If Android is a "stolen product," then so was the iPhone
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
It seems to me that he wasn't calling it stolen because it was a similar product - other comments of his indicate that he was was well aware that the technology would be cloned.
He was calling it stolen because he felt the time-to-market advantage had been stolen by an insider who breached his trust. I think this is what drove his animosity.
Android is obviously deeply influenced by the iPhone. The iPhone is obviously influenced by a whole load of other products (though not to quite the same extent).
What makes it 'stealing' is whether the influence was underhand or not.
We don't know whether Eric Schmidt did use inside information in breach of trust, but if he did then Jobs' position seems a lot more supportable.
Pre-iPhone, Android's demo phones looked like a BlackBerry clone: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Android_mobile_phone_platf...
http://www.osnews.com/story/25264/Did_Android_Really_Look_Li...
iPhone was announced January 2007 and released June 2007. That's hardly pre-iPhone.
Steve Jobs must have really sold the board on the viability of next-gen smart phones: "guys - our work on iPods shows us we are just about at the point where almost-PC-class processors, RAM, and hard drives can be crammed into a mobile-phone sized package, without wiping out the battery in 12 hours. You know what will happen next?"
If that was the reason Google put so much effort into Android, then Google effectively stole Apple's strategy. Sure, some random Googlers would have thought of it, but it may not have been sold as well at the top level. Remember, Steve Jobs was an unbelievably good strategy salesman.
It's inevitable then that Android would follow the market leader - that's what products do.
Google had already bought Android and bet on next-gen smartphones well before Eric Schmidt joined the Apple board. And that bet was already serious and high-level. Schmidt wasn't involved in the acquisition, but Larry Page was. They were also, correctly, talking about mobile as the "next great frontier of search". If that wasn't a big deal at Google, I don't know what could be.
Like design of any architecture, a consumer product is always a package of many components. Knowing what component to keep and what not to and tuning each to best please the user and work together are the art and the kind of innovation that is the most difficult to find.
And you know people are copying/stealing just by looking at it:
- http://www.flickr.com/photos/tjetjep/4100430224/ - http://micgadget.com/8168/shanzhai-sydney-opera-house/
The "entire package" of Android included a huge number of features that the iPhone did not, many of which later got incorporated into iOS.
> Pre-iPhone, Android's demo phones looked like a BlackBerry clone
As I understand it they had full screen touch-based prototypes as well. They were experimenting with everything. Of course, what actually emerged into production was iPhone-like because by then the market had moved in that direction.
wrong.
</sarcasm>
Sorry, for all that I wasn't personally a fan, I remember how amazing the O2 XDA (and its its immediate relatives) were at the time and I have to stick up for them (and HTC, of course).
This article is heartily missing the point.
Android is basically a stolen product. It's a direct successor and competitor to the iPhone, and the direction of Android in it's current form has been and is extremely influenced by what Apple has been doing.
Sure, the iPhone is a bunch of "stolen" technologies and ideas, but Apple brought them together to make something great in a way that had never been done before. What Apple did took vision, discipline, and execution. That is what Apple brought to the table, and that is what innovation is.
Nobody was making products that resembled the iPhone before Apple, but now everyone is trying.
We don't need to get all emotional about this. This doesn't have anything to do with the quality of the products, it's just the history about how this stuff came about. You are still free to like Android or WebOS or iOS or whatever you want. It's fine. Just recognize innovation for what it is.
This video describes very well how inventions get created and then evolve for the benefit of everyone:
That's blatantly false. Every smartphone I owned going back to 2003 resembled the iPhone. Smartphones of the day either resembled the iPhone or they resembled the blackberry but both designs were out there in number. After the iPhone was released almost everyone dropped their blackberry-like designs (except for RIM).
Apple's innovation was the capacitive multi-touch screen and finger-friendly interface. I'm not even sure that's a revolution just an evolution of existing designs.
Which phones?
This is pretty close to the one I owned around 2002: http://img.tomshardware.com/us/2002/04/04/comparison_of_six_...
Ah, here we are: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Sony-CLIE-PEG-NZ90.jpg
The iPhone is a fine product. The ground it broke was making people want a PDA, not actually inventing the PDA.
Which of course is the whole point: ideas are items of trade. Someone thinks of something and someone else improves it. That's the way innovation works. Apple has surely done more of it than any other single company, but they've also, like everyone else, "stolen" far more than they invented themselves.
Claiming that they have some special ground with the iPhone is just a laughable, juvenile flame war. I wish these would stop.
Back in 2007 I joined a new employer. One evening during my new hire training a colleague demo'ed his iPhone he brought over from America to Europe. All other attendees, including myself, were amazed about the multitouch, pinch and zoom photo's, the easiness of use, the awesome GUI and the beautiful design. At the end of the demo there was a deep respectful silence by all of us. Amazement. Thinking about our own phones at the time compared to what we just saw.
Then.. the owner of the iPhone put it gently against his face and caressed it. Yes he actually caressed it. I still remember that image.
This is the "thing". You know, this thing called love. Something that cannot be traded like an item and which still holds true for many.
The Treo was the original smartphone. The orignal smart phone that Blackberry copied was the Treo.
Apple's spin was ditching the keyboard, but by then even the sony ericcson P800 had a full screen phone with a touch keyboard years before apple.
but it was a niche product that probably didn't appear in the u.s. much.
as a psion user i lusted after these devices. but price of mobile data put them out of my reach.
i used a psion 5 as my main computer till 99 when i wanted to start ripping cds for an mp3 player amongst other things.
Fair enough, but now you're describing evolution, not revolution.
Apples spin wasn't ditching the keyboard as so many people think, it was designing the user interface around finger-based touch, making the interface easy enough for normal people to use, and finally to ship a decent performing browser at a time when most other phones were a nightmare to use when browsing the web (try a N95, also released in 2007, to see what I mean)
I forgot about the communicator because I didn't consider it a smart-enough phone to use. I kept using my Palm Pilot Pro becuse it gave me the productivity I needed. The communicator definitely had a keyboard and apps though, I just didn't find them usable at the time.
By far it is still one of the most bad ass looking phones, with that folding out.
On a side note, the Handspring Visor Phone addon is also worthy of a shoutout, since it was out before the Treo..
http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/Handspring_Releases_V...
before thi ihone, no app store no multi touch, litte integration outside of the blackberry, and smartphones and phones in general sucked by comparison. how quickly we forget how crappy what we had before was. sure, previous products had lots f features............ but they didnt blowpeoples minds, or make their companies the most valuable ever.
I wonder what Andy Rubin would say about that...
We're not forgetting that they sucked. We're pointing out Apple didn't invent this stuff.
Touchscreens, had those for years. Multi-touch? Lots shown in the ARS article. Here's some http://tactiva.com/demo.html. Includes pinch to zoom, 2 finger rotate objects. Also includes tactile feedback, something no tablet has introed yet AFAIK.
Apps, had those too for years. Oh look, it's instructions from 2001 on how to write apps for phones http://www.geocities.co.jp/SiliconValley-Cupertino/1621/
App stores? Did you ever bother to look? There's been app stores since at least 2001. None of them were that popular but they did exist.
Oh look, my WinCE box boots into a grid of icons in 2001 http://blog.greggman.com/japan/ce/dsc03224.jpg
Maps, I had 3d first person maps on my 2004 feature phone, something still missing from any iPhones I know of. They had 2d maps in 2000
Games, Yep, last 5 phones I owned before my iPhone all had downloadable games. Here's me playing mappy I just purchased from an online app store in 2001 http://blog.greggman.com/blog/what_s_this_/
Cameras? Here's pictures from my 2001 cellphone camera http://blog.greggman.com/blog/pictures_from_cell_/
Facetime? Here's Facetime on a P2101V from 2001 http://blog.greggman.com/blog/more_cellphone_madness/
Front and back cameras? 2002 http://joi.ito.com/weblog/2002/11/15/my-new-p504is.html
Airtime, i.e. TV playback? 2003 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2XWLG-6qPwo
Webpage browsing? Yep. Wrote my first blog post from a phone in 2001. Maybe Apple can claim full browsing first on iPhone though I suspect people have earlier examples. I could certainly view full pages through Opera Mini before iPhone.
Music? Several of the phones I owned has music stores built in and some phones advertised how awesome a movie player they were. Synced to PC and everything.
Want an iPad? How about the Sony Airboard, 2001. Wireless internet browsing touchscreen tablet http://www.sony.jp/airboard/indexpc.html
Did Apple take all those features and make them super awesome? YES.
The point is THEY TOOK EXISTING FEATURES. They didn't invent them. They just made them way better. Awesome. It's the little details they did well. It's the sum of the parts. It's pretty hard to pick any one thing for which there is no precedence. Cut and Paste? old. Zoom under pointer? Old. Slide to Unlock? Old. Email? Old. Pages of icons? old. They brought awesome style and design but even my old B/W WinCE machine linked above I didn't need or use any of the buttons except POWER and I could use my finger to control everything else.
http://www.gsmarena.com/palm_treo_180-623.php
Palm OS looks a lot like iOS when you factor in the era's technology.
So, as a Palm "Fanboy" I can say with certainty that those devices were not even in the same product category as the iPhone. Suggesting that they looked like iOS is farcical at best. I recall struggling for the better part of a week to purchase and install a "Yahtzee game" for the phone. Even after nine months on the 600, I _still_ was unable to reliably hit the proper key sequence to dial a number out of my phone book (the Cancel had the focus by default, so you would "select number, hit enter - and cancel out. Instead you had to "Select number, change focus, _then_ hit number to dial. They finally reversed it on the 700, screwing up 18 months+ of muscle memory that finally developed.
net-net - anybody who ever owned a Palm, and particularly those who used the browser, will state beyond a shadow of a doubt the iPhone and Palm had no relationship, evolutionary or otherwise, to each other.
Did the iPhone do the things my Treo could do much, much better? Was it a great step forward? Absolutely. The iPhone was and is amazing [1]. Nevertheless, saying that the iPhone stands apart from the broader evolution of mobile devices is either ignorance or a willful misreading of the relevant history.
[1] Though I will admit to finding the idea of paying money for ringtones of music you already owned a repugnant step back.
I think most people would agree that the iPhone 4S is an evolutionary upgrade over the original iPhone. Indeed, many, many of the Enhanced Browser/No Keyboard/App Store Enabled/Touch Screen smartphones today are closely related to the iPhone in a manner that that iPhone is not related to the Palm Treo - that's all I'm trying to say - that Apple did something completely new with the iPhone, rather than just iterating on a previous design.
I will _never_ forget the day I used the iPhone of a friend (I was among those who thought the concept of Apple getting into the "Phone" business was ludicrous, and was determined not to get one) - and used that browser/map. Within 48 hours I had an iPhone, and never looked back on my dear Treo.
Just because a particularly successful combination of traits looks like a giant leap doesn't mean it is (consider things like Nobel Prize winners or Olympic medalists born to "ordinary" parents). Similarly, the relationship of the iPhone to its predecessor phones is tighter than you think. Almost all of the traits that made the iPhone what it is were present in the predecessor population of smartphones.
In particular, I'd say the iPhone is what you get if you cross two specific devices and add the mutation of capacitive multi-touch (and the inevitable march of Moore's Law, of course). Those two devices are:
1. the O2 XDA (full touch screen, no keyboard, "enhanced" browser with desktop-like ambitions [even if it was Pocket IE]) 2. the Danger Hiptop (consumer focused device with similar built-in apps, centralized app download catalog / store)
Those ancestors were chosen quite carefully, of course. The manufacturer of the O2 XDA was HTC. A bunch of ex-Danger people (most notably Andy Rubin) went on to start Android. A smartphone cross in the iPhone's immediate vicinity was going to happen regardless.
Which is exactly why it resembled none of the smartphones that preceded it. That innovation was a monumental game changer.
Do you have specific smartphones in mind? The only ones of that era I'm more than passingly familiar with are the Palm phones, and they were nothing at all like the iPhone.
http://files.myopera.com/Yorch/blog/p800.jpg
Palm smartphones were the minority (in terms of total number of models).
Apple "advocates" always said: apple invented the gui, apple invented mp3 players, apple makes the fastest PC, apple's not the "big brother" company, etc. etc. Every claim usually turns out false. The Rep for "reality distortion field" has firm basis in trugth.
We can't always take Apple's claims at face value. This article just exposed, once again, another pro-Apple fallacy: that they own mini-tablet-phones and everyone stole the idea from them.
nonsense.
Apple made the GUI, MP3 players, etc. usable for the general public.
Apple "advocates", including some in this very thread, do routinely dismiss as unimportant, sucky, etc. every pre-Apple contribution in some of these categories (especially smartphones and tablets). I generally think they're trying to emphasize the importance and originality of Apple's contribution, but I can see how someone else might interpret that as saying "Apple invented X".
Palm was making touchscreen smartphones before iPhone.
Years before the iPhone I was carrying around an iPaq. Now it isn't quite the same, most notably because the original device didn't even function as a phone. Yet I would argue that the phone part of smartphone is by far the least important part (and the only reason it is so prevalent is that carrier subsidization allows people to stomach $700 iPhones). Really these things are ultra-portable computers and the phone thing is ancillary.
The iPaq wasn't multitouch. But here's the thing -- Apple bought that multitouch sensor. They didn't invent it. They didn't specify it. They didn't even initiate its creation. Their software used it brilliantly, but by the common narrative you'd think they had invented it.
Capacitive touchscreens evolved. Embedded processors evolved. GPUs evolved. Wireless technologies evolved. Batteries evolved. Makers like RIM pushed much of that evolution.
Apple stepped in at the perfect confluence of technologies and made the iPaq v2.0. Better in every way -- largely owing to those hardware improvements, all of which came from outside Apple -- but did it really invent an industry?
It's actually a bit sad how little credit RIM gets, given that they were the ones who pushed a lot of the innovation in mobile that made the iPhone possible. A distributed messaging, application platform, camera, etc...everyone just focuses on the damn keyboard as if it defines the platform.
Already I'm seeing many ascribing the iPad as inventing the tablet, forgetting so many products that came before (both real, such as Archos, and conceptual like the Crunchpad). Apple executes amazingly well, but their creations are seldom as out of left field as people imagine. They say that the victors write history, but it is sad if we're blinded into confusing commercial success with innovation.
And isn't the iPaq v1.0 just the Newton v2.0?
Do you think that was only because those devices lacked a capacitive touchscreen? If so, then why did every other company have to scratch their mobile platform after the iPhone came along? Why didn't Microsoft make Metro in 2006, after all, the techology was available (I tried a Panasonic Toughbook with a capacitive display way before that).
I agree that others should be credited for their inventions. Both RIM and others like Nokia helped pushed the technology forward, but they did so very gradually. It took an outsider to disrupt the industry (luckily, Apple had killed off the Newton, or they probably woudn't have had the incentive to do so).
For those right choices Apple has yielded incredible riches: Profits never before seen, quarter after quarter. They're a half-a-trillion dollar company.
All I argue about is this revisionist history that acts, essentially, like Apple is entitled to everything. That they borrowed nothing and created everything. It seems like I'm arguing against a strawman there, but it is too common of an opinion. It is an argument that is based upon taking the smallest trivia of Apple's implementation and making it the most profound, important thing ever, while everything else doesn't matter.
History of their company in making such products automatically creates a media hype around the products. Its like so long as products are not very bad, they are always good. And assumed to be so! They have done a lot of work to make that happen and deserve it too.
Don't forget that iPhone and iPad got the push because iPod generation of devices did a very good job convincing common folks that handheld devices can be usable. Again apple needs to be credited for this.
Android can be told to have copied iPhone's trend. Not as a product.
As you said others have done a better job building ecosystem to ensure such an innovation happens.
Besides everything being touch based, which was really disruptive, I believe a real disruption in the iPhone was that it included a full browser and not the mobile crap that existed back then, apps were good, but it was something that existed in other smartphones although without the centralized distribution medium, but they did exist.
Now some people are saying that Apple reign will not last just because smartphone prices will follow the same path that feature phones prices walked in the last 10 years, they will become much cheaper than now, I do not know about Apple remaining the leader or not but I do believe that smartphone prices will be really cheap in 2020, even for developing nations.
EDIT: typo and correction in the last paragraph.
The Nokia 770 from 2005/11 and the N800 which was released (2007/01) around the same time that Jobs was announcing the development of the iPhone. (These were Internet tablets with the hints of the telephony stack already included. Eventually the N900 phone did come out, too little too late unfortunately.)
Android has much more in common with Maemo than Apple iOS.
(And at the time, the 770 had a pretty amazing screen and user interface compared to most other mobile devices. If only Nokia had known that capacitive touchscreens existed and started porting the Hildon UI to multi touch in 2005..)
Aspects of Android were inspired by the iPhone. The iPhone itself was inspired by the Blackberry, Palm and Windows Mobile series of devices before it.
There really is no such thing as "stolen" when it comes to knowledge. Everything is built upon other things, emerging from the context where they are conceived. It is utterly impossible to not "steal" when you create because your creations are a direct response to the environment in which you create them, which by necessity is a result of creations that came before.
I think the real meat of the argument is "iPhone synthesized all those individual pieces into something coherent and incredible.". It's kind of like how the Macintosh and Lisa took the ideas from PARC, perfected them, and turned them into a real product. I think the stink is being made that Android is copying that aspect of the iPhone, instead of just a piece or two.
Maybe that's not what's actually being argued, but that's what I think should be argued at least.
Isn't that what the current legal battle over slide to unlock is over? I'll be the first to agree that the iPhone put all the pieces together, but it seems like every other week there's a new lawsuit over some iPhone or Android feature that is more of a common sense thing and probably shouldn't have been granted a patent.
This doesn't seem like a meme we should seek to perpetuate.
Bringing this back to technology with an example: Palm synthesized the smart phone and color LCD screen in ~2004. I'm pretty glad all smartphones have color screens today.
> If there was no innovation in bringing multi-touch to
> smart phones, why wasn't everyone doing it in 2007 when
> the iPhone was first released?
No, they're not, at least not in software. Nobody reads software patents, for two reasons. First, the majority are either non-novel or written in a way that they are not useful to others. Second, by reading patents you increase the damages in a possible infringement suit since at that point you knowingly infringed.
I think what I said about software patents applies to hardware patents as well, if less so. There is this idea that patents are a compromise: I file a patent, and I get a temporary monopoly on the idea. In exchange, the world gets full disclosure of my idea.
The point I'm making is that the full disclosure is worse than useless. Nobody ever says I wonder how I should implement this? Let's go check some patent filings to see if someone else has figured it out...
We all stand in the shoulders of someone else.
But sometimes, to better see the whole picture, we need to take a step back from the drawing board. We, as engineers, like to think that every great revolution in consumer behavior is due to a technological invention fundamental to the shift. But if you pay attention you'll notice that Apple's biggest innovation wasn't technological. The area they excel the most is marketing. They built a coherent experience from the device interface design, to the propaganda on TV ads that was powerful enough to convince consumers to buy their products.
Steve Jobs was a genius. But if you believe he was a genius engineer who you should try to mimic, then you'll end up making poor technical decisions. He was a genius marketer who excelled at convincing consumers his products are worth it. That's what we should take from all this. That's we should learn from Apple's growth. Marketing matters.
Bill Buxton is currently a Research Scientist at MSR and he more than knows what he's talking about.
From 1997:
(http://groups.google.com/group/comp.dcom.telecom/msg/f62a1ff...)
It's how progress happens. Too bad people are so quick to blame others with "stealing" when this happens.
http://obamapacman.com/2010/03/myth-copyright-theft-apple-st...
Other people here are talking about "vision" and "innovation" and while these are certainly things Apple had in abundance, the bottom line is that Samsung's lack of vision is not what Apple is complaining about. It's all about risk: Apple took a risk, they pioneered a whole metaphor of a smartphone made of a giant touchscreen and little packaged apps. They had to convince a whole legion of consumers that their highly simplified interface was the elegant solution they needed, and that takes a lot of money and a lot of risk. Now Apple wants their day in the sun to last as long as possible, they want as much of the payoff from the risks they took as possible, and they feel entitled to a degree of exclusivity.
Has Apple been fair to those companies by their own standard?
Would that not constitute prior art in one of the patents Apple asserted against Android recently? I am only vaguely aware of the finer details so I'm probably mistaken on some point.
Other prior art would be Ward Cunningham's WikiWikiWeb (1994/1995) for turning CamelCase into links and, my personal favorite, Netscape Navigator 2.0b1, for "Live URLs" (that recognized URLs and email addresses in mail and news text and made them clickable).
I've been following this off and on, and AFAICT, HTC didn't bring up any of these piece of prior art, which makes me seriously question the quality of their prior art searches.
No wonder Apple has never sued Palm, or now HP who owns all the IP. Palm had half the iPhone probably patented lol.
Meanwhile all phones since the iPhone look a heck of a lot like it.
They get to the point themselves:
Indeed, what made the iPhone such a great product was precisely that Apple drew together a number of innovations already developed separately—touchscreen phones, capacitive touchscreens, sophisticated multitouch user interfaces—and combined them in a product greater than the sum of its parts.
And then Android just imitated that precise sum of parts (full touchscreen, swipe gestures, on-screen keyboard, apps, desktop-class browser, accelerometer, great graphics...). Android looked nothing like it is today before the iPhone OS.