Delta pilot sues the airline for allegedly stealing an app he designed
engadget.com
engadget.com
The article talks about this huge problem...the genesis of his idea was this problem that 100s of people, in the airline industry, at Delta, all faced - including their technical teams, operations leadership, executives, etc. With all of those folks facing the same problem, it's not unexpected that some come with the same general solution. Practically speaking, whether it was the pilot or the technical team at Delta, anyone building a chat solution would be familiar with the same chat UIs; at some level, when have any of us used an app that had a truly unique design? Many would argue that the UX best practice is to use familiar elements, from popular apps, so not to have to re-educate the user.
That doesn't mean they didn't steal the app. However, in my experience, people with all sorts of ideas hit up executives at big companies all the time. That repetition is the basis for brand marketing. It's likely they were pitched a similar solution to that same problem both before and after that person met with their team.
Barring some egregious fraud, not mentioned in the article, or some major bad acting, it seems like a hard argument to make.
That's not to mention all the strategy consultants / management consultants love to bring their own innovative ideas to the table.
Not to say it isn't a good idea but the limited description seems like an idea that I imagine more than one person could have come up with.
That's not to justify the company's actions, but if that is the app I'm not sure how novel a thing we're talking about here and maybe the needs that weren't met were simply back-end tech based and not idea based...?
How many 'roughly the same idea but X' start ups are out there? and it's not always the first that succeeds.
That is not the same as two disparate people who have never communicated coming up with the same idea for something.
The app as described in this article at least is incredibly generic - I'd imagine the Delta board members could independently arrive at the conclusion such software features would help and also determine that there may be other options to select that fit their operational requirements better. "Role based text messaging" sounds a lot like a workplace chat app...
Don't talk to people unless you get paid for the time you invested, the guy behind AppGet had to learn that the hard way, as did hundreds of service companies that got used to outsource initial project planing without ever hearing back from their potential customers.
Especially for "role based chat", there are many mature enterprise offerings in that space already. It's arguably only pertinent to evaluate all options aside from the single one presented by an employee trying to sell a side project.
Of course, so why even involve the pilot at all if his App idea was obvious and he could never hope to provide the services required by Delta? Clearly at least some delta managers thought they would get some value out of those meetings.
Delta execs could have come up with the same idea independently.
But they didn't, they literally took the idea off him after they met with him to discuss his solution.
Why are you still arguing about whether it's theoretically possible that they could have come up with it without him?
It strikes me as incredibly unlikely in 2016 Delta management at some level weren't aware of the concept of workplace messaging software. Besides this one employee, there were loads of companies trying to sell this in 2016 too (Yammer, Slack, HipChat, etc, etc) as well as the usual enterprise vendors.
You're talking about IN THEORY. There's a difference between NOT purchasing something and completely stealing someones idea / design. How is that not clear to you?
If I purchase a washing machine from Hotpoint, I don't steal the idea of washing machines from their rivals. Thanks for the capitalization, I'd never have understood your "theory" of events without it.
That said, maybe he asked for something absurd like a billion dollars for what was effectively "a good idea." Hard to know without that and the fact that the information isn't in here leads me to believe that the answer doesn't land in his favor.
Suing your employer for $1 billion, bold strategy cotton. I suspect he's about to get a lot of the less desirable route assignments.
He was particularly keen on the London - Australia double header, apparently he made bank on that route.
Or is the implication that the airline is likely to blow up their own airplane and kill hundreds of passengers just to swap one major lawsuit for hundreds of major lawsuits?
But let’s be generous here and assume his story is 100% true; his app was stolen and it is worth $1 billion dollars to the company.
Why waste time in a stupid legal battle when you could be selling your app to one of the 5,000 other airlines on earth that likely have the same need? Delta has just proven how useful it is based on the fact that they built it themselves!
I highly doubt Delta will be selling internal tech to competitors, so the market opportunity should still be there.
If the founders’ time is best spent in a lawsuit with a single potential customer instead of selling to other customers, I’d say that’s a sign it was never a viable business to begin with.
err, hate to burst your bubble, but I already had the idea for making a nickel a pop off of those people, and I'll fight you to the death over it.
It is clearly morally wrong, but is it illegal? Does someone here have a legal sense of this?
I recall as story about a manufacturer, building a new plant. He took "reasonable security precautions" to protect its design, fences, guards while being built. A competitor hired a plane, flew over, took detailed photos. It was later ruled that the trade secrets were intact, thus could not be used.
Not so sure about that. I recently interviewed where I asked something along the lines of, "So what would my daily responsibilities look like?" They refused to tell me what I would be doing day-to-day. No specifics on technologies, platforms, would I be helping internal/external groups, etc. Could not even get them to elaborate on specifics in the job posting itself.
That company? Google. He would've been employee # < 100, and comfortably retired in 10 years.
In this case his idea was "role-based" communication. He came up with this (2016) as Slack and other role-based solutions were storming across the market.
[1] - a common problem coupled with advancements in the field/technology often yield many people "inventing" the same thing simultaneously, because it's an obvious next step. It's why we're so negative of the countless useless "on a computer" patents, "on a network", etc.
> It's not about whether more than one person could come up withe idea, it's that he pitched it to his own employer, met multiple times with execs to discuss acquisition, only for them to suddenly cut him off and directly copy what he proposed with no remuneration.
> That is not the same as two disparate people who have never communicated coming up with the same idea for something.
It's entirely possible, if not probable, that there was independent efforts to build out "role-based" communications. Some employee comes along and says "Look, I've already developed an app do you want to buy it?". They talk with him and decide that what he has built isn't worthwhile and move on. Suddenly he thinks he has intellectual ownership over the entire premise (hence the hilarious $1B claim).
It doesn't work like that. Indeed, stories like this are why many firms simply don't want to listen to any pitches, because people often have a pretty outsized notion about their "inventions".
Again, maybe they really did rip off his idea. Maybe in 2016 they really had no idea of broadening their communications approaches (or I guess narrowing in this case). His lawyers can demand the pertinent records and that's what a court case is for. But just seeing this reminds me why I'm very clear in a lot of situations that I don't want people's ideas/inventions, because in almost every case they've been considered but now the person thinks they invented it and have ownership over it.
He could have had some implementation of some kind of basic messaging functionality, which for any number of reasons they may have decided to implement themselves, which is pretty rational for a whole host of reasons.
If an employee is trying to sell a 'side project' to a Corp. they are acting effectively as a 3rd party and should expect to be treated as such.
If there was some material, core IP that was infringed upon, maybe there's an issue, but otherwise some kind of independent implementation is probably within bounds.
I can't speak to what extent there was 'carbon copy' of features, or even if that is lawful or what not.
Think of it like this: company ABC pitches their app to Airline. Airline decides to roll their own, and the feature base seems quite similar. That's pretty normal.
I’ve seen enough to know, that your secret sauce probably isn’t as secret as you think. Even in the ridiculously tight-lipped world of quant trading, it turns out that everyone’s mostly doing the same few basic ideas with not much more to distinguish than a few peripheral variations here and there.
In general execution ability, not having the best idea, tends to be the main driver of which teams win. If a third party does think your idea is brilliant, then stealing it from you is a pretty moronic way to capitalize on it. You’re creating a motivated competitor from day one who by definition has a lot more domain expertise.
It’s much simpler to just cut the guy a check for equity in the company.
It's possible the codebase was a patchwork of Bootstrap, PHP, Wordpress, and jQuery UI plugins that could buckle under a production load. It could have been a good idea poorly executed; we just don't know right now.
There's a good chance the app did what it was supposed to just fine, but Delta couldn't sign on because it didn't have Reporting Requirements, SOC2 Compliant or a litany of other things that an Enterprise would require to sign on.
I work for a company that sells a SaaS product, it's not unlike many others, but we win sales based on how flexible / well we integrate with our customer's wonky systems.
What our application does is roughly the same as anyone else's ... but for many customers ease of integration with their systems is the make or break point.
So like most enterprisey software. You'd be amazed how much enterprise software has a customer of 1 and any bugs the end users have a workaround simply because they are a captive audience that had this steaming pile foisted on them.
I suspect the story stretches out over a long time period, and has lots of variables.
I can think of many ways that either side could be cast as villain or protagonist.
I thought that was both pretty cool and also interesting that they all had tons of data on any customer within a few clicks.
Verbal agreements are as good as the paper they’re signed on though - Big Business 101
Verbal agreements are legally binding in many jurisdictions, but they're hard to enforce for obvious reasons.
Boeing paid a lot of money over the years to use the design patent of engines in the back used on 727s. Personally, I thought the patent was ridiculous, but that's how the patent system works.
If he was a software engineer, his contract would state that it belonged to his employer.
Honestly this isn't very novel idea. It's possible that many people came up with this very same idea before he did.
Another great example of the lawyer's mantra: get it in handwriting!
News at 11.
It reads like selling the idea of an umbrella to a wet guy in the rain, and then suing him when later he refuses to pay.
In some cases, yes.
> It reads like selling the idea of an umbrella to a wet guy in the rain, and then suing him when later he refuses to pay.
It’s more like the wet guy listening to your pitch, playing with the product to see how it works and then declining as he goes to make an identical one to avoid paying you.
You show someone that a telephone can save them time.
They interview you about telephones.
They then decide not to pay you about applying your telephone idea tot heir system and create their own.
The value here is really in either a)the consulting or b) your telephone product being so great they can’t copy it.
His app idea if he spent 100k and only that nominal amount likely wasn’t that unique or special
Then pay him. If they had no one bright enough to come up with it themselves, they received something of value.