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Comment by liendolucas | Hacker News Reader

> "I will spend my last dying breath if I need to, and I will spend every penny of Apple's $40 billion in the bank, to right this wrong. I'm going to destroy Android, because it's a stolen product. I'm willing to go thermonuclear war on this.

What about all the technology (and engineers) at XEROX PARC that Jobs stole from there? Funny how history repeats itself.

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> I'm going to destroy Android, because it's a stolen product.

First time I'm reading up on it, but seems Android was both conceived as an idea and worked on as a mobile idea before Jobs started thinking about the iPhone?

> Android Inc. was founded in Palo Alto, California, in October 2003 by Andy Rubin, Rich Miner, Nick Sears, and Chris White. [...] The early intentions of the company were to develop an advanced operating system for digital cameras, and this was the basis of its pitch to investors in April 2004 [...] and five months later it had diverted its efforts and was pitching Android as a handset operating system that would rival Symbian and Microsoft Windows Mobile.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_(operating_system)

> In 2005, when Steve Jobs began planning the iPhone, he had a choice to either "shrink the Mac, which would be an epic feat of engineering, or enlarge the iPod". Jobs favored the former approach but pitted the Macintosh and iPod teams, led by Scott Forstall and Tony Fadell, respectively, against each other in an internal competition, with Forstall winning by creating iPhone OS.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IOS

Would seem like Android was ideated around 2004, while iOS ("iPhone OS") was ideated in 2005.

Could also just be an attempt at rewriting history, wouldn't be the first time...

Reportedly, the original Android was more of a Blackberry ripoff, with a keyboard and directional keys instead of a touchscreen. Once they saw what the iPhone was doing, they quickly pivoted and changed the whole product, so the Android we see today has nothing to do with the Android of 2004.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/10/building-android-a-4...

I think this was just more of a function of technology. Good quality capacitive touchscreens only really started to become available in the mid 2000s, and even the early ones weren't that great (e.g. no multi-touch). Without this you're forced into using keyboards if you want to have any kind of usable interface for typing, or you do something like the graffiti writing system that psion PDAs had in the 90s.

No they were just pressure sensitive screens. You could use a finger to navigate but again not as accurate. The solution instead was to perfect one handed navigation which was what palm os 5 did and input writing with either a keyboard (handheld/onscreen) or graffiti like you said.

The CoRecursive podcast has an episode with Chet Haase where he specifically outlines how they were cloning BlackBerry and then had to drop everything and rebuild when they heard about the iPhone OS. He directly states that Android wouldn’t have had a touch interface if the iPhone didn’t exist.

GUI interfaces using a capacitive touch screen became good because of iPhone, not as part of a natural progression of technology.

But I had a Samsung PalmOS phone with no keyboard or numpad or dpad, and a full color touch home screen grid of 3rd party app icons, in full final production in the hands of users like me, in 2000 or 2001.

Samsung SPH-i300

There were also operating systems like Palm OS, Symbian and Pocket PC / Windows Mobile before either of them.

Steve was probably complaining/accusing Eric, that Google bought Android because they've seen what Apple is doing and realized that it is a big deal. Plus, perhaps what Apple was doing also shaped/influenced Android in the later stages before release.

I think this is mostly a case of Steve being an arsehole. Sure Android copied the design style from Apple but Apple themselves copied if from Sony. https://www.theverge.com/2012/7/26/3189309/apple-sony-iphone...

You are allowed to make a product that is a bit like an existing one out there.

> "You're ripping us off!", Steve shouted, raising his voice even higher. "I trusted you, and now you're stealing from us!"

> But Bill Gates just stood there coolly, looking Steve directly in the eye, before starting to speak in his squeaky voice.

> "Well, Steve, I think there's more than one way of looking at it. I think it's more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it."

https://folklore.org/A_Rich_Neighbor_Named_Xerox.html

Immortalized in movie form: https://youtu.be/UFcb-XF1RPQ&t=10

Xerox the company gave it away seeing no commercial value in the invention.

Just want to say Thank You. It does get really tiring the very few on HN have to fight the misinformation about a lot of things in tech.

Maybe they did see the commercial value, but they were more FOSS-minded people thinking this technology must be free for the world to use. But I don't know any of the specifics of this particular transfer of IP.

Xerox, FOSS minded? No way in hell.

Xerox sold access to PARC to Jobs in return for access to pre-IPO stock in Apple.

That was literally given to him/Apple, with Xerox's permission. Being given something is never theft.

Jobs famously muscled his way in and took their ideas, albeit from a dumb board.

Famous story:

Steve Jobs confronted Bill Gates after he announced Windows' GUI OS. "You’re stealing from us!” Bill replied "I think it's more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it."

Still not your idea or product though, isn't it.

Compare the Alto to the Mac.

Now compare the original Android to Blackberry (which it copied first) then compare it to the iPhone, which it copied later.

The Alto and Mac were both WIMP interfaces, but had very different distinct personalities.

If you listen closely you can almost hear the faint singing of consumers rejoicing that he failed to eliminate all the competition.

Or much more closely, Nokia's Maemo running on a Nokia 770. The nokia 770 had more resolution, actually supports apps and app store (Apple only supports weblets in gen 1), had an icon based UI, and supported a stylus.

Sure the apple had a nicer touch screen and WAN, but the grid of icons to launch an app was very similar.

Exactly, it shows how much Jobs was disconnected from reality. When others do it, it's no longer "great artists steal"?

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