Yes, Google "Stole" From Apple, And That's A Good Thing
forbes.com
forbes.com
There are a lot of narrow physical constraints operating in this market: the size of the human hand, the size of a fingertip, the range of human vision, the distance from the eye to the screen in terms of arm's length. There are other technology givens like the resolution of a screen that fits in the hand and the precision of touch technology. There are cultural givens to pull something apart to stretch it or push it together to make it smaller, or to advance a view by turning a page.
The more you think about these problems, the more you realize how narrow the space for innovation was in them, and in fact how many of Apple's innovations were anticipated by the market. Apple got there first with the whole package and reaped the benefits in mindshare. But they shouldn't be able to seek rent on a solution that experts would create in a vacuum.
As a universal truth, I don't buy this. This is partially based on my own engineering experience, but in terms of the smartphone market I see WP7 (and to a lesser extent Palm) and see touch phone experiences that are significantly different than what Apple developed/evolved with iOS (although it is true that some of the implementation details like pinch-to-zoom are present there as well, but other details are different).
There is no universal axiom that says that a smartphone experience has to look like an iPhone. I think everyone would be better off if Google took more of an independent route rather than just building an experience using bits and pieces of iOS and WP7.
The current market provides some evidence.
http://searchengineland.com/comscore-android-nears-50-us-sma...
70% of the smartphone market is in iOS and Android, two very similar smartphone experiences. RIM's distinctive experience is at 20% and falling fast (it was at 27% in March). WP7 is an also ran at 5%. Symbian is at 2%. Palm is not in the chart.
If you believe those numbers, the contest is all but over. Every non-iOS non-Android experience is failing in the market. It may not be just because of their designs, but I think you have to believe on other grounds that UX/design is the major selling point for all smartphones. The second contender might be applications, and iOS and Android are the leaders there too, by a wide margin over the field.
I think Google decided to beat Apple at its own game. Whatever you believe about how they used Apple's patented material (or not) or how valid the patents are (or not), clearly at some point a decision was made to compete with Apple not just on features, but also in UI polish and look and feel.
And somebody probably looked at Apple and said, how can we top that? When they couldn't, they kept it as similar as possible for a variety of reasons: the patents were too broad to be enforceable, they could justify deriving the same concepts in a vacuum because they come from well known UX principles that predate the patents, the design elements were universals that all phones should have, they should lower switching costs from iOS to Android.
I agree with you that Google could have gone its own way when designing a phone experience. But I don't know that that would have been a path to success. You would only have to believe the preceding paragraph to imagine that a think-different UX could have been worse for consumers.
The non-recognition of this fact of course is the biggest threat for Apple and non-recognition of pretensions of owning 'innovation' a threat. Because selling pretentiousness is the business model.
Google scrapped that and then turned around and copied the iPhone. And they copied everything about the iPhone. The resolution was the same. There were the same number of icons per row. Applications placed icons in the same place. You pinched to zoom on both devices. You switched between screens by swiping on both systems. Both systems had an app store (a previously unheard of way to deliver applications).
This isn't Mac vs. Windows or Xerox vs. Mac. This was way above that in the theft department.
An app store as we understand it today where you click a buy button and the app installs on your computer was an Apple innovation
May I present to you Synaptic:
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Synaptic_%28s...
Fits the bill, minus the polish. And that's really where Apple's genius is, polishing the hell out of a concept in order to make it desirable. Just don't pretend it's an original concept.
edit: which of course, is just apt-get/synaptic + the ability to pay money. All of the real innovation came from Debian.
Steam - 2004 Xbox Live Marketplace - 2005 Playstation Store - 2006 Playstation Store for handheld gaming devices - 2008
I appreciate that Apple's done good work but they built on the shoulders of everyone that came before them.
Why should Google screw up their platform so that they wouldn't look like Apple?
As for screwing up their platform I'm not saying they should of. The patent system is screwed up and I'm glad Android stole from the iPhone because it means there's actual competition.
But there's a difference between saying "Yeah, Google stole from the iPhone but its the fault of a bad patent system" and denying Google stole from Apple at all.
What is a good physical size for the screen.
What is the kind of resolution we can get on a LCD of that size?
How many icons can we fit on that screen, which can be easily manipulated by users (there aren't that many options, as you can't fit that many icons on the screen).
It seems to me many of these kinds of things fit into into a set of "only one real option", once you've decided (and this might be the 'big copied thing') to have a phone which is just a touch screen + a single button (or 3 on android)).
Do we want to say that if a company A does something that's similar to company B's work, we shouldn't allow that to happen. Ever. I think breaks down pretty badly if you consider the case of, say, generic AIDS drugs. These "copied" drugs are saving lives and that to me is way more important than any IP-infringement issues.
In the Apple vs Google case, it seems like this copying has been a good thing - we now have a lot of really great smartphones trying to out-compete each other. So it's not clear to me that if this copying was banned, this would've been good for human society as a whole.
OTOH, if you consider something like Intel copying the RISC microarchitectures of the 90s and essentially driving the likes of Compaq, DEC and MIPS out of business, allowing those ideas to copied was almost definitely bad for consumers.
The point is that there isn't a clear-cut right-or-wrong answer on this one. It seems like whether copying is a good thing depends more on who is copying who, and how much money each of the participants have, than on exactly what is copied.
If you develop a useful UI paradigm or technology, I may make use of it if it is fitting.
The time when "stole" seems appropriate is if Google stole the design from a non-public version of the iPhone. Which maybe did happen (via Schmidt), but that's generally not what people are referring to when they use the term.
I don't understand how you can argue this was bad for consumers when it made fast CPUs so much cheaper. Okay, it stuck us with the x86 architecture, which wasn't so great for programmers, you could argue. But how was this a problem for consumers?
I think the reality is quite the contrary: if Intel hadn't done that (and BTW it wasn't just Intel), modern consumer-grade machines would be 1/10 as powerful, or less. The kind of power I now have in my laptop would be confined to $20k workstations.
If you remember back to 2000 or so, Intel had killed all their competitors, bought Alpha and then threw it way were trying two rather briandead architectures in the P4 and the Itanium. They were able to get away with it because essentially they had no competition. AMD saved us from this with the Greyhound and x86-64 and there's no guarantee that Intel would've done anything similar if not for them.
I think the reality is quite the contrary: if Intel hadn't done that (and BTW it wasn't just Intel), modern consumer-grade machines would be 1/10 as powerful, or less. The kind of power I now have in my laptop would be confined to $20k workstations.
The reason you have that kind of performance increase over the last 30 years or so is because of CMOS scaling and let's not kid ourselves into thinking that this is driven by Intel. CMOS scaling was predicted by IBM's Bob Dennard back in the 70s and all we've done since then is pretty much just follow his roadmap.
It's not like computers weren't getting cheaper and faster before Intel became the dominant monopoly.
That seems kind of at odds with what you're saying. It makes this seem more like a proof of concept, released after videos of touch-based phones, that Android could work under multiple forms.
I just thought the point would be obvious since it makes no sense for Android to be more iPhone like, then go to this, then go back to being iPhone like.
But your core point is probably right; they probably did see the iphone and say "well shit. Call up the team." I don't think it should be illegal, but you're likely correct on what actually happened. And yeah, it's funny people are so averse to saying that.
(And I recently realized I'm a big Google fan. ... Is there a name for us? I need to get to know my people!)
Edit: Blackberry from 04/05 http://www.opera.com/mobile/download/blackberry/7100t/
Microsoft was showing off their Surface product (with 1:1 user interactions, pinch to zoom, and swiping around) before iPhone's release. The concept behind it was pretty prevalent in science fiction, most prominently the movie Minority Report.
Laying out apps in rows of icons has existed since some of the first UIs have been created. You don't have to look further than any Blackberry to see exactly where Apple got the idea from for doing it on a mobile device.
The Danger Hiptop (commonly known as the T-Mobile Sidekick) had a complete app store that they called the Download Catalog. You wrote apps using their Java ME SDK, and the only way to get them onto the device was by distributing through this central repository. Apps would have to be curated and tested. Sound familiar? And this was back as early as 2002. Not to mention the plethora of Linux package repos. The concept of a centralized distribution store existed long before iOS.
iOS was completely built on the work and ideas that already existed in the industry. Android was no different, only it happened to come out after iOS. So it incorporated those ideas as well. That's practically the definition of innovation. Trying to white-knight and make out Apple to be some saint of a company that didn't do the exact same (and completely justified) thing as Google is just naive. Google didn't "steal" from Apple any more than they did from Palm or HTC or Microsoft. Or any more than Apple "stole" from Palm or HTC or Microsoft.
If you make a new cooking device that's somehow easier, it seems like a patent is a reasonable protection of your innovation. Cooking has been around for a long time, so if you come up with something clever that saves a few minutes, then that must be novel.
However, with technology changing so fast, it seems to change the equation. When good touchscreens came out that would fit nicely on a phone, there was really no "standard" way of using them in that context. So, almost by definition, the first few things that people implement are both new and obvious.
It's not that such things aren't somewhat innovative. But it seems like it's going too far to grant long-term patent protection for such things.
Maybe we need a 3-year version of a patent that can cover fast-changing areas like this? I feel pretty confident that someone would have invented a good UI independently of the iPhone (whether similar to the iphone or not) within about 3 years of the availability of the underlying technology.
I'd personally prefer a competitive landscape where players do what Harris's team did at Microsoft or what Palm did with WebOS, which is to make it their own. Tiles instead of icons. Cards for switching and closing apps instead of iOS's in and out. Big players who copy are bad for innovation, not good for it.
He did feel betrayed by Schmidt but he makes it clear he feels animosity towards the whole company (there's a depicted scene where he grudgingly agrees to advise Larry Page because he feels its his duty as an elder statesman)
http://gizmodo.com/5479684/google-ceos-mistress-tell+all-blo...
I don't think that Schmidt stepped out of board meetings until early demos of the G1 were shown off bearing a resemblance to the iPhone.
Ultimately, I think Job's emotional reaction is one common to forward thinking people. Andrew Masson has been similarly disgusted with Groupon clones. PG hasn't exactly been sanguine about the YCominator knockoffs. The copycat competitors contribute in many ways, but I think that great minds can only respect people who bring truly new ideas to the table, not those that find a niche or an edge in the marketplace after riding in their wake.
Yes, some sharing is good for consumers, but at some point the knockoffs need to be called on it. The whole discussion boils down to where that line is.
(I'd provide a link but I'm on a flaky connection right now. It was on reddit, and probably on HN as well).
http://channel9.msdn.com/blogs/laurafoy/a-peek-inside-micros...
So the funny thing about the article is that it states as fact that Google copied Apple's pinch-to-zoom (but that it was a good thing), when in fact the case could be made that Apple copied Microsoft's pinch-to-zoom (I'm not sure if they did or not).
Excerpts:
A breakthrough occurred in 1991, when Pierre Wellner published a paper on his multi-touch “Digital Desk”, which supported multi-finger and pinching motions.
... however both the function and the term predate the announcement or patent requests, except for such area of application as capacitive mobile screens, which did not exist before Fingerworks/Apple's technology
If the courts were to ever rule in Apple's favor, it would probably revolve around the tech behind it.
I too believe much of this has to do with Schmidt on the board and the radical change of Android from pre to post iPhone. It just seems we really lost something when they made their switch.
I don't know about that. If they changed their "vision" from "replicate blackberry" to "replicate iPhone", we (where "we" = "society"/"everybody") didn't stand to gain anything in the first place, apart from cheaper phones maybe (and even that...)
There was really a shot at trying a lot of new ways to interact with mobile devices and very little made it to market in the quest to follow the other guy.
I'm glad Microsoft at least is going that way. Palm tried it as well (and as far as I'm concerned WebOS still has the nicest notification system) although they failed for other reasons.
This reminds me of Ford's stance when Robert Kearns took them to court for his design of the intermittant windshield wiper (the story was made into a movie a while back).
Haven't they always been a do x good company? Web search and email were around for years before google showed up.
Allow companies to patent innovations but legally force them to license it to others for a "fair price". That way companies can still build on top of each other's innovations but inventors still get financial compensation for their invention.
I recognize there would be a problem in pricing the license but since these cases end up in court anyway (where a judge or jury determines the fair value) I don't see how allowing companies to resolve what "fair price" means would be any different than what we have now. Except it would take out the ambiguity for the consumer(since a company like Google would never have to pull the product from the market).
What if you think they copied the Palm Pilot GUI?
Music publishing has compulsory licensing, so there's some precedent about how it might work, but music copyrights are nearly as fucked as software patents. In neither case is the root problem addressed.
We need more pirate, less navy.
Apple did copy it from the Treo-era PalmOS. A grid of fingertip-sized tappable app icons.
And I'm OK with that, because it fosters progress, competition, and iterative improvements of existing technologies. I don't see the big issue with copying user interfaces. You'll either take the idea and improve on it, or make a mockery of it and your product will fail.
And who gets to define what is a "fair price"? The whole point of patents is that they are a monopoly, and they are inherently anti-competitive.