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.'"
And they will probably declare him a nut (Score:5, Insightful)
because it goes against the corporate way...
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Woz has long been the guy that people like us listen to, while the rest of the world worshiped at the altar of Jobs.
Not surprisingly, everyone else went with the cut-throat, they're all trying to get in my kool aid, kill them with our IP... no-matter-how ridiculous, business guy with a, "I'm going to annihilate them if it's the last thing I do" attitude.
Woz and Jobs (Score:3, Informative)
Woz's always the geek, while Jobs the guy with street smarts
Re:Woz and Jobs (Score:5, Insightful)
Street Smarts is a nice way of saying Snakeoil Salesman.
Re:And they will probably declare him a nut (Score:5, Insightful)
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."
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Nope. You left out the purpose and only included the method.
Patents are "to promote the progress of science and the useful arts."
The method the Constitution prescribes for accomplishing this purpose is "by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." But don't get those mixed up. The method is secondary to the purpose. That's important.
Patent Warchests - not just for the big fights (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course patent chests are there to stave off the attacks of other massive companies - heck, look at the Facebook response to Yahoo's patent attack - it snaps up a quick 800 patents and uses the new ones against yahoo in retalliation - but they are also used (probably much less noticably) to swat at the small flies that the big boys want to get rid of.
What better way to make some easy cash, when a start-up has a good idea, point out that your patents invariably make their product "infringe" then come out with their product under your own name - and possibly use your new patents to broker another settlement with some other big player in THEIR new emerging technology.
[Apple is] totally establishing new markets that (Score:5, Funny)
you bet. an entire industry of lawyer specializations!!!
'em rent seekers (Score:3)
The geeks innovate
The lawyers? Rent seeking
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.
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iPhone? a jump? the only thing it did "first" was capacitive touchscreen.
same goes for a lot of other tech and "markets". they didn't create application selling.
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Re: [Apple is] totally establishing new markets th (Score:4, Insightful)
Apple is innovating in the iDevices department, nobody can say the contrary. They own the market, everybody is rushing after them and so far, failing. However a tablet is purely a consumer device. What about the developer market, the enterprise, and the innovators that have made Apple possible ?
Here I do hear you, they are letting OS X go fallow. Mountain Lion is already a huge disappointment, as was Lion before it. Its cloud support is lackluster, the server parts are even more dreadful than before. OS X cannot really be recommended for developers on the desktop anymore. Think that the only halfway decent software RAID solution for OSX is the one coming from the abandoned port of ZFS all these years ago and picked up by enthusiasts. GCC is stuck at 4.2 and LLVM is not really progressing compared to the GCC behemoth. As far as I can tell, we are not sure Apple is going to ever upgrade the Mac Pro again. The list goes on.
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Troll.
Apple (both OSX and iOS) use amongst developers is growing not shrinking.
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Back in 2005, Apple was still "struggling" with the PowerPC platform. When did SMB/CIFS in OS X become a "butchered and buggy Microsoft stack"? It was based on the open source Samba stack until 10.6 and starting with 10.7, an Apple built system. Samba along with gcc were banished/limited from OS X due to GPLv3 more so then Apple's decisions.
As for iTunes... its a bloated mess nowadays. Its basically Apple's Outlook, a far cry from what Jobs called "The best damn Windows App Ever" in 2003. Its one of the man
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We have osX which is still lackluster at best at context switches (still, after over a decade with negligible improvement)...
You moan about MacOS X being "lacklustre at context switches", while I enjoy the ease with which Grand Central Dispatch and blocks allow me to create multithreaded applications.
Different Business Model (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Different Business Model (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Fantastic. So now it's not just the product that is complete vaporware, it's the entire business too.
Go figure that our legal system would be so damn broken as to literally change the entire purpose of a new business.
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:Different Business Model (Score:5, Insightful)
This deal is insane. The next Internet bubble is going to burst soon.
What break? (Score:5, Insightful)
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."
I'm not a huge Apple fan but that seems pretty much true to me. They weren't all 100% original (what is?) but iPod, iTunes, iPhone and iPad have pretty much all created new markets or massively expanded existing ones. I mean I can't remember seeing rows of tablets on sale at my local electronics store prior to the iPad but now every company and his dog seems to have a tablet product. In fact the only tablets I remember hearing about before the iPad were laptops with touchscreens and huge price tags slapped on."
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Apple hasn't created anything. Everything existed before. Apple excels at marketing. That's it. They use the same chipsets and the same technology as everybody else. It is so bloody frustrating. Then they get rewarded for removing features and making shit HARDER to use. Yet some how we again say "look out easy it is" when in reality the majority of people run into more problems and can't figure the damm thing out. Is it better than some of Microsoft's offering? Not really. It offers a slight improvement by
Re:What break? (Score:5, Insightful)
Apple finishes their products though (some use the term polish) unlike many other manufacturers. HTC/Samsung and the rest of the makers of smart phones and electronic gadgets have a tendency to rush things to market and just throw them out before they are complete. They are often not very well thought out and have major bugs and glitches or poor performance in comparison to Apple products.
Like my brand new Galaxy Nexus for example had a glitch where the sound would randomly go up and down, then they fixed that and now the phones connection is intermittently lost, to top it off the camera and speakers suck both hardware and software wise in comparison to the 4s iphone's. All that was needed was a little more time to iron out the bugs and add some polish, but typical big manufacturers just simply can't or choose not to do so.
While I dislike Apple's products due to the lack of options, such as a larger screen, removable battery etc.. you simply have to admit they spend an awful lot of time and care on their products to make sure they are polished and the major bugs are worked out.
Re:What break? (Score:5, Insightful)
The overall product is very finished. On top of that you get a nice UNIX system on the background and tons of apps that come with it. For example Automator and the system-wide services menu for your scripts make a HUGE difference.
And of course, there are also many commercial games available for the platform and now that Steam is too, there should just be more. Linux just cannot compete that. Even if you are a geek, OS X is a very good choice, as it's pretty much what Linux on desktop should be.
Re:What break? (Score:5, Insightful)
You haven't seen multi-touch trackpad in other systems because of... PATENTS!
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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.
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Re:What break? (Score:4, Insightful)
There have been many multi touch implementations, just because someone was the first to file doesn't mean they were first to think up the general concept. Hell any kindergartner that's given some finger paint is prior art for 'multi touch' as far as I'm concerned.
Most inventions feels "obvious" once you have used them, but before that you wouldnt think of them. And putting crayons on a paper is hardly the same as using hand gestures to control a computer. Don't get me wrong, I dislike software patents. I just dont think your example is very good.
To give you an example, back in 2006 I bought an iPod Movie. The ones that look like the original iPod. I loved it and it worked fine, I watched movies on intercontinental flights before there were inflight entertainment systems on my carrier. My only reservation was the limited screen size. So my idea was to put a bigger screen on the back of the device, hidden behind the metallic case. So you would control it with the scrollwheel and once the video was playing, you'd flip it and watch the screen on the rear side.
Now that every device has a touchscreen it seems so obvious to control your gadgets by touching the screen, but at that time it never ocurred to me. I just saw the obvious problem of not being able to fit the touch-scroll-wheel on the front without reducing the size of the display.
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.
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Even if you are a geek, OS X is a very good choice, as it's pretty much what Linux on desktop should be.
Nope, but thanks for your assessment.
There's one thing OS X is lacking which I require my system to be, and that's "usable". It's got BSD binaries for the UNIX subsystem, which is fine, but then it doesn't present them with a proper package management system: they're just 'there'. Granted, I can download something like DarwinPorts and install/compile packages for my system like I could in 1998 on PC-BSD, but that's somewhat missing the point.
And the GUI? It's anathema. Any self-respecting Unix person who pr
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I use my mouse extensively. I have focus-follows-mouse, and i use it to point at different terminals. For that, the mouse is great.
For actually doing work stuff, it sucks :-)
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Wait what? My shitty 350€ HP "netbook APU with a notebook form factor, but I can play startcraft for almost 3 hours on a 15 inch screen on battery" lappy has one. A very good one at that. As did every single other notebook I looked at when I was picking one for myself about two months ago.
Where on earth did you find a major brand laptop without a multitouch track/touchpad?
Re:What break? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What break? (Score:5, Interesting)
Like my brand new Galaxy Nexus for example had a glitch where the sound would randomly go up and down,
I wrote about this in my amazon.co.uk review, was instantly voted "not useful" by a lot of people. Other reviews mentioning shininess are of course "most useful".
Don't know if it's a legion of astroturfers, fanboys, or just other buyers who have a hard time admitting they made a bad purchase.
Re:What break? (Score:5, Interesting)
If you really waste your time writing reviews for Amazon for free, you've got nothing to do here pal. These things are nests of armies of paid-for "moms" and "dads" writing nice things for the products they're paid to write nice things for. Any second spent trying to "crowd-source" those reviews is a second of your life that you'll never recover. And it will benefit no one, except those reviews farms.
I know, I work for a big e-commerce website.
Re:What break? (Score:4, Interesting)
Or, on the PC/Laptop side, the systems are simply more reliable than a typical OOTB Windows 7 or Linux (my basis for comparison is Ubuntu) install. If you're unlucky (this depends highly on which vendor(s) you buy your hardware from, and the quality of the drivers they provide), you'll still run into the occasional bluescreen or things that simply break and require a reboot (yes, even on Ubuntu :p)...
Just in the last two years of Windows 7 use, I've seen a few bluescreens with EMU audio hardware, Realtek laptop NICs, and even a virtual network driver (AVM's Fritz!VPN application - that was a particularly nasty one, because the machine would hang on standby and then only bluescreen about half an hour later... very difficult to troubleshoot). Oh and don't even get me started on Intel's crappy video drivers... bug-infested crap (if it weren't for the higher power consumption and heat I'd switch to a laptop with discrete graphics just for the better drivers).
As far as I know (since I'm more or less a pure Windows user - can't get used to OSX for the life of me, nor do I want to - hell, maybe it's just a "grass is greener" thing), these are problems that more or less don't exist in the Mac camp... I keep hearing from musicians how they've never had a crash with their MacBook - our keyboarder, who uses his Windows 7 laptop as a soundbank on stage, actually had a bluescreen during a gig a few months ago. :(
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Yup, I managed to break Ubuntu pretty badly with just 5 packages or so (trying to find a decent DE for myself and get the power consumption on my laptop below 9W [Windows hits about 6W when idle])...
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What the...?
Like my brand new Galaxy Nexus for example had a glitch where the sound would randomly go up and down, then they fixed that and now the phones connection is intermittently lost, to top it off the camera and speakers suck both hardware and software wise in comparison to the 4s iphone's.
I call BS. Granted, it's anecdotal, but and maybe it's had problems, I can't say for certain. I can tell you this: my housemate has had a Nexus since the first day it was available. He gets an official ASOP update from Google every night (that is, he's running nightly builds, which I believe is a stock ROM option, and should by all means have more problems than any 'baked' ROM), and to the best of my knowledge, has never had such a problem as you describe. ICS is, from my subjective observation,
Re:What break? (Score:5, Insightful)
You're thinking too much like a techie. Regardless of whether the new market was carved out of excellent tech or excellent marketing, Apple is still carving new markets. If the iPad didn't exist, do you think the tablet market would look anything like it does today? No? Then Apple pretty much created a new market.
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If the iPad didn't exist, do you think the tablet market would look anything like it does today? No? Then Apple pretty much created a new market.
The first tablets weren't made by Apple in this round. They copied the cheap tablets from China which copied the cheap 'netbooks'. Google was already moving (slowly) in that general direction with Android, with netbook support. Did Apple find (and set) the price point for tablets before anyone else? Yes. So in that regard, yes they created the market, but it's not like they made something which wasn't being conceived by almost everyone else at the time, already. (By using the exact same lackluster phone sof
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The first tablets weren't made by Apple in this round. They copied the cheap tablets from China which copied the cheap 'netbooks'.
Citation needed.
The market for all of them. (Score:5, Insightful)
You say yourself that there was no market because they sucked.
Make things that don't suck, and the market emerges.
Look, I get tired of the mindlessness of the Apple critics.
I was a smartphone user for years and held off for two years on getting an iPhone once iPhone was released because I was sure that it couldn't be that much better, that it was all hype. After all, I already HAD a smartphone that I was completely satisfied with (a high-end Treo).
Boy did I feel stupid when I finally got my first iPhone (a 3GS, some months after it had been released). I realized that I had been walking around using a Treo when I could have been about 10x as functional and connected on the go using an iPhone, which was a device in a completely different *universe* if you actually wanted to get stuff done with your phone.
Listen, everyone *knew* there was no market for tablets before iPad. That was exactly the critique and it was spot-on. But Apple executed so well (and at half the price that people had imagined) that they CREATED a market out of whole cloth. Hell, half the people on Slashdot still argue that the iPad market is non-existent and will dry up just as soon as people "wake up" and realize that the device they're using is... I don't remember how the argument goes, exactly. Useless? Overpriced? Stupid? Whatever. I dont' care. The market didn't exist until iPad.
Listen, in 2007 I was a hardcore Linux user. Slackware 2, 3 -> Red Hat 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 -> Fedora 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11. I walked around with a Treo. I was one of the few tablet users with a Toshiba Portege m200, an upgrade from the separate Thinkpad T-series and Vadem Clio tablet team I'd used previous to that.
In 2009 I finally grudgingly tried an iPhone and a day later had one of my own. By 2010 I was all Apple with an iPhone, an iPad, and a Macbook Pro. It's not because I'm an apple fanboy. I *was* a Linux fanboy and an irrational Apple critic, and I realize that only in retrospect.
Maybe you don't like Apple products, but to question whether or not they created the market for capacitive touch low-button smartphones or capacitive touch tablets that run a mobile OS? That makes you sound like an irrational Apple critic of the same sort that I was.
Apple makes fabulous stuff. They are *not* the Apple of 1997, but most Slashdot Apple critics don't realize that because they're steadfastly trying to convince themselves either that (1) Apple is incompetent at everything but marketing (despite a decade and a half of growth) or (2) Apple is the second coming of Microsoft (who was never, ever as creative or innovative on their very best day).
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I do think Apple created a product the market was ready for, and was the first to make this particular advancement step. But I don't think they would have been first had they waited much longer. I don't think they would have been first had another company let geeks and nerds make product decisions. But they do make their products good. I would have an iPhone today if they had not done things like carrier exclusivity and be the exclusive app store for it. So I have a Samsung Galaxy S II instead. Jobs m
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Here is my summary:
Apple got to the top fairly because it has great products. That is good.
Apple is trying to stay at the top by killing its competitors unfairly. That is bad.
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iPod? The first model lacked features (and had less space) compared to its competitors.
I really hope you're just poking fun at "No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame." The only players with comparable capacities were friggin' bricks with 2.5" drives in them. Awful things. The iPod managed to put a (then) high-capacity MP3 player into a manageably small form factor, and it didn't really start to take off until they'd put out a few more generations. Also, GP did specify that Apple may not create markets per se, but they have had a colossal impact on markets that may have existed, but with
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iPhone? A polished convergence of the touchscreen PDAs and cell phones, without a stylus.
iPod? The first model lacked features (and had less space) compared to its competitors.
On the iPhone: The first model lacked features compared to its competitors -- including the average feature phones of the time. (It still lacks features that competing phones have been commonly offering for years.) I don't know if I'd call that "polished" so much as "astonishingly incomplete"
The iPad would have been interesting, but we'd already seen several similar tablets in various stages of development the previous year.
I can't deny that they significantly expanded the smart phone and tablet markets.
Re:What break? (Score:4, Insightful)
and a good balance between battery life, performance, looks and cost that no-one else was achieving at the time.
And who else is now? Serious question.
Re:What break? (Score:5, Interesting)
Asus has been making superior hardware which Apple can only envy for at least several years now. Look at their Zenbook: it's basically a punch in Apple's face, being faster, lighter, thinner, and having better battery life than the Macbook Air - all while having a larger display (11-14" I think) and starting at about $950.
As for "nobody else does it": Apple hasn't done much which really stands out when compared objectively, it's only with the loud cloud of Sales and Marketing that anything they make seems like it's something. Ape Store? iTunes SaaS and software distribution channels weren't anything new then, either. Off the top of my head:
Pkgsrc and BSD Ports have been around for some time - mid 1990s, I imagine. Debian's APT has been around since 1998. I remember using it in a modified form for my Zaurus, via a GUI installer, in 2001. Granted, iTunes came about in 2001. It was several years behind Napster, offering music with a price tag and a brand name. Steam has been around since 2003 and was installed on pretty much every gamer's PC, and offered much more of a comprehensive unified store than App Store did at first. The App Store didn't debut until 2008. It basically does the same things as all the above do, but with more of an Amazon.com-meets-Walmart feel: a large inventory but you pay by the byte, with dollar ringtones, discount movies, and cheap shareware bins.
Apple is by no means a leader here. They're an integrator with strong marketing/sales proclivities. That leads to broken promises, people believing lies, and people accepting less due to false expectations.
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How could it be a copy? It's got a bigger display, thinner, with a different body design which is thinner by a bit.
There must be multiple revisions of the Zenbook then because the comparative test that I looked at had them within a couple of milli-meters in every dimension, with the Zen Book being the one that was slightly bigger. And the shape pretty much identical, without about the only difference being which side the ports are on, the lack of Magsafe and Thunderbolt, and the colour of the keyboard keys.
I tell you what, provide a link to the exact model you're referring to.
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T-series Thinkpads were pretty hot stuff in the IBM days. Light, fast, brick-shithouse construction, and only came in business black - flat black at that, no rounded shiny. Easy maintenance and full service manuals were available... IBM has a bloody part number on every piece of everything they make; it's almost like they actually designed the things for ease of maintenance. Almost everything else was twice the weight, creaky sloppy plastic with no battery life.
IBM did make you pay for it, though...
I don't
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!
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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:What break? (Score:5, Insightful)
>What market did Apple create, other than the App Store, again?
Wait... you mean a curated software source with automated installs for ease-of-use, quality control and malware protection ?
Linux had that in mid-1990s.
Re:What break? (Score:5, Interesting)
That's the problem with patents of course, a fundamentally wrong belief that innovation happens in isolation and is done by any one person/entity.
Here's a little story. Around mid-2005 I was working on what would become the openlab 4.0 release. Under pressure from my paying customers I had to find a way to build the most robust and easy to deploy thin-client network-computer server with easy-to-use desktop Linux possible.
At the time Linux came in installable-disk and live-CD versions - and ne'er the twine did meet. Ubuntu indeed had promo packs for their first release (came out about a month before OL4 was released) with TWO CD's in - one live, one installable.
Then I had a flash of brilliance. What if a live CD could replicate itself onto a hard-drive, you would have a faster, more reliable and more predictable way to install linux, with much more ease of use on top of all the other live CD advantages.
You may notice that practically ever linux distribution in the world today works this way - an instalable live CD. But when I did it for OL4.0 I had never seen such a thing before.
Apparently I invented the modern Linux distribution - because a year later every other distribution had followed suit.
But OpenLab was a fairly niche system - aimed at education and mostly deployed in schools, it had very little impact outside that sphere.
By the end of that year I saw PCLinuxOS for the first time -and they were the second system I ever saw using this mechanism. The thing is... they may have actually done it before I did.
I have no idea which project did it first, mine or theirs. I have no idea which one was then first copied by a major distro (of 2005) and laid the groundwork for everybody else following suit (odds may well be on them but it's hardly proven).
Point is that a major innovation in Linux distributions was achieved practically simultaneously by two disparate projects neither of whom was aware of the other's work. The same thing happens with all innovation - ever. It's always just the next logical step in the progression and there are always several people who have it.
I'm proud of having been a first person to do something that is now standard fair. But I don't think I ever deserved the right to patent the idea or charge for the concept - if only because somebody else was doing the exact same thing at about the exact same time without us knowing about each other's existence yet.
Innovation ? Encouraging innovation ? Stupid concepts.
Innovation is an unavoidable consequence of the state of history at any given moment. It cannot be encouraged or indeed inhibited, the only thing stuff like patents can achieve is to make the results more expensive and cause them to take longer to reach the market penetration they deserve.
Re:What break? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, relative speaking they're "good". Relative to Bill Gates and his mob, and relative to a lot of other stuff that goes on in corporate America. Even so, they play pretty hard ball, and don't think twice about rolling over their developer community if it suits their supposedly higher purpose. And they're playing pretty hard ball in squashing the incumbents in books, music, magazines, newspapers, film, apps, etc etc. I guess some of those guys deserve to be squashed, but still its going a bit far saying Apple are pure good guys.
Lol, Apple fanboys, they remain funny (Score:3)
Yeah, iPods, iTunes, iPhone and iPad are so new... because nobody ever heard of a walkman, online music store, mobile phone or tablet before. Nor is Apple all that succesfull, yes, they sell a LOT of a single model but in total sales, many others surpass them. (Android activations outstrip in a matter of days, total iPhone sales. iTunes sells a lot of online music but only if you don't count traditional retailers)
The parent poster claims he can't remember seeing rows of tablets before. Well, then he must no
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I generally find fandroids less amusing because (on Slashdot at least) their energies seem equally driven by the same consumer devices but with irrational negativity.
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Yeah, iPods, iTunes, iPhone and iPad are so new... because nobody ever heard of a walkman, online music store, mobile phone or tablet before. Nor is Apple all that succesfull, yes, they sell a LOT of a single model but in total sales, many others surpass them. (Android activations outstrip in a matter of days, total iPhone sales. iTunes sells a lot of online music but only if you don't count traditional retailers)
Nobody is saying they invented portable music players, mobile phones or online music stores.
Re:What break? (Score:4, Insightful)
Because creating a new market is synonymous with fulfilling a previously unrecognized need. It actually is something useful. Not useful in the same way as inventing agriculture was, but useful nonetheless.
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Oh Please ... (Score:2, Informative)
Apple creates Airprint
Re:Oh Please ... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Oh Please ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Um... you do realize that AirPrint support is built in to most recent linux distributions, right?
Apple implemented it in CUPS 1.4.6 (and you can get it running on earlier versions with a little work, since it's mostly just combining a few existing standards).
But why let facts get in the way of apple bashing.
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)
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Thought not.
Creative energy gone from Apple (Score:2)
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Indeed. And the 3rd gen iPad is way wide of the mark too. Heavier, hotter, sucks battery, all because Tim Cook couldn't think of any way to improve it except to crank resolution up way past anything anybody actually wanted. Oh, and not give it a proper name. Let's see how that works out.
I can say this much in favor of Tim Cook: he did a great job of setting the stage for further gains by Android.
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My wife saw me print a document the other day by typing "lpr name.pdf" and she made me show her how to do it, because it is way faster than starting an application and clicking your way through a bunch of dialogs.
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EXCELENT.
It's nice to see that "normal" people (or at least, some of them) are realizing that U.I. is not that marvelous panacea for all the computer problems.
Indeed it makes a lot of things easier. But not all of them, and not always!
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Mac OS used to have something even better: drag the file to the printer on the desktop.
Quite pathetic that OSX doesn't have that. Not even the printers on the desktop. So handy!
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Before you say it, Linux is NOT at the point in which you don't ever have to use the terminal.
And neither is OSX, or Windows.
Collective Amnesia (Score:4, Insightful)
Everyone is going to forget about how apple tries to stop everyone with vague patents: lock screens, touch screens, tablets, launching applications by touching icons.
Yep (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm trying to do the indie developer thing and I know that after these years of working full-time on a product with an upcoming initial release, the biggest threat to me isn't product failure but a frivolous patent suit burying me and likely making me give up the results of all the thousands of hours I've invested. I still plan on releasing this particular product, but the extensions and off-shoots I'll write for it will either stay private (and I'll make my money in a completely different field) or I'll end up moving to another country without software patents. It's shitty that the U.S. patent system is basically set up to force non-rich people to work for others (and thus have some indemnity), or pair up with lawyers to become pure patent trolls. In my worse moments, I've considered the latter as a sort of "this is what you've turned me into!" revenge fantasy.
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Better safe than sorry.
There's no evidence that his app will not be the next blockbuster neither. I would cope with his preocupations than with your lack of it.
Possibly (Score:2, Interesting)
When it comes to patents stifling competition is, at the minimum, part of the equation, I wonder what would happen with no patents at all, the ultimate form of competition?
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You mean no patents for junk ideas as well as for the few gems of innovation? Then I suspect maybe a few innovators might be discouraged. But corporations will still continue, sans a few overpaid lawyers.
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That's easy, for patents, the environment hasn't changed much since the Patent was invented.
So if a "little guy" gets a markable idea a big company will come along, copy it, and use it's larger manufacturing capacity to put through a shitty knock off before the little guy gets the first one out of the door. If the little guy tries to go to court (which will still in theory be possibly) he'll be swamped under lawyers. If two middle size companies come out with similar products at the same time they'll sue
The patent system encourages this behavior (Score:5, Interesting)
As long as we have a patent system that blindly issues a patent to damn near anything applied for, even though there's no real innovation involved ... e.g. stuff that the best engineers/programmers in their field could do without much effort if given a task that needs it, then we'll be having these wars. Patents need to be limited to the kinds of innovation that that we simply would not have if the applicant had not figured it out or spent the extensive effort and cost to come up with it.
Fundamentally, patents are themselves a government sanction theft of intellectual property from those that invent it, just because they didn't invent it first. Only because we can't know whether someone did invent it, or did steal it, do we justify a patent (which is really nothing more than government sanctioned exclusivity). But our patent office is not working to filter genuine innovation from trivia ideas. A few years ago I scanned over some random patents, selecting those in areas I happened to know, and found that the vast majority were easily doable, and not innovation. The ratio was around 500 (junk) to 1 (innovation). This was one sampling, so that can be off. I only used higher numbers spanning about the last 5 years at that time.
So it's not really the corporations doing this. They have to react this way under such a system, or end up being a loser. This is why we need an epic-major overhaul of the patent system itself, and not some minor tweaks that politicians have paid lip service to.
I have written more detail about this recently here [wordpress.com].
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Apple's greatest innovations are much the same as Microsoft's ... extreme marketing.
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Apple's greatest innovations are much the same as Microsoft's ... extreme marketing.
Even if we take that statement on face value, without Apple's "extreme marketing" the current market for tablets (and arguably consumer-targeted smartphones) would not exist. Innovation that refines a product category and creates the market for it to be sold? That's not something to be derided.
Oh, nonsense. (Score:4, Insightful)
Apple's savior is an MP3 player. They didn't invent the market, they just made it shinier than it was before.
If you've read Jobs's bio, he was ready to go nuclear on Google over Android, so yes, Apple's just as ready as anybody else to pound you into sand if you dare try to make anything resembling their products. Apple is not a good guy. If you love Apple products, they're just YOUR bad guy.
Finally, few people are qualified to tell whether the newly appointed head of a half TRILLION dollar company is going to be successful. Woz is probably more qualified than I am, but not by much. Tbh, I truly believe the only people who are really qualified to know are living in 2017, if not 2022 or so. Ask one of them.
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I don't have 2020 vision, but it's really unlikely that the new guy can be as successful as the extremely "unique" individual who built the company. The board of directors, who took control when he left, wouldn't allow it. They will basically choose someone just like them with the exception that this person is willing to take a greater risk, ie when something goes wrong they will be kicked out, for a better reward.
This is nothing like Steve Jobs who basically loved the game, he was very, very good at it
LoL (Score:3, Insightful)
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Woz wanted to give away the Apple I schematics for free... I don't think he's the Apple founder you should be bashing.
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I second that.
Please read further about the guy and what he did in the past. He had never commanded the company - all this patent shit is not his decision.
May I remind you this Steve Wozniak poses with his new Galaxy Nexus at Google Building 44 [slashgear.com] ?
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If you know anything about Woz, you'd know that he has zero influence on Apple's legal activities. Just because he's a celebrity and collects a check doesn't mean he actually works for them or tells them what to do. He's admitted in many different ways he just wants to build and hack, not run a company.
Not just following the formulas of other companies (Score:4, Insightful)
I disagree. Apple is following the formula of Microsoft, which is to abide by no morals and have no shame.
"He still gives Apple a bit of a break:" (Score:4, Interesting)
He still gives Apple a bit of a break: "Apple is the good guy on the block of all of them,”
And I would do the same.
I'm not stupid to bash and kill my own cash cow.
Anyway, I always liestened to what this guy said all these years.
He is a good engineer, but not just it: he likes and encourages good technology no matters from who.
*Apple* is the good guy? (Score:4, Insightful)
Seriously, what a fucking blind spot, Woz. If anything, Apple is the most vicious patent suer of all. I really hope B&N fucks Apple's patent portfolio for good.
I am particularly irritated by Woz's assertion, because it just plays into the zombie-Jobs reality distortion field.
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Seriously, what a fucking blind spot, Woz. If anything, Apple is the most vicious patent suer of all. I really hope B&N fucks Apple's patent portfolio for good. I am particularly irritated by Woz's assertion, because it just plays into the zombie-Jobs reality distortion field.
At least answer Woz's claim, instead of bashing him on something irrelevant to his point. He didn't say Apple was better because of suing less, he said something different. It was mentioned in the summary.
Ideas? (Score:2)
I always thought patents were about products and not idea. There are too many "gee i think I can make something that does something interesting" and write a vague design. It has never been built and never researched. Cas in point the touch sensitive floor. IBM has not built one but they got the patent anyway. The problem is that no one else can develop it because someone already has the patent even if they never develop it themselves. Ideas are a dime a dozen and should not be patentable.
as usual, add "In the US" to title (Score:3)
It don't think this patent debacle stifles innovation or startups, I think it does so in the US because of a broken patent system and borked legal system. Incubate your startup company somewhere where it can either fail, or grow large enough to stand up to the patent trolls before they ever find themselves in that situation.
If I started a company in the US, an attorney or patent advisor would be person #3 involved. In europe I'd be confident to run a much larger innvoation-heavy a startup with without legal advise. I'm not shitting you: you can run a company for years with dozens of employees and not even have a business card from a lawyer in your office.
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They are too big to fa^H^Hbreak up.
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If you had not narrowed it to just "communist" and just did "dictatorial" in general, then you could have also included Syria.