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Businesses Apple Technology

When Apple Comes Calling, 'It's the Kiss of Death' (wsj.com) 139

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
Aspiring partners accuse Apple of copying their ideas. From a report: It sounded like a dream partnership when Apple reached out to Joe Kiani, the founder of a company that makes blood-oxygen measurement devices. He figured his technology was a perfect fit for the Apple Watch. Soon after meeting him, Apple began hiring employees from his company, Masimo, including engineers and its chief medical officer. Apple offered to double their salaries, Mr. Kiani said. In 2019, Apple published patents under the name of a former Masimo engineer for sensors similar to Masimo's, documents show. The following year, Apple launched a watch that could measure blood oxygen levels. "When Apple takes an interest in a company, it's the kiss of death," said Mr. Kiani. "First, you get all excited. Then you realize that the long-term plan is to do it themselves and take it all." Mr. Kiani is one of more than two dozen executives, inventors, investors and lawyers who described similar encounters with Apple. First, they said, came discussions about potential partnerships or integration of their technology into Apple products. Then, they said, talks stopped and Apple launched its own similar features.

Apple said that it doesn't steal technology and that it respects the intellectual property of other companies. It said Masimo and other companies cited in this article are copying Apple, and that it would fight the claims in court. Apple has tried to invalidate hundreds of patents owned by companies that have accused Apple of violating their patents. According to lawyers and executives at some smaller companies, Apple sometimes files multiple petitions on a single patent claim and attempts to invalidate patents unrelated to the initial dispute. Many large companies, particularly in tech, have been known to scoop up employees and technology from smaller potential rivals. Software developers have given a name to what they describe as Apple's behavior in such cases: sherlocking. The term refers to an episode about two decades ago, when Apple released a software product called "Sherlock" that helped users find files on its Mac computers and perform internet searches.
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When Apple Comes Calling, 'It's the Kiss of Death' More

When Apple Comes Calling, 'It's the Kiss of Death'

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  • So, wait.... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by King_TJ ( 85913 ) on Thursday April 20, 2023 @12:06PM (#63464896) Journal

    Apple is claiming Masimo is in the wrong for copying its original ideas for blood-oxygen measurement devices?

    Seems like it would be an excellent case to challenge in court, since Masimo could show it had such devices before Apple did AND can show all the evidence of Apple trying to hire its employees away before launching the feature in a new Apple Watch?

    Just because Apple is bigger doesn't mean they automatically get to win cases like this.
    I'd think this might be a great opportunity for Masimo to bank on the damages it did to their business, etc.

    • Would more than likely make it a pyrrhic victory. Small businesses can't really win against mega corporations.

      In this case they just contacted him so they could poach his engineers. On the one hand I find it hard to be upset because those engineers are making a lot more money and in all likelihood will continue to.

      One of the dirty secrets of small businesses is that they tend to pay their employees like crap. This isn't the same large businesses are puppies and kittens but typically a small business

      • Re:The legal fees and appeals (Score:5, Insightful)

        by jenningsthecat ( 1525947 ) on Thursday April 20, 2023 @01:27PM (#63465170)

        I agree with pretty much everything you said. But "higher taxes for large corporations" doesn't go far enough. I keep harping on this because it bears repeating: unless we get rid of corporate personhood and allow individual decision makers in companies to be held liable in civil and criminal actions, corporations will continue to rip the social fabric apart and plunder the planet.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by CAIMLAS ( 41445 )

          RFK Jr recently used the phrase "corporate feudalism" to describe our Democracy (tm).

          He's correct, for this reason. I've been saying this for close to 20 years at this point. The corporations make the rules, and voting is a ruse.

        • Yes. We need to not allow a corp to own another corp. This kind of shit will go away.

      • Re: Small businesses -

        I don't generally disagree with a lot of your points, but they aren't very applicable to the situation at hand. Masimo isn't a mom & pop shop that "makes a living for the owner and the owner's wife and not much else." They have >2000 employees and have a market cap of $10bn on the NASDAQ. They're small compared to Apple (everyone is) but don't fit any definition of a "small business" I can think of.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by fermion ( 181285 )
      Who owns the technology? Through NDAs and other oppressive agreements a company can claim ownership over anything you develop while employed by them. They can pay you a pittance and monetize your ideas. If you quit they sue you.

      Or you can work for someone with resources to develop the ideas and who will share. The article says the patents were filed under the employees name

      Then there is the question of if there was ever a product or path to a product. In other words, are these patent trolls. It seems

    • They did that. Masimo won a case with the ITC a few months ago that says their patent was violated. The US hasn't enacted an import ban on the Apple Watch yet based on the ruling, but could. There's a separate attempt by another company to get an import ban going because of infringing on their heart monitoring tech.

      Infringement will probably end up being a smaller payout than buying the company. Time will tell. Apple also gambled on the chance they could invalidate the company's patents. And they'll p

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        Reminds me of Transmeta. Won against Intel over CPU power efficiency patents, but went bust anyway.

        They got half a billion dollars and licence fees for the lifetime of the patent.

    • Re:So, wait.... (Score:5, Informative)

      by ceoyoyo ( 59147 ) on Thursday April 20, 2023 @01:22PM (#63465158)

      Neither one of them actually invented measuring blood oxygen with LEDs. A Japanese guy, Takuo Aoyagi did, in 1974.

      Apple and Masimo are having a PR and legal battle over details. The ITC judged that Apple did infringe on two cliams in one of Masimo's patents.

      The patent [google.com] is titled "User-worn device for noninvasively measuring a physiological parameter of a user."

      Great title. I've got a few patents, and the lawyers love that "make it as broad as possible" bullshit.

      The device is described in claim 20:

      A user-worn device configured to non-invasively determine measurements of a user's tissue, the user-worn device comprising:
      a plurality of light emitting diodes (LEDs);
      at least four photodiodes configured to receive light emitted by the LEDs, the four photodiodes being arranged to capture light at different quadrants of tissue of a user;
      a protrusion comprising a convex surface and a plurality of through holes, each through hole including a window and arranged over a different one of the at least four photodiodes; and
      one or more processors configured to receive one or more signals from at least one of the photodiodes and determine measurements of oxygen saturation of the user.

      The infringed claims are:

      24) The user-worn device of claim 20, wherein the protrusion comprises opaque material configured to substantially prevent light piping.

      30) The user-worn device of claim 20, wherein the protrusion further comprises one or more chamfered edges.

      So, you know, super innovative. Note that Apple doesn't compete in Masimo's market, so Masimo is really just complaining that they didn't get a big payout for their chamfered edges. Except now they are going to get one.

      Not to say Apple wouldn't steal. They're a company.

      • A Japanese guy, Takuo Aoyagi did, in 1974.

        The creation of the transistor does not mean Walter Brattain, John Bardeen and William Shockley invented the device you're currently reading this post on. Takuo Aoyagi did not in any way shape or form invent a wearable device for measuring blood oxygen. In fact the device he did invent was a large headset which measured blood oxygen levels through the ear when attached to a a large machine which itself weighed upwards of 15kg.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

          I'm not sure who's post you read, but I was very clear that Aoyagi invented the LED pulse oximeter. Sure, *lots* of other people have contributed to improving it, and Aoyagi built on non-LED machines that preceded him.

          Masimo's made contributions, I didn't say they hadn't. Most of them seem to be algorithms. Of relevance to Apple's watch, unless you're some kind of fanboy, is the ruling of the ITC, which I described.

      • Neither one of them actually invented measuring blood oxygen with LEDs. A Japanese guy, Takuo Aoyagi did, in 1974.

        In the medical field, Masimo is a well-known supplier of oximetry devices (which cost quite a bit), and are also substantially superior to the typical crap oximeters you find on Ebay and Amazon. Some of the higher-end Masimo devices have quite a few innovative features, such as multi-spectral pulse-oximeters that can identify false readings due to methemoglobinemia and carboxyhemoglobinemia, or generate estimates of hemoglobin levels.

    • Seems like it would be an excellent case to challenge in court...

      There is no such thing as an excellent case to challenge in court if Apple is involved because they have way more money than any opponent and will use that to their advantage.

    • Yes but a big company like Apple can make litigation take years and rack up a lot of legal bills, which a small, financially stressed company canâ(TM)t survive. All part of The Plan.

  • Link? (Score:3)

    by Ghostworks ( 991012 ) on Thursday April 20, 2023 @12:06PM (#63464900)

    Has no one noticed there's no link in the summary?

  • Trust, but Verify. (Score:3)

    by geekmux ( 1040042 ) on Thursday April 20, 2023 @12:09PM (#63464908)

    "Apple said that it doesn't steal technology and that it respects the intellectual property of other companies."

    If this statement were true, then at this point in the timeline of Apple there should be hundreds if not thousands of pieces of evidence in the form of emails and chat sessions coming from the legal research department along the lines of "hey, we found existing IP and/or patents on that, so we need to nix that new feature proposal.."

    I wonder how many would actually be found in legal discovery to back their own claim.

    • Re:Trust, but Verify. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Jahta ( 1141213 ) on Thursday April 20, 2023 @12:29PM (#63464966)

      "Apple said that it doesn't steal technology and that it respects the intellectual property of other companies."

      Hmmm. In The Triumph of the Nerds [imdb.com] Steve Jobs famously said "We have always been shameless about stealing great ideas."

      • Re:Trust, but Verify. (Score:5, Insightful)

        by DesScorp ( 410532 ) on Thursday April 20, 2023 @01:02PM (#63465072) Journal

        "Apple said that it doesn't steal technology and that it respects the intellectual property of other companies."

        Hmmm. In The Triumph of the Nerds [imdb.com] Steve Jobs famously said "We have always been shameless about stealing great ideas."

        Not just ideas, apparently.

        For all the complaints about Microsoft being a giant Borg Cube, the fact is that they usually bought smaller companies with products they liked and then absorbed them into the Microsoft ecosystem (FoxPro, PowerPoint, Hotmail, Visio, etc). That's quite a bit different from what Apple is doing, which is apparently dangling a partnership with smaller companies and then proceeding to just hoover up their key people and ideas for Apple, then shitcanning the small company, with no compensation or licensing. Just taking what they want and leaving the husk.

        Maybe it's time to bring antitrust action against Cupertino.

        • Slashdot never understood why I defended Microsoft, and I suspect most of them still won't. Microsoft, for all its failings, made hardware a commodity. PCs got cloned, and it was for our benefit.

          F/OSS made engineers whore themselves out, and since the software itself is no longer the product, YOU became the product while F/OSS helps mine all your data.

          Apple was the last of the vertically integrated hardware/software companies that refused to die. The result is "What's a computer?" thinking. Vertically i

          • Compaq created the PC clone (by reverse engineering IBM's BIOS and hardware setup), which opened the floodgates for the industry.

            • I googled this, and Compaq was not the first. I think it's remembered because of its unique "luggable" PC. In my first year of college I knew somebody that had one. It was so very "business like" compared to a C-64. It seemed very "un cool" to me; but of course it was most likely targeted at a very different market. I wonder how many of those were actually dragged through airports, LOL.

          • Re: (Score:3)

            by sjames ( 1099 )

            Many companies cloned PCs. Microsoft was not one of them.

            Real 'credit' goes to IBM for fumbling and losing control of the spec so everyone could clone the PC.

            Lots of 'credit' for fumbling to go around, the 8086 was supposed to be an I/O controller for a much more elephantine platform that Intel never got off the ground.

            • True, MS didn't clone the PC but as time went by all the cloners felt like they had to be able to run MS-DOS (and later, Windows) or they wouldn't sell.

              Also agree that IBM's "fumbling" needed more credit. MS picked up the ball and ran it in to the end zone.

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by sjames ( 1099 )

                MS got involved more or less by accident of timing. They didn't actually have an OS at the time but quickly bought out QDOS (stood for Quick and Dirty Operating System, not a joke). The first release was a turkey, so the next version came out a week or so later that could actually do something other than just boot.

                The big compatibility effort for clones was to be able to run the same applications as the IBM PC. Complete with the boot ROMs containing the ASCII string "NOT COPYRIGHT 1980 IBM" placed so that I

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by dryeo ( 100693 )

          Seems there's a list of companies that MS did steal ideas (and code IIRC) from. The first one I think of was Stac, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] which MS lost. There was also Spyglass where MS did offer to pay, based on a percentage of sales, and then gave the renamed IE away to get out of paying.
          Though mostly MS got its bad reputation from anti-competitive behavour, and there was lots back in the last century.

      • "Steal ideas". Stealing ideas is absolutely fine. However, Jobs copied this quote from Picasso. A mediocre artist copied other people's work. A great artist steals the ideas and turns them into his own.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by rsilvergun ( 571051 )
      So there's a very good chance it's true in the legal sense but not in the moral sense. But when it comes to money anything you can get away with is perfectly moral.

      This is one of the things that consistently scares me about modern corporations. They exist to make money and they have large bureaucracies where the terrible things they do aren't usually signed off on by individuals so the blame gets spread around. No one person is responsible for all the horrible things so nobody ever really feels like doe

      • ...That kind of blame shifting is where the phrase, it's not personal it's just business, comes from.

        Actually, that term is more personal than you assume, since most corporations look to ensure they have a sucker-grade scapegoat employee who is basically oblivious that they ARE predestined to take the fall when SHTF.

        Corporations get away with shit because quite often someone's head has to roll in order to appease legislators and regulators. It's part of the "feel good" negotiations at the end of the day that somehow justifies everyone else's job at the table.

  • Apple Steals Play From Microsoft's Playbook (Score:4, Informative)

    by gosso920 ( 6330142 ) on Thursday April 20, 2023 @12:15PM (#63464922)
    First, there's a discussion to license disk compression software from Stac Electronics. Then, Microsoft releases DOS 6, which features (gasp) disk compression program DoubleSpace.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Halo5 ( 63934 )

      Hell, Microsoft even got the idea for Windows from getting a look at what Apple was working on at the time (Lisa/Mac)! Apple is the new Microsoft...

      • Hell, Microsoft even got the idea for Windows from getting a look at what Apple was working on at the time (Lisa/Mac)! Apple is the new Microsoft...

        And Apple got most of it from Xerox PARC Alto. Your point? Apple has never really innovated. They just take others ideas and make them (at least in their mind) "better."

        • Re:Apple Steals Play From Microsoft's Playbook (Score:4, Informative)

          by hawk ( 1151 ) <hawk@eyry.org> on Thursday April 20, 2023 @08:25PM (#63466014) Journal

          >And Apple got most of it from Xerox PARC Alto.

          that is patently, categorically, untrue.

          It's a common urban legend, though.

          Jeff Raskin's master's thesis describes significant portions--written in 1968, long before he came to work at apple, as well as before PARC started playing with such ideas.

          On top of that, apple had mockups of the Lisa before the visit. You can find them with a bit of effort on the internet.

          the PARC visit certainly *influenced* the direction the project took, but it absolutely was not the source.

          Also, apple payed Xerox with a significant amount of stock to use the IP

          hawk

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Osgeld ( 1900440 )

        no, they both stole it from xerox

        • no, they both stole it from xerox

          . . .and they ALL "stole" it from Vannevar Bush's thoughts on the "Memex" in the early 1930s, and as described in The Atlantic Monthly in 1945, in an Article read by a young Douglas Englebart. . .:

          https://arstechnica.com/featur... [arstechnica.com]

          So, Now what?

    • Re:Apple Steals Play From Microsoft's Playbook (Score:5, Interesting)

      by leonbev ( 111395 ) on Thursday April 20, 2023 @01:18PM (#63465142) Journal

      Apple is even worse than that, though. Not only do they steal product ideas from the top applications in their App Store, they'll then go after those competitors to sabotage them.

      A good example of this is Tile. Not only did they rip off their device tracking idea with Airtags, but now they're trying to abuse their new privacy features to disable Tile's ability to track devices when the application isn't running. Even know they KNOW that functionality is required for the application to work (because their application basically works the same way), they repeatedly ask users if they want to disable it.

  • I never understood the economics of this (Score:3)

    by RogueWarrior65 ( 678876 ) on Thursday April 20, 2023 @12:52PM (#63465028)

    Apple could easily afford to buy the company and I'll bet that the owner would be happy with a few million dollars. So why would Apple do something obnoxious like this? Another way to look at M&A is Adobe buying a company that made collaboration software for billions. Apparently, Adobe tried to create their own and spent a lot of time and money but it didn't work well so bought the solution. What makes a company decide to say to a small company "No, f*ck you, we're not buying you. We're going to steal your key employees and copy your stuff." In this case, what was going on behind the scenes? Was Apple already 90% of the way there on their own version? Did the small company want too much? Did Apple go to a meeting and the owner wasn't there but the wife was and the wife screwed up a major deal a la CP/M? I find it hard to believe that Apple was starting from scratch on this and spied on a company with key technology. The time to develop and get it FDA-approved alone should have made buying a solution cheaper. Was the company owner so naive to think that nobody was going to steal their stuff? Are there forces in Apple that are so slimy that being a straight shooter isn't in their vocabulary? It's not like Apple vs Xerox PARC because in that case, Xerox wasn't going to do diddly with what the PARC researchers came up with.

    • Apple PAID Xerox in stock. Xerox didn't know what they had either time, they solid their Apple stock way way too soon as well.

      It's modern big business; they simply do whatever is cheaper.

      • Ah, didn't know that. That said, cheaper can mean many things. Was it cheaper to build their own from scratch? Was it cheaper to pay the lawyers to gut the patent portfolio? Was it cheaper because they had already invested time to get it 90% of the way there and poach employees to get it across the finish line? It's starting to sound like the small company probably wanted some lucrative per unit licensing and Apple decided it was cheaper to ruin the company. Regardless, we're only hearing one side of

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mcl630 ( 1839996 )

      Apple could easily afford to buy the company and I'll bet that the owner would be happy with a few million dollars.

      Masimo is a publicly traded company with a market cap of around $10 billion. Why would they ever sell for just a few million dollars?

      • Okay, so not a small company. I'm guessing that they aren't the only company that makes blood-ox sensors and this one was way too expensive or possibly too big or too power hungry and they weren't willing to make design changes.

  • I understand that we don't know all the details, but very large companies have pretty terrible ethics records for this kind of stuff.

    Looks like a new acquisition plan:
    1. Evaluate a company to buy or license tech
    2. Which is cheaper A) Poach employees or B) Buy company or C) License tech?
    3. If choice "A", make sure they cannot compete against your legal budget.

  • Microsoft came to my company (Score:3, Interesting)

    by iAmWaySmarterThanYou ( 10095012 ) on Thursday April 20, 2023 @02:30PM (#63465322)

    They sent various folks all over my company to do due diligence. Okay, sure.
    Without even a basic NDA or other IP protection agreement in place, the guy I'm talking to wants me to walk him through our network, show him our firewall rules, let him look at the key parts of our source code that had the secret sauce to our entire existence and some other bullshit along those lines.

    He was shocked when I told him no.

    Him: "You understand I am here representing the Microsoft Corporation?!"

    Me: "Yes, I understand perfectly who you are and who you represent. That is why I am not showing you our source code".

    Him: *head explode emoji*

    • A giant networking company acquired a start-up I worked for in the 90s and prior to the acquisition they sent over some hardware for our engineers to do integration with. I put it on an air gapped network and the software engineers balked and escalated to the CEO. I was asked why I was being so paranoid... as if it would be unthinkable for the, at the time, leader in networking to be able to collect sensitive data and avoid having to acquire the company. A twenty year old kid had more sense than the mana

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by PPH ( 736903 )

      They never tried this with us. We have armed guards.

  • What a load of crap! (Score:3)

    by Murdoch5 ( 1563847 ) on Thursday April 20, 2023 @03:43PM (#63465506) Homepage
    Company X makes a product, a new way to make waffles. Apple meets with X, discusses and gets a demo of the “Waffle Master 6100”, then pouches the employees from X, who have knowledge of artisan craft waffles? That couldn't be any more of a clear sign that Apple is stealing ideas, processes, products, and people. If Apple was doing it first, they wouldn't have arranged a meeting with a company making the same product, they'd just get to market first, and already have the right people working for them!

    This is the same stupid logic that companies use when they steal open source software, and claim they had the idea all along. I've heard N times, from different people, that it was never stealing because in “the one instance” the idea is so meta, it belongs to the universe, until they release it. I worked for a company whose entire platform was just open source stolen software and libraries. Every time they wanted functionality added, they would take a library or product, incorrectly rebadge it, band-aid it in, then have their lawyers go to work trying to claim they did it first.

    Every bleeping week I would be in the dev meeting insisting it was just theft, dishonest development, and asshatery practices. Every week, the “management” team would tell me I didn't know what I was talking about, or threaten to fire me, or try to spin the dumbest defences I've ever heard. At one point a developer for a library got in contact with me, and outright stated we had no right, whatsoever, to continue using his library. The company owner tried to sue him, and at that point I updated their website with a clear explanation of what the product really was, why it was worth $0, and quit. One of the developers that company ripped off, worked with me to build in a check if they were using their library. If the library picked up on some data, it would intentionally corrupt output, insert a bug, and just occasionally fail. That software is still using the same library, and the owner of the company has asked me N times to come back and “fix it”, instead of just writing the functionality from scratch, like they should!

    Apple is doing the same thing, but has such legal horsepower, they can steal closed source anything, and get away with it.

  • Yeah (Score:2)

    by PPH ( 736903 )

    Just ask the Beatles.

  • I don't know much about this, other than various tellings of the story that have popped up on news sites, but in a number of stories, and sometimes in his own words, this Joe Kiani guy sounds like a complete scammer trying to shake down Apple because they have money and he wants it.

    Note: I'm not defending Apple or its behavior. I have no idea whether they did anything wrong or not. But whether or not Apple did anything wrong, this guy seems like a slimy huckster.

  • American CEOs love to tell people that the reason they are payed the big bucks is that they are the smart guys who make the critical decisions nobody else can, and they like to claim responsibility for every good thing that happens to their businesses. Unfortunately for many investors and employees, CEOs are frequently the biggest idiots in the room.

    The CEO of Masimo has absolutely no excuses. All he needed was a basic awareness of computer history...which isn't all that long (it's hardly a long timeline, l

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