A Quote from Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

What's the point of this thread?

Apple is hardly a saint, they've stolen lots of ideas from other companies. Heck, even Steve himself said "we've always been shameless about stealing great ideas."

And before the fanboys get all defensive, please note that the quote is from an actual on-camera interview with Steve. You can easily find it on Youtube.

Obviously, the thread is not GPS related. It's just another topic for discussion.

The only people who are going to get rich out of that are the lawyers. Sueing on software patents and copyright, especially by the patent trolls, has gone way out of control. Patents and copyright are supposed to encourage innovation, now they are actively discouraging it.

Steve Jobs was given a tour of Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) where he got to see all kinds of new and innovative ideas. Among those ideas were the graphical user interface and the mouse. Notice that this was a XEROX facility.

Jobs promptly stole those ideas and they showed up in the Mac. He later accused Bill Gates of stealing "his ideas" when Windows was introduced as an alternate graphical user interface with a mouse.

Jobs was a smart guy but no saint.

So Apple went with it.

Xerox was a copier company.

Xerox is a great many things, producing copiers is only one thing they do. Xerox Data Systems was never a large name in computers but they were a well respected name. Their best days were before and shortly after the creation of the Mini-computer which also bit the dust following the creation of the PC.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/05/16/110516fa_fact_...

Both Apple and Microsoft when they were young innovative companies didn't care much for so-called "intellectual property". Now they use the concept of so-called "intellectual property" bully potential competitors to stifle competition.

One of the ironies of the supposed free-market system in the US, using legal system to bludgeon the competition into oblivion. And I thought the free-market system was about good hearted competition. Guess not.

It became about the money, and shareholders.

Remember the hippy pics of MS and Apple founders? Those days are long gone...

I'm not a patent attorney, but I would think that all of Apple's iPhone patents would have stopped the Google/Android by now, or had court ordered royalty schedules.

That's one thing that was clear when the original iPhone was debuted: it was patent protected with something like >200 patents.

The "inspiration" from iPhone is rather evident in the Google Android platform and OS. There has to be an Apple patent or so that has been infringed upon.

Unless there has been an unpublicized agreement between Google and Apple.

Time will tell.

Everyone needs to pay me. Now.

The current state of patent laws are absurd. Lawsuit frequency is far more absurd.

Everyone rips each other off as far as they can. It's a joke.

The competition is the only thing that keeps innovation going from both sides. If Apple would win, the result would be complacency-why do you need to keep improving the product when you are the only one making it? And the same holds true to a lesser extent with Android. The thing with Android is that it's open source, so anyone can change it however they want. Don't like the camera app? Compile your own and roll it in the system! The enabling of FM radio on my Nexus 1 was the result of rom hackers-they knew the radio chip had the capability, but it was never enabled in Google's official build. Eventually they figured out how to add code to enable it, and now we have radio! How much potential of the iPhone could be unleashed if it were more open?

reminds me of this which I found on another forum years ago. Hope you all find it entertaining.

"Personally, I think we should sue everyone.

Now, before you tune out, hear me out.

I think suing everyone, and every company, will solve our problems, all of them. Someone cuts you off in traffic? Sue them. You get in a car accident? Sue the radio station for playing a good song during rush hour, thus distracting you.

Or maybe sue the civil engineer for not making the grade 15 degrees rather than 14.5 degrees which may have resulted in an accident.

I'd like to file a lawsuit against everyone to cover all the stuff that happens everywhere, all the time.

But before I do that, maybe I'll move for a preliminary injunction against everyone to prevent more stuff from happening during the adjudication of my main lawsuit.

Yeah, that's what I am going to do. Me v. Everyone et. al. That's it.

Stuff happens? Sue someone. Doesn't matter who. Just sue them. That will get their attention.

Got no case, no facts, no theory, no chance of winning? Sue them anyway, I say.

Sue them till they bleed.

How much did they make in profits last year ? Well, we'd better sue them for making so much money. Because we KNOW that the more money people have, the more likely they're guilty of something, right?

Maybe if we sue everyone people will wake up and realize that they have an obligation to make sure that stuff doesn't happen to me.

See, suing everyone sounds good doesn't it?

Well, this raises the interesting issue of where to hold a trial when you sue everyone, never mind who would sit on the jury since the potential jurors would be part of the defendant class. Well, I think I'll have to file a companion lawsuit naming the founders of our country for not foreseeing my need to sue everyone. Yeah, that's it.

So, sue em all. That's the answer. It's the American way.

If I could sue everybody, I would. Maybe then people would wake up and take responsibility for the stuff that JUST HAPPENS to me. It ain't my fault, I know that. I'm the victim, and I want to sue someone.

Where's my Yellow Pages?"

That's why it's posted in the Smart Phone forum and not any of the GPS related forums.

Apple Found Guilty Of Patent Infringement

Apple has now become the most sued technology company in the world. It has a huge legal team, both in house and outside, that must work diligently to protect the company.

more:
http://www.gev.com/2011/07/apple-found-guilty-of-patent-infr...

That is so funny, It sure made giggle while reading it.
The sad part is there are folks that come close to that extreme.

You'd be doing something really helpful if you compiled all the results of those patent infringement law suits.

This gets to a fundamental flaw with patents. Patents are meant to protect a particular invention; they are not meant to protect a concept.

Let me illustrate with the lowly oscillating lawn sprinkler. Yes you should be able to get a patent for a particular lawn sprinkler based on a real design plan. However, you should not be able to get a patent for the concept of an oscillating lawn sprinkler. So by extension, just because someone has a patent on a particular device, such as the iPhone, it should not preclude someone else from being able to develop a competitive devise based on a similar concept.

Also think of the concept of "reverse engineering". It used to an honored approach to competition. Now "reverse engineering" is being driven underground through frivolous lawsuits. This will stifle innovation.

Just because you have a patent filed doesn't mean it will stand up in court. That's been the problem with software patents and the acceptance rate of the USPTO for some time now. There have been many, many patent lawsuits in which the patent was not upheld. Problem is it costs millions of dollars to go to court and most smaller, startup companies can't afford it. So bullies with deep pockets like Apple, or even worse all the patent troll slimeballs, grab patents on everything from "look and feel" to "one click checkout" to "breathe in, breathe out" and use them to smother competition.

I'm really glad Google is taking them on, I hope Google smashes them flat, and maybe brings some sense to the whole patent mess, software and hardware.

In the late 70's and early 80's when I worked at the GM Tech Center in Michigan, we had several Xerox Star computer systems from Xerox PARC. This was a time when IBM and other desktop systems were coming into vogue. DOS was what you learned to manipulate data on an IBM, yet the Star system from Xerox displayed actual file folders on the screen and you manipulated data by pointing, clicking and dragging etc. Years ahead of the Lisa or Mac's introduction with the GUI interface.

Jobs did indeed 'borrow' that concept from PARC.

See it here. http://toastytech.com/guis/star.html

TechDirt Article "Steve Jobs Was Willing To 'Rip Off' Everyone Else... But Was Pissed About Android Copying iPhone?
http://www.techdirt.com/blog/innovation/articles/20111021/16...

"This is coming from Steve Jobs, who was inspired by the graphical user interface he saw at Xerox PARC and turned that into the Macintosh. Now, as we've noted before, what Jobs was always great at doing wasn't just taking an idea and copying it, but making it better. But, many would argue that's the same thing that Google has done with Android. Yes, they clearly took inspiration from the iPhone, but there are some key differences, which many people enjoy. In fact, Steve Jobs pretty much admitted this very fact earlier this year when some of the iPhone's upgrades appeared to be copied directly from Android."(Emphasis added)

So everyone is copying from each other and making incremental improvements. Again, this points to the absurdity of today's misguided approach to so-called "intellectual property". All that so-called "intellectual property" does is retard progress by making progress a liability.

So it must be an amazing coincidence that MS Windows was remarkably similar to Mac OS?

Right now I work for a tiny company that maintains what was another spinoff of the Star system: Metaphor (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaphor_Computer_Systems)

Funny thing is our graphical interface still looks like that Star system screenshot. Someone unrelated to my firm posted a history at http://www.johnweeks.com/random/metaphor/. Back in the 70's and 80's, everybody was ripping each other off.

Not really. Products evolve, in part, based on ergonomics so they tend to "acquire" the look and feel of similar products. Form follows function.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Form_follows_function

No coincidence at all.

Bill Gates and Steve Jobs
John Paczkowski

This is a direct quote's from Steve Jobs:

"The developer relationship between Microsoft and Apple is one of the best Apple has,If the game was a zero-sum game where if Apple wanted to win, Microsoft had to lose, then Apple was going to lose. But Apple didn’t have to beat Microsoft. It had to remember what Apple was. Microsoft was the biggest software developer around, and Apple was weak. So I called Bill up.."

"You know, when Bill and I first met each other and worked together in the early days, generally, we were both the youngest guys in the room, right? Individually or together. I’m about six months older than he is, but roughly the same age. And now when we’re working at our respective companies, I don’t know about you, but I’m the oldest guy in the room most of the time. And that’s why I love being here. … And, you know, I think of most things in life as either a Bob Dylan or a Beatles song, but there’s that one line in that one Beatles song, “you and I have memories longer than the road that stretches out ahead.” And that’s clearly true here."

coincidence? I think not!

Read the whole interview:

http://allthingsd.com/20070530/d5-gates-jobs-interview/