bring it down to a certain price (and they'd honed that on the iPod Touch). But even they couldn't bring it down to the kind of price normal people would pay.
Fortunately for Apple, they don't need to bring prices down to "normal people" levels -- they have a following of wealthy aficionados who will pay premium prices.
Re:The lawsuits are ridiculous but... (Score:5, Informative)
1. Ideas develop simultaneously.
or
2. Apple stole the LG Prada designs.
Either way, it proves your point is full of crap.
I'm sorry that you're upset that Android it better, but please you're just embarrassing yourself here.
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You are wasting your time. Apple zealots lie to themselves about everything tech related. They simply cannot comprehend the fact Apple basically rip off everyone else, and make a shinier product with exceptional marketing.
Apple still aren't paying for wireless patents, something pretty critical to cellular technology, their OS was taken from a free UNIX clone, the touch screens have been around since the 90s, coverflow was taken from an open source media player on the Nokia N700, portable music devices have
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> but no one was doing multitouch.
That was mainly because touchscreen controllers historically exposed only a single X and Y location to applications, and made their own internal decisions about how to handle multiple simultaneous rows & columns. Plenty of people realized 5-10 years ago that even "simultaneous" touches would involve one finger making contact a fraction of a millisecond before the other(s), and that you could intelligently make certain rectangular assumptions by simply noting which ro
It shows the basic philosophy of followers (Score:3)
RIM did some great stuff in its day, and for that reason was wildly successful. Everybody was trying to copy RIM -- even Android looked to RIM for what to copy (not look to for inspiration for new directions, but simply copy).
But Apple didn't go that way, decided full touch with no keyboard was the way to go for a smart phone. Apple was wildly successful, thus everybody wanted to copy Apple, including Google, which changed Android's direction.
Kindergarten (Score:5, Insightful)
No, it's not your idea. It's everybody's idea.
Standing on the shoulders of giants - where there is room for everyone - people decided to knock everybody down to the ground who dares to scale them, because they think that only they are entitled to make use of the work of earlier generations.
The opposite of a developing country, is a stagnating country. And stagnation is what we are seeing.
Re:Kindergarten (Score:5, Insightful)
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Jobs accuses everyone of theft. He did it with MS and he did it with Google. Shame he was such an IP and patent fascist.
He was your typical American CEO. He's all take, mine-mine-mine, and fuck you. The fact that the base of all his OS's are built on open principles and open source doesn't matter to him. He's allowed to take and he's allowed to own ideas like sorting with a linked list, but no one else.
And the consumer wins! (Score:5, Insightful)
A slightly unrelated topic... (Score:5, Interesting)
The book delves into Jobs' decision to delay surgery for nine months after learning in October 2003 that he had a neuroendocrine tumor — a relatively rare type of pancreatic cancer that normally grows more slowly and is therefore more treatable. Instead, he tried a vegan diet, acupuncture, herbal remedies and other treatments he found online, and even consulted a psychic.
He seems to be a poster child for alternative medicine.
Exactly how not to treat a perfectly treatable cancer.
If, the author is telling the truth. Whilst I'm not Mr Jobs' biggest fan, I do have to take this source with a huge grain of salt given it was published after his death. OTOH, it would fit with Mr Jobs' narcissism to have a scathing biography ready-written for his demise.
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This cancer is not "perfectly treatable". It grows slowly, yes, but it has a habit of invisibly metastizing, recurring and finally killing people.
And Jobs seemed to have waited with surgery only until it was clear that the tumour wouldn't shrink. He then had surgery, radiation treatment, liver transplantation and everything scientific medicine could do for him.
If you look at the surgery he had you will see that this is the most drastic rearrangement of your anatonomy that is routinely done during cancer tre
Re:A slightly unrelated topic... (Score:5, Insightful)
>This cancer is not "perfectly treatable".
Except this particular cancer was relatively easily treatable with surgery.
>And Jobs seemed to have waited with surgery only until it was clear that the tumour wouldn't shrink.
How was it going to shrink exactly? The homeopathic bullshit he was engaged in wasn't going to do anything anyway. He signed his own death warrant.
>But yes, maybe he would have lived longer if he hadn't waited. Maybe not.
All facts point to yes, he would have. Oh well, that's his decision. I can't stop people from killing themselves, but we can at least use him as a cautionary tale for those who are entranced by woo medicine.
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Re:A slightly unrelated topic... (Score:5, Insightful)
But I definitely understand his perspective that he could beat the cancer. Imagine his ego (and I really am trying not to sound insulting), but this is a man with his own distortion field who was very successful in his chosen field. I've heard similar stories about NFL players; because of the all the work and strong sense of self importance must have to be so dedicated to compete at the highest level, to a degree you think you're invincible. "That career ending injury was terrible for that other guy; but that couldn't happen to me."
A man that believed he could put a dent in the universe probably believed he could beat cancer on his own. I know if I get cancer I'm doing exactly what the doctor tells me, but that's also probably why I'm not the head of a multi-billion dollar company either.
reality distortion Re:A slightly unrelated topic.. (Score:4, Interesting)
I know if I get cancer I'm doing exactly what the doctor tells me, but that's also probably why I'm not the head of a multi-billion dollar company either.
The veneer of certainty that conventional doctors present can certainly comforting, but is - in its own way - a kind of reality distortion field.
Be careful about doing exactly what any single doctor tells you - research, be informed, get 2nd opinions, all that time consuming stuff.
For example, I've read about thyroid issues where the plan is to nuke it (literally, with radioactive iodine) to kill off the thyroid tissue. I would save that for like Plan Q, maybe - after plan A, B, C etc... didn't work out.
(if I can believe what they wrote about Jobs delaying treatment, that is simply regrettable wishful thinking - then again, I didn't know that a subset of pancreatic cancer was actually survivable - I thought it was pretty much a fatal, quick and unpleasant end).
Anyway, thankfully I haven't had to deal with cancer issues in my family... but I would research the hell out anything that did turn up.
To some SJ was like a god (Score:3, Insightful)
and to some he was like a devil.
In reality he was just successful. But then this is more than most slashdotters will ever be.
Come on guys, if you don't like fanbois don't turn into anti-fanbois. It's just the other side of the same coin. Quasi-religious hate and spite is in no way different than quasi-religious fanboidom. It's irrational, emotional and makes you look incredibly silly.
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Worshiping success at all costs is far worse than any sort of fanboism.
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Such a hypocrit (Score:5, Insightful)
It's been more than 3 days...... (Score:5, Funny)
Why hasn't Steve rolled away the stone?
Pope of Apple wants to kill heretics, shock! (Score:5, Insightful)
The ONLY thing Apple has ever done is push the trend towards good graphics. They didn't invent anything, just showed that it could be done well, and that people liked it. the Mac did this, producing a mass-market GUI with reasonably consistent UI rules. the Next basically pushed the resolution and depth of the display, demonstrating the advantage of both. the iPod/iPhone showed that even small displays could use the same basic metaphors with touch.
None of these took place in a vacuum; all of them were extrapolations of work others had done. part of Job's big sell is to convince Appleheads that they were the chosen people, that they had just just a superior product, but a product in a unique category.
Of course Jobs wanted to kill Android - its existence violates the ridiculous marketing mystique he spent billions to create. It's a religious war.
It's also totally immoral. There's simply no way to defend one company saying "no, you must not create good products". And since nothing Apple created came from nowhere, there is no legal basis for claiming some kind of IP monopoly (patent, copyright, trademark, designmark).
Jobs was the Pope of the Church of Apple, and he must have been just as frustrated as Catholic popes were during the reformation.
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The ONLY thing Apple has ever done is push the trend towards good graphics.
No, they've done quite a bit more. They pushed an end product that was well thought out and (mostly) finished. Not the slapped together Dell garbage with extra weird buttons on the keyboard that don't actually do something. (Mostly) adhered to human interface guidelines.
Apple has really raised the bar in terms of people's expectations of how high tech things work. That is the one striking thing that other manufacturers don't get. They think they can take a tablet, slap some sort of GUI on it, make some
Is that right? (Score:5, Insightful)
Android might have "ripped [them] off wholesale," but the truth is that Android delivers a great smartphone OS to everyone instead of everyone that can save enough for an iPhone with its special data/voice plan. Did they really expect OEMs to do like RIM and just sit there while Apple designs and builds awesome hardware from the same factories they use?
Plus, Apple's products are amazing until you start "thinking different." Then you run into HUGE walls. Example: In Android, I can install an application that controls battery usage by controlling all interfaces on the phone. This seems to be impossible on the iPhone, which is bad because there are days when it will use most of the battery in less than half a day and others in about two days. Another example is adding a Windows print queue on OS X, though this might have been made easier with Lion. I'm not sure.
His frustrations are thinly warranted, though I do agree that most of Google's products are either crappy or great for two months after release. It would be great if they made APIs along with their products, but I suppose that's not the Google way.
As someone once said... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm sorry he's dead but I'm not sorry he's gone.
You're kidding yourself if you think otherwise. (Score:3, Informative)
Speaking NOT as a fanboy, but as a gadget fan:
In hindsight, it's easy to say the iPhone is just another smartphone, but at the time it was introduced, it was nothing like any phone that came before it. Yes, its individual features -- touch screen, icons, internal antenna, multitouch UI, etc., all existed -- but until the iPhone came along, they had not been put together quite like this before (To use the hackneyed "car" metaphor: wheels, internal combustion engines and axles predate the automobile, but this doesn't mean the car was nothing new when it came along).
Just look at marketing materials from the major carriers in 2006 -- flip phones and candy bars were the typical (practically only) form factors available before the iPhone was revealed in January 2007. It took very little time for all that to change, but when it comes right down to it -- there was nothing akin to the modern smartphone before the iPhone.
It's pretty silly to suggest today's wide array of multi-touch handheld computers have nothing to do with its design and success.
You're kidding yourself if you think so. (Score:3)
So it seems to me either that Apple stole the idea and polished it up, or as has often the case in history, technology was headed in a certain direction and several people ca
Android users are not Google's customers (Score:3)
Google users be they on Android or when you use gmail, google search etc... are not seen by Google as their customers. You are seen by Google as their product which they sell the advertisers. The "free" services they provide you is like feed to a cattle which is why Eric Schmitt has so little respect for privacy of users of google services. If you are fine with being viewed as cattle and fine with having to upgrade your handset to get the latest release let alone a specific feature then stick with Android if you want.
For all of the "faults" that some of you would see concerning Apple's behaviour, they are a customer/consumer focused company. The average consumer is who they see to be their customer and they are interested in selling products and services to those customers.
Despite all of the grousing about siri being only an iPhone 4S feature, look at the comparison of the iPhone 3GS getting almost all of the features of iOS 5 despite having been released over two years ago originally and iOS 5 even brought features from iOS 4 that were previously iPhone 4 exclusive to the 3GS like custom alert tones. Given that they rolled out that feature on the 3GS, I would guess that iOS 6 will bring Siri to the iPhone 4 when the iPhone 5 comes out.
Show me a single Android handset that was released even 6 months ago that is user upgradable to the latest Android version without any rooting or other hacks regardless of your carrier.
Android handsets are cheap and disposable and because of this, they want you to continue buying new versions and that is why they will not offer updates to firmware for anything but the latest model (if even that). This all stems back to the fact that they don't see you as their customer. They see you as a channel for advertising revenue.
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> Nothing on Android looks or works quite right. ...in other words you're just used to how Apple decided to do things and can't cope with anything else.
"but but Android is a copy of Apple really it is. Never mind the fact that it isn't really."
Some of us like that fact (that Android isn't really a clone of PhoneOS). Makes working with our phones nicer and much less of a bother. ...as far as "programmer art" goes. Android runs much of the same programs as the iPhone does and they're written by the same pe
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Re:Control Freak (Score:5, Insightful)
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It's funny how people who seem to be extremely motivated and successful get labeled as an "asshole". It's been said of Albert Einstein, Thomas Edison, James Cameron, Frank LLoyd Wright, Henry Ford, Charles Lindberg, etc. The list is really quite large.
Makes you wonder who is labeling these guys assholes? Perhaps it's all of the idiot people that work around them.