The problem is with the (losing) teams that aren’t copying | Hacker News Reader

The problem is with the (losing) teams that aren’t copying

daringfireball.net

25 pointsshawndumas26 comments

I'm sure Samsung making their stuff look very iPhone like contributed to their success, but they have plenty of other advantages. They make most of the internals of their phones (flash, CPUs, screens) themselves which gives them excellent margins compared to anyone buying those things from them. They have a globally known brand that was already doing well in other categories (I bought a Samsung TV 7 years ago). They are really good at the carrier relationships game. They jumped into large sized phones very early on.

Palm were never a contender, sorry. Their UI framework was basically just a tarted up web view, totally unsuited to developing rich native apps. Animations? Rich media framework? Robust data persistence layer? Nothing close to iOS.

Yes, we all know deep down that Google took one look at the iPhone and immediately pivoted Android into as close to a clone as they could get without it being too blatent. Samsung just didn't care about that and went the extra mile, and screw the consequences.

Microsoft's problems are different. They're just way, way too late and still catching up with a still rapidly moving target. It doesn't matter how similar or different their platform is to the iPhone or Android. They just have no mobile developer or consumer mindshare. Where are their premium mobile apps, like Apple have Garage band, Pages, etc? Touch Office looks to be a kludgy half way house hybrid mess. Maybe they can leverage their desktop strengths with Windows 8 Phone 8 (delete one of the 8s, who knows which one?), but they don't seem to be doing anything to actually make that happen.

> They're just way, way too late and still catching up with a still rapidly moving target

What do you cite as this rapid motion? The move to retina? Siri? Tweet sheet integration? Mindshare doesn't necessarily make for rapid motion of the platform, but I am interested in how you see it.

Apple are devoting huge dev resources to iOS. Check out the last slide 'and more' from their iOS 6 preview at the bottom of this article (1). Sure most of the low-hanging fruit and signature features are in place, but they're still making strong efforts to upgrade and expand capabilities such as accessability features for disabled users, improved localisation for overseas markets such as China, expanding iCloud's capabilities. A few years ago you could say that a competitor could pick a few major feature areas such as social network integration, navigation, cloud services, etc and beat Apple in those areas. Now that's just not possible. They have all the feature areas covered and are steadily deepening their feature sets in those areas. The only real way to differentiate against them now is in hardware.

(1)http://www.macstories.net/stories/ios-6-our-complete-overvie...

Utter nonsense. Nokia didn't provide a smartphone OS for years, and Palm OS, while supposedly nicely designed, apparently didn't perform very well in practice. Their problems were not not copying Apple.

Your examples do not contradict the thesis.

This brings up some interesting thoughts. What if the layout of the keys on touch-tone phones were copyrighted? What about keyboard layouts? What about the notion of a folding computer (laptop)?

I never quite thought about it like that before, but copyrights like this completely stifle future developments. Sorry, just showing up late to the party.

So then Apple are now like the guys still in leather helmets that have been running exactly the same pass play for five years while the rest of the league has figured out you can actually run four or five different formations and pass all over the field?

But sure, let's keep pretenting this is about Samsung in particular and not Android in general.

>So then Apple are now like the guys still in leather helmets that have been running exactly the same pass play for five years

No, they are the guys that created the whole game field as a massive market niche, coming from completely outside that market, and then 2 years later they jump started another market (tablets) that they pretty much own to this day.

Or, the guys that have another announcement on 9/12, with predictions for their biggest selling device ever, outselling previous models (that each outsold the previous anyway).

It's not like the fact that the other guys "run four or five different formations and pass all over the field" worked well for them in the smartphone/tablet market.

They used the same "four or five different formations and pass all over the field" in the PC market and it's now commoditized to death with minimal margins (ask Dell, HP, Lenovo, etc).

And the main distinguishing feature of that new 9/12 device? A form factor very close to Samsung's last two flagship models. And that new iPad mini everybody's so excited about? Copying a form factor that Samsung pioneered and Amazon and Google validated. Maybe next Apple will copy the Note?

So who exactly is copying whom here? Surely the physical size of a device is more defining and market-making than the bounce back behavior of a scroll view? Where are the cries for protection of Samsung's innovations?

>* And the main distinguishing feature of that new 9/12 device? A form factor very close to Samsung's last two flagship models.*

You mean "a bigger screen"?

Well, it could have had even less distinguishing factors and it would have been just fine in my books. They created that kind of design, it's not like they have to differentiate for the sake of differentiation. Incremental cpu/memory/storage/batter upgrades are OK too.

>And that new iPad mini everybody's so excited about? Copying a form factor that Samsung pioneered and Amazon and Google validated. Maybe next Apple will copy the Note?

They actually had prototypes in various sizes years before Samsung, Amazon or Google ever thought of going into the tablet space, or even the original iPad come out.

Plus, Apple created the mass market for tablets. Before the iPad it was a wasteland with few inhabitants.

Samsung taking the iPad and offering something similar in a smaller form factor is something original, really? And Apple making a smaller version of THEIR OWN PRODUCT is copying Samsung? That's some twisted logic.

>So who exactly is copying whom here?

Samsung.

They copied the iPod in a smaller form factor, and now Apple will offer a small form factor themselves. Should Apple preemptively put out all possible form factors at once, to not be considered a copycat? That's some twisted logic here.

It's not like Apple didn't already have a smaller form factor device that was similar. Remember when they called the iPad (mockingly) "a large iPhone"?

The problem is that "The Inmates are Running the Asylum." Most techies would've scoffed at the MacBook Air, if it were described to them with specs, before it came out. Steve Jobs didn't have a reality distortion field. He lacked the one most of us have.

Seconded. It wasn't until Christopher Cross [1] personally recommended the 11" MacBook Air to me I considered it as a primary computer.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMkIuKXwmlU not http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=010KyIQjkTk

> Most techies would've scoffed at the MacBook Air, if it were described to them with specs

Those "techies" probably couldn't use an Air anyway - not like you're going to be walking around your windowless server room too often, and you certainly wouldn't want to take work home with you. And macs can't even run Exchange Administrator!

Most programmers I know, however, were delighted. Raw specs have never been a good measure of a machine's usefulness, but the size and weight you can take straight to the bank. The air is a lifestyle computer at a time where a lot of programmers are beginning to think more about their lifestyle and realise it's cool to go outside and actually walk around and stuff. Maybe half the (web) programmers I know have them now.

Specs! I guess you can't ignore them, but in my experience the more people go on about "specs" the less productive use they turn out putting all those gigahertz to. In normal use the computer will spend 99.99% of its time waiting for the stupid slow user, and I never seem to need to compile Gentoo or compress bluray movies in a big hurry all that often. What I do like to do is put my air in my coat pocket and walk down to the café and do some work, and if your overclocked oil-cooled 12-core neon-lit Extreme Edition alien-head-logo-having AC-powered Gigantibox can't do that then it is basically a piece of useless junk to me. Good for games though, gotta say.

> Most programmers I know, however, were delighted.

I agree with most of what you say. However, the inmates are still running the asylum.

If the Apple persecution of Samsung succeeds, we should all be worried that next NFL teams will start patenting their strategies and suing each other.

...and it won't be possible to come up with an effective defense unless a team applied use of the patented offense in practice sessions without a valid license.

"Persecution". Nice. Let's cool it with the inflammatory rhetoric. You may not agree with Apple's legal methods in solving a dispute, but it's hardly a persecution--particularly because Samsung is suing just as much (and has already threatened to sue over LTE).

I was surprised that Gruber completely ignored the possible penalty to copying, the resulting lawsuits. His football analogy doesn't really stand up because you can't patent the forward pass, or if you could the opposing team runs the risk of having their win vacated if they implement it too.

The lawsuit and Sumsung's (pending appeal) loss is such a huge elephant in the room that by not addressing it, and the similar fate that the other "losers" maybe trying to avoid, I don't think Gruber really said anything of real substance.

Right. Correct me if I'm wrong but isn't the only way to protect a strategy in football is to keep it secret?

I think this article is interesting because of Gruber's role in the conversation as an Apple fan[atic]. Samsung has been criticized from the Apple side (and by Gruber in particular) for copying Apple's innovations -- the implication being that he thinks it's good that Apple won. But Gruber is acknowledging here that a healthy marketplace includes both innovation and copying of the best innovations, and that it's at least possible that the world is better with Samsung's copying than without it. So it's directly addressing the lawsuit by acknowledging that there's a downside to Apple winning. That's no big deal for me to admit, but kind of a big deal coming from him.

I think the NFL and MLB already consider their stats proprietary. I wouldn't be surprised if someone patented something and won a couple years before the league made using that technology illegal in their games. That's a bit different, as the NFL would change the rules to prevent such a monopoly when they saw ratings go down (or not, if they went up, I guess). The whole 'salary cap' issue is already supposed to help address the problem of the wealthiest teams being able to 'buy all the talent' in the NFL, so I suspect they would move quickly.

Apple's patent of fairly obvious technology (slide to unlock, already present elsewhere..rounded courners WTF?) seems a lot more ridiculous, yet the courts cannot act quickly. If it wasn't for Android competition, would iOS advance very fast? Or would you be getting a 'New color of white this year!' option in the Iphone 6G?

NFL teams do not compete in a business sense. They are part of a coordinated league. There are even exemptions to antitrust law for some sports leagues (MLB at least).

How did you get a lowercase first letter in the title? I thought HN auto-capitalized submission titles.

Don't worry, I'm sure a mod will be along to change it to match the article any minute now anyways.

good point. I guess I'll just put the quote here then:

"What if Apple is like a sports team that introduced a groundbreaking strategy. Something like introducing the forward pass to football. Is it wrong for another team to copy that strategy? What if the only other team that can win is the one team that most shamelessly copied that strategy? At some point you have to start thinking that the problem is with the (losing) teams that aren’t copying. "

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