Will Steve Jobs' final vendetta haunt Google?

Well before PalmOS, Apple spent ~100 million dollars developing the Newton which also ended up having most of the major applications of a modern smartphone, including - with the appropriate PCMCIA cards installed in the slot(s) or external devices attached to the serial port - both phone service and location-based services.

The first Palm product was a software program that ran on the Newton; the first PalmOS devices were far less capable than Newton. So if you're just going by the feature set, I think Apple wins this one.

It's nice to see someone who actually remembers Palm. It's amazing how many people simply forget all about Palm altogether yet it was the thing to have in the 1996-2004 era.

As someone who has been observing the tech-industry since 2004[1]. This is what I have to say, Android (as a startup) was supposed to be an open-source alternative to the Blackberry and the first Android device (made by HTC) was in a "Qwerty" form-factor.

And the UI was (at the time) plain and among the most uninteresting that I'd ever seen[2].

To explain things clearly:

[1] I've been a gadgeteer from the late 90's and owned a Nokia 5110 when it came out. I've been an early adopter since and had one of the first smartphones (which included a camera) from Nokia, the 7650. I started covering the industry as a freelancer and was with one of the leading print magazines on tech.

[2] In regards to UIs on smartphones-pre iOS, most UIs were palatable and even interesting. The Nokia S60, Symbian UIQ, WM, etc were all different - none of them were copies, and some were just too intuitive once you were used to it (S60). So, when I used the Android emulator (the first device wasn't publicly released) I knew that it would never succeed with a mediocre UI.

And in response to @brudgers, where is Handspring now? Nokia were THE innovators in the smartphone market, where are they now? Nokia had tons of services before any Google service was palatable - NGage, Nokia Store, Nokia Music (comes with Music later on), etc. WAP and career billing existed pre-Apple. And if you're talking about Apple's mobile browser, the Mobile webkit was first ported over to a mobile OS by Nokia themselves (it was open-sourced as well).

Its all about the implementation. When a behemoth like Nokia could be brought down, just because they didn't anticipate Apple's all out assault. Apple had one of the best strategies one's which would've been known to other board members, are you going to say Nokia, MS, and other smartphone companies where complacent when Apple and later Android assaulted them?

Google had a clear direction on how to move forward with their OS, and it wasn't until after the iPhone was launched (and when Schmidt was a board member) did that idea come into place. I'm not accusing Google of stealing Apple's plans but the data is all out for you to parse and make sense of. And since we have many entrepreneurs and businessmen here, let me just say that business plans are as important as the product itself, even more so in a few sectors. I'm not prejudiced, but I make sense of what I can.

Were you around when the iPhone came out? Do you remember the day you first saw it? As it frustrates me people reinventing history. I remember seeing an iPhone for the first time. It was literally a total game changer, revolutionary is a fair word and I use it rarely.

It was years ahead of anything else on the market. The UX was incredible. Everything just worked without incredibly complicated interfaces and clicking a million different options.

You're not looking at the whole product hard enough. The UX is what made it so incredible. The fact it was touch based when everyone said there wasn't a market or that it was too expensive was an added bonus rather than the main feature. But that multi-touch screen enabled Apple to make a truly gorgeous UX. The way it all ties together. The little (and totally un-noticable) UX features that just make it all work so well but you don't notice them any more because they're so ubiquitous because Android copied them all.

Specific examples:

1. The web browser. I remember being incredulous at the time. Nonsense! I said. Viewing normal websites on a mobile? It'll be unusable! Phooey! Then my friend passed me his iPhone and I played with the wonderful pinch and zoom. I switched websites using the on screen keyboard that unobtrusively appeared like magic when I clicked on the address. I was astounded. And totally proved wrong. They were very nascent at the time. People used to have to make websites specifically for browsers and no-one really bothered. My old company did for their browser based application (quite revolutionary at the time) and it was an extremely limited subset of functionality. See your own link, the first one, for how useless the first attempts were. What on earth are those little icons in the top right corner?

And Apple just walked into a market they had no experience with and, Plop! Incredible mobile web browser straight out the gate.

2. The home screen. You could customise it! And move stuff around. And it's accessible without pressing back 20 times! Wow. No longer were you locked into having the media player as option 8 that you had to press 9 buttons to get to. Gah, those old phone screens still make me shudder. They pretty much exposed every setting as a gigantic list on your home screen. And there were so many options. I still feel a little surprised every time I open the iPhone's general settings.

3. The contacts book, no phone before the iPhone had a usable contact book. It was a list. If you were lucky you could search. But that would probably be at least a few button presses on top of the search.

4. Text message interface. Totally different to how other phones did it, conversation based instead of just a list (see your own link for how it used to be done).

5. The email tie-in. A simple UX for emails? Nice little notifications? Push? In a consumer phone? It's not a blackberry? Incredible!

6. The media player. An intuitive interface for playing or manipulating playing songs? And iTunes! Crap as it may be in today's eyes, it was so much better than the crud that came bundled with other phones at the time.

7. The microphone, volume controls and phone answering.

8. The 'silent' mode switch. Faffing around through about 10 actions to turn on silent mode? No more, one tactile feedback switch with the added bonus that you can run your thumb over it in your pocket to see if silent mode is on.

9. The synch just worked. You just plugged it in and it worked. In the 3 or 4 years that the other manufacturers had computer tie-in they'd managed to produce every conceivable piece of rubbish synching software you could imagine. The iPhone was the first phone I saw anyone actually bother to synch with their computer.

10. The wi-fi. It has wifi? No way. And it just works? Not 20 minutes fiddling, it just worked. And it did amazingly smart things like use the wifi for email and browsing when you were near a known network. This. Is. Amazing. The reason it had this incredible feature was because it had a mobile browser that would have caned your mobile data plan which were restrictive to say the least. Other phones didn't have wifi connections.

The list is much, much longer than this. There's just so many little tweaks and incredible modifications they made to how a mobile phone should operate that beggar belief that anyone would claim it's just a 'step', it was a gigantic leap.

Phone manufacturers were total failures when it came to the actual software for their phones. Total and utter failures. They couldn't do it! The UX was always horrific. The iPhone changed that permanently.

It reinvented usable mobile phones. Before that everyone just used a tiny subset of the capabilities because they were so god-damn complicated.

And Android took it all. Copied it. This is what Android looked like when the iPhone came out, it looked like every other phone on the market, a terrible UX, with absolutely no vision:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FJHYqE0RDg

I've said before, credit where due to the android team for changing direction so fast and so well, but they lifted that OS from Apple, no doubt in my mind.

NB: I'm not an Apple fanboi, I only have an iPhone. But to dismiss the iPhone as a 'step' is absurd to me.

> If FaceTime and iMessage were available on Android

This is about as likely as them licensing iOS to other handset makers. There's little to nothing for Apple in such a move.

>Apple has pledged to be true to Jobs' vision? Really? Because I think we just saw a better-sourced article state that Jobs himself said "Don't ask, 'What would Steve do?'".

I don't think that Jobs was alone in his feelings on Google and Android at Apple, whether it's justified or not. I'm reminded of a Gruber article:

http://daringfireball.net/2011/07/succeeding_steve_jobs

"ERIC SCHMIDT. Zero chance. Schmidt is viewed throughout Apple as a traitor, who perhaps used his knowledge of the iPhone, gleaned while then a member of Apple’s board himself, to give Google’s Android effort a leg up. There is a better chance of Apple choosing its next CEO through a raffle of ten golden tickets hidden inside iPad boxes distributed around the globe than that they’d give the job to Eric Schmidt. Wall Street might accept him but Apple rank-and-file would revolt."

Why do so many mobile site redirects get this wrong?

I'm not sure if you were referring to the author of the book, but this is an authorized biography with interviews of Steve Jobs. I have no idea who the proceeds go to but this was obviously something Steve Jobs wanted to happen.

The mouse was invented by Doug Engelbart and 'stolen' by Xerox and then 'stolen' by Apple. Apple's mouse was well designed, compact, cheap, reliable, very dependable and consistent in its function. None of this was true of the two previous mice.

This is the difference when Apple 'steals'. They are inspired by something poorly executed and create something much better than the inspiration.

I have seen this banded about the internet too much of late and it's about time it stopped, I mean it's not as if the information is out there, is it? The mouse wasn't invented by Xerox. The concept was invented by Doug Engelbart of SRI in the 1960's and first demoed in 1968 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfIgzSoTMOs). The GUI was around as a concept before PARC existed. Ivan Sutherland is credited as creating the first working GUI with Sketchpad in, released in 1963 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOZqRJzE8xg). You'll notice that the interface ideas found in the Alto and later systems (Star?) by PARC (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Alto_Neptune_Filemanager.g...) were influenced by those of Engelbart in his demo, or to use your language, "stolen". If you look back further, you'll come across Vannevar Bush, who outlined the majority of what went on to become modern computing in an essay about a conceptual system called 'Memex' in 1945, so I guess using your language, everyone 'stole' from him.

As a footnote, Xerox/PARC were remunerated fairly by Apple with 1 million pre-IPO shares, valued at around $7/share which Xerox later sold for $16 million (~$45 million today).

Finally, making criticisms like that is fine, but at least get the meme right. Apple were said to have "stolen" the GUI concept that Xerox apparently "invented".

> "stolen"

There has been no invention in the history of mankind that was not produced without learning from the past work of others.

According to Wikipedia, the first mouse was developed by Douglas Engelbart at the Stanford Research Institute in 1963. Regardless, Xerox was paid in pre-IPO Apple stock, so I don't understand why people try to say Apple stole anything from Xerox.