When Apple Comes Calling, 'It's the Kiss of Death' (wsj.com) 139
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.
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.
So, wait.... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
The legal fees and appeals (Score:2, Insightful)
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)
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.
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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.
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Yes. We need to not allow a corp to own another corp. This kind of shit will go away.
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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.
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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
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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
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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)
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:
The infringed claims are:
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.
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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.
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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.
Masimo Pulse Oximeters (Score:2)
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.
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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.
Re: So, wait.... (Score:2)
Re:So, wait.... (Score:4, Insightful)
The legal system indeed favors the fat cats. Most laws are vague or ambiguous because politicians are filtered to be better at platitudes than precision.
Top lawyers know how to find and leverage these fuzzy areas to gum up the defendant's arguments. Small companies usually can't compete with top-of-the-line legal teams.
That being said, if a big co. comes along that's interested in your tech and asks for a "partnership", maybe it's time to quietly restructure your company in preparation to eventually be bought by the fat cat. That's usually the more lucrative path for the owners than letting the fat cat milk you dry in a hit-and-run. Companies that "worked with" MS had similar experiences. It's kind of sad to watch your co. be assimilated by Borg Inc., but it's just a winner-take-all world right now.
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Yes, because doubling all your employees salary is just so easy.
Employee poaching is illegal.
Predatory hiring, while not technically illegal, is HIGHLY unethical.
Doing both in a manner that facilitates theft of trade secrets?
Yeah. Lawsuit bait.
Re:So, wait.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Where in the US is employee poaching illegal? I can't say I've ever come across a state that made employee-poaching illegal.
Re:So, wait.... (Score:4, Interesting)
Where in the US is employee poaching illegal? I can't say I've ever come across a state that made employee-poaching illegal.
It may be legal, but if we had a functioning antitrust system then poaching at scale or explicitly to quash a competitor would be grounds for breaking the company up due to anticompetitive behavior.
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I'm pretty sure an functional antitrust system would never ban employee poaching any more than it'd ban putting contracts out to tender. I can't even imagine where you get the idea from that companies competing to employee a person is a bad thing.
Poaching an employee, no. Simultaneously poaching many critical employees from a potentially competing knowledge based organization (as is the accusation in many of these stories), yes. It is effectively just a forced acquisition without the messiness of buying the physical assets. It's explicitly anticompetitive, and would easily fall within the realm of something antitrust law would deal with.
Re: So, wait.... (Score:2)
I do wonder a bit, how many of these poached employees are subsequently laid off after their implementation has matured?
Re: So, wait.... (Score:2)
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https://news.bloomberglaw.com/... [bloomberglaw.com]
https://www.sullcrom.com/expec... [sullcrom.com]
https://www.maynardnexsen.com/... [maynardnexsen.com]
Re: So, wait.... (Score:2)
Re:So, wait.... (Score:4, Informative)
Employee poaching is illegal.
As a willingly poachable employee (for the right price), I assert it is legal as I live in an at-will state and have signed nothing saying I won't run to a competitor tomorrow. My employer knows it, keeps me well fed and knows what I'm worth.
Now perhaps my employer enters into an agreement with a potential supplier, and they sign some non-compete agreements saying they won't hire each other's employees for so many years, or without consulting each other... this may be legal in my state, nothing I can do about it. Of course such contracts have penalties that are owed if the rules get broke, and that's when it's time to break out the lawyers.
Trade secrets not protected by patents? You better have your employees very happy. If I can invent a what's-it for you, I can surely invent a what's it for them, and do it better by virtue of having learned from the first.
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Trade secrets not protected by patents?
That would be why they're trade secrets, and not patents. If you patent your trade secrets, they're not secret any more. That's part of the deal.
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I assert it is legal as I live in an at-will state and have signed nothing saying I won't run to a competitor tomorrow.
While I'm not doubting your assertion specifically, I would say it's worth making it clear that it's quite common to have some form of non-compete clause in an employment contract.
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... it's quite common to have some form of non-compete clause in an employment contract.
They're unenforceable where I live. Employers try that sort of crap all the time.
In fact my current employment contract contains a clause that says I'm not allowed to discuss pay rates with my colleagues, which is hilariously unenforceable and everyone knows it, but because it's "company policy" the clause is left in.
Local management are not stupid enough to try to enforce it though because they don't want to get laughed at.
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They're unenforceable where I live.
I would bet that isn't completely true. From what I'm seeing in a quick search, there are only three states that all but make them unenforceable. The point being that there are still exceptions. Still, California is one of those states so it's relevant to the story. That is, unless they just happened to fall within one of the exceptions.
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... it's quite common to have some form of non-compete clause in an employment contract.
They're unenforceable where I live.
...
I don't live in America.
Then why would you bring it up? You joined a conversation talking SPECIFICALLY about businesses in California, USA, about employment in that state, and people all over the discussion talking not just about American law but about California law in detail.
Saying "my country also doesn't enforce them!" is just trolling.
For those following along with the state's laws, California has extremely tight restrictions on non-competes. They are still allowed under a few specific circumstances such as a business owne
Re:So, wait.... (Score:4, Insightful)
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I'm not a slave.
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Yes, because doubling all your employees salary is just so easy.
Employee poaching is illegal. Predatory hiring, while not technically illegal, is HIGHLY unethical.
Doing both in a manner that facilitates theft of trade secrets?
Yeah. Lawsuit bait.
What is "employee poaching"? I've just changed my jobs because I've got a better offer. Did I break the law? Did my employer break the law? I thought that we live in market capitalism. Employee can get as much money as the companies are willing to offer. The term "employee poaching" sounds funny.
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Employee poaching is illegal.
Predatory hiring, while not technically illegal, is HIGHLY unethical.
There was a saying that the US got rich before it got civilized, the comments here illustrated as least one aspect very clearly -- Americans are living in a feudal system with corporations instead of noble houses.
"Employee poaching"? Other posts used the term "stealing people". Since when did working for a company means you became company property? It sounded like the Game of Thrones playing out with FAANG instead of Lannisters, Starks and Freys. Masimo is like a small house getting crushed by the Mount
Re: So, wait.... (Score:2)
Re: So, wait.... (Score:2)
And the rights of the employees to work where they wish?
Re: So, wait.... (Score:2)
Yeah. So, once again, fuck the employees. Typical.
Re:So, wait.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Good luck out-paying a trillion dollar company that wants to see its competition gone.
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Once the pay gets to a certain level, especially if it comes with royalties or stock, things like the work environment start to matter a lot too. If they can't provide a better offer than Apple...
I've made that decision before and smaller companies are usually better to work for.
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Really ?
To paraphrase Calydor : Good luck out-paying ,or out environmenting, a trillion dollar company that wants to see its competition gone.
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IANAL and can't be bothered to spend the evening researching if anything was actually potentially illegal.
But he can't pay as much as Apple. Nobody can.
Re:So, wait.... (Score:5, Insightful)
legality and ethics are not necessarily the same thing.
apple is a scummy corporation, just as bad as google/ms/et al -- they have this weird halo around them, but they're no different.
throwing your weight around to acquire companies and hoard technology/patents stifles innovation and in the long run is not in anyone's best interest (even for the company doing the acquiring)
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Exactly. If they had made a good offer to stay then Apple's reputation and inevitable corporate HR BS would have worked in their favour.
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> If they had made a good offer to stay
For example ?
I don't see what Apple couldn't up. And say Massimo had 8 really important people, Apple doesn't need to woo all of them, maybe just snatching up one or two is enough.
Re: So, wait.... (Score:2)
Link? (Score:3)
Has no one noticed there's no link in the summary?
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It doesn't matter; nobody reads TFA anyway.
We already know which opinions can be acceptably expressed in this forum anyway.
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It comes from a story from the Wall Street Journal [wsj.com], which is paywalled, but can mostly be read here [thepassivevoice.com].
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There is no need for a link, see here [slashdot.org], here [slashdot.org] or here [slashdot.org]
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Seriously how is your UID so low and you've not seen stories without links in the summary? There's a reason the link to the story is always next to the title. This isn't that uncommon.
Trust, but Verify. (Score:3)
"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)
"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)
"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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
Re: Trust, but Verify. (Score:2)
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Apple tunes their loot, MS then clones it."
And still Microsoft somehow manages to screw it up, much of the time.
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Yet because they are a near monopoly in the biz realm, it doesn't matter, no compatible alternative. MS could crap on 5th Ave. and not lose customers.
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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
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...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)
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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...
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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)
>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
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no, they both stole it from xerox
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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)
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)
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.
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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.
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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
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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?
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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.
Cutting out the Middle Man (Score:2)
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)
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*
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They never tried this with us. We have armed guards.
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I wish! But we were told to be nice. But I wasn't told to be stupid. :-)
What a load of crap! (Score:3)
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)
Just ask the Beatles.
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Yeah, yeah, yeah!
seems like another shakedown (Score:2)
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.
Another incompetent CEO who ignored history... (Score:2)
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
Re:what decade is this (Score:5, Insightful)
"Most of the time (except for massive innovations like ChatGPT) the technology isn't rocket science"
So why not just do it themselves in the first place? Why would they need to approach a company to pretend to buy it in , observe what they've done then essentially steal their ideas?
What MS and Apple do might be legal but its completely unethical. But then ethics take a back seat to profits whatever virtue signalling honeyed words Cook and Nadella vomit up when required.
Re:what decade is this (Score:5, Insightful)
So why not just do it themselves in the first place?
Because it might be cheaper to license someone else's and have your own engineers work on other projects. It might also not be.
That other person's tech may be better than anything you could possibly hope to come up with in the next two years... or it might not.
You don't have any way of knowing - or even being able to make reasonable assumptions about - any of this without approaching them and going through the corporate equivalent of two dogs sniffing each others asses. Sometimes the ass smells good and you climb on for a hump. Other times, you find out it smells no better than your own, and you might as well just sniff yours instead - and because you're a dog, you can.
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So why not just do it themselves in the first place?
If Apple just did it themselves, they could end up with competition. Masimo could end up licensing to another watch maker. With the way they did things, they get the ideas for cheap and also prevent anyone from wanting to touch Masimo.
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It could be they coincidentally hired away the people who knew how to invent the tech and improve on it and just wanted to keep Masimo from advancing further. But is it the most likely answer? Apple now has new pulse oximetry patents since then. Whose names are on the patent?
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Unless my understanding of Patent law is obsolete...Its not wrong to have a clean sheet implementation that solves the same problem.
You may be thinking of copyright or trade secrets. If someone owns a patent, they can prevent you from implementing the invention(s) defined by the patent, regardless of whether or not you've ever seen the patent. If you solve the same problem in a different enough way that it doesn't fit the patented invention (as described by the claims in the patent), then you aren't infringing the patent.
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Unless my understanding of Patent law is obsolete...Its not wrong to have a clean sheet implementation that solves the same problem.
It doesn't quite work that way. It's "first to file". It used to be "first to invent", meaning your clean sheet had better be dated prior to the other person's.
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You've got to have solid patents and more importantly good lawyers and unlimited time and money. Even if you win, they will drain you dry in court for a decade while your business better function somehow with them eating your lunch during that time. This is not just Apple; a whole industry existed and playbook which Apple just bought into like any other big corporation.
Nothing new. If you are cheaper to sell out then they buy you, if you are cheaper to circumvent then they will do that. I'm sure they have s
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If only the little company Masimo had properly protected their ideas with patents. I bet they used a bargain-basement patent service and got worthless patents.
With good patents, they could have a nice legal way to punish Apple for stealing their ideas. Or they could have used the good patents to seriously negotiate with Apple.
Masimo is a publicly traded company with a market cap of around $10 billion.