I wonder though: in these situations if he were to refuse the acquisition would Apple just steal his idea (NOT implementation) and bake it into the iPhone regardless? I think Microsoft did something like this, no? Any thoughts?
Apple has certainly done this before:
Apple Literally Stole My Thunder https://medium.com/wwdc-round-up/253aed27a455
Apple rips off student's rejected iPhone app - iOS 5 lifts idea, name, even logo http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/06/08/apple_copies_rejecte...
Konfabulator, Dashboard controversy flows out of WWDC http://www.macworld.com/article/1035200/konfabulator.html
Apple stole Karelia Watson http://forums.macworld.com/index.php?/topic/2477-apples-stol...
It was a different time when the images/weather app was rejected by Apple. They were deliberately trying to prevent people creating thin wrappers around websites and calling it an app. And at the start it made a lot of sense.
Syncing over WiFi was a feature that users had demanded long before that app had been around and the name/logo are not distinctive. They are the most common sense choices you would use.
And widgets existed decades before Konfabulator thought to bring them to OSX. They were available as Desk Accessories in the previous versions of Mac OS as well as on Windows/Linux.
It's pretty clear this was just two people coming up with the same logical icon concept simultaneously.
The article states "I’m not naive enough to claim Apple actually took my idea." You apparently are, though.
> Apple rips off student's rejected iPhone app - iOS 5 lifts idea, name, even logo
C'mon. "Wi-Fi Sync" is hardly a surprising name for such a feature, and making its logo the bog-standard Wifi logo with a bog-standard Sync logo superimposed is hardly a surprising choice either. It was a long-expected and long-awaited feature.
> Konfabulator, Dashboard controversy flows out of WWDC
A controversy about the bog-standard term "widget".
> Apple stole Karelia Watson
Well, it made its own version and named it cheekily. This seems to be the one mostly valid case in your post.
http://techcrunch.com/2010/01/27/think-ibooks-looks-familiar...
And Apple has over a hundred billion dollars in cash and eighty thousand employees. They could certainly clone this software if they wanted to.
The reason to acquire is to signal to other people that doing innovative things on apple platforms can make you a millionaire, instead of signalling the same thing is a sucker's game as apple will steal your ideas if they're any good.
This is my biggest worry with my product. I literally spent two years going down dead-end alleys to refine my Information Flow Control System because there was nobody that I could copy from. We often hear "Ideas are worthless. It's the execution that matters." which is true but knowing what does and doesn't work is as important in my opinion.
Apple now knows you can capture video very efficiently with JPEG. People now know, if you want to build a powerful social media product, you'll have to use real names and so forth.
I can't back this up with citations as I don't remember where I read this from, but it basically said innovators are usually not the ones that benefits from their innovations. It's usually those that tweaks the innovations that benefit the most.
I guess the message is, if you do have something innovative, you should probably patent it. You might not be able to protect yourself from larger companies, but you'll certainly improve your chances of being acquired.
Although half of that is retail, which isn't going to help in software dev.
To call it a "decent iPhone app" somewhat puts down the 12 or so months of hard core research and implementation that jpap put into it.
I think the App was more about the implementation than the idea. He created extremely efficient implementation of jpeg compression with 50000 lines of C++ code as far as I remember from the dev's blog. So Apple is obviously more interested in the guy than anything else.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stac_Electronics#Microsoft_laws...
Look at SnapChat turning down $3bn from Facebook and now FB integrating a lot of that functionality into Instagram.