Patent Application from "Steven Jobs et al": Advertisement in Operating System | Hacker News Reader

Patent Application from "Steven Jobs et al": Advertisement in Operating System

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30 pointsblasdel28 comments

Many people say that Erich Schmidt quit the Apple Board of Directors because of iPhone/Android competition, but this application suggests another reason.

Google AdSense is great at monetizing high volume, low cost content. I work at a news aggregator and our eCPM is around $.50 from AdSense. I suspect this is typical. This puts a cap on how much it can cost for us to produce content: more than $.50 for 1000 page views means we're losing money. If you want to make more expensive content, it will be hard to make money using AdSense, because AdSense does not take into account the quality of your content.

It's hard to know what Apple is planning based on a patent application, but we do know one thing: nearly a decade's work has gone into iTunes. It is one of the biggest content distribution systems on the web. Compared to YouTube and Hulu, I would bet it's more profitable also. Whatever they are planning is probably related to extending the iTunes/App Store framework: they currently distribute songs, TV shows, movies, games, and apps. Ebooks, news, magazines and blogs seems like a plausible next step.

Could this be for a tablet PC that displays media content (i.e. magazine, newspapers, etc) and is ad-supported, helping it beat kindle etc on pricing?

In other words, it's a patent to turn a computer into a television set. Sad.

Yes, but at least the ads are likely to be targeted and contextual rather than the blanket-cover approach of conventional TV ads.

It seems very unlikely to me that Apple would install advertising into their operating system or applications. It would be premature to guess that they would ever implement this patent.

They probably patented the concept to prevent anyone else from doing this sacrilege.

You use the word "computer" like it should be limited to general-purpose devices. There's no good reason for televisions/other media devices – traditionally supported by advertising – not to include more substantial processing as time goes on.

I just don't see how this doesn't have prior art. The PeoplePC, for example.

This is the opening line in the abstract: "Among other disclosures, an operating system presents one or more advertisements to a user and disables one or more functions while the advertisement is being presented. At the end of the advertisement, the operating system again enables the function(s)."

To rephrase it: the operating system of a machine you paid good money for will disable your ability to use it while it force-feeds you ads.

Isn't that jumping the gun a bit? It's really hard to predict what context this was designed for, but I very much doubt it will apply to the existing hardware/software model.

In what context is disabling a device for ads considered a good thing? It's terrible in terms of user friendliness, especially when you're very likely to have paid money for the device.

Unless Apple is about to start giving ad-supported devices for free, a conjecture that would be jumping the gun.

I feel like it wouldn't be the worst way to operate a free cyber cafe. Overall not a fan of the idea, but I just don't see Apple doing this to all computers.

I think the point is that you would not have "paid good money" for the operating system itself.

Then to continue that paragraph it says 'The presentation of the advertisement(s) can be made as part of an approach where the user obtains a good or service, such as the operating system, for free or at a reduced cost'.

I assume their logic is somewhat like we have ad-subsidized web sites (i.e. most of them), so why not ad subsidized devices? Shown on page 4 as part of the 'Advertising Control' components is 'Buy Ad Free Version'.

My guess is that this would be tied into a reduced cost iPhone. If you look down the page though, they show plans for how it would be integrated into desktop MacOS.

Personally I don't want my computer to become little more than an ad delivery mechanism. I can't think of anything worse than embedding ads directly into the OS, wasting yet more of my time.

"I see that you wanted to open a terminal window, but before I can do that for you here's a special message from our sponsors..."

In the Windows world crapware on new PCs is bad enough. Most people hated popup/under ads and went to some lengths to block them, so that historical precedent would suggest to me that this isn't going to work very well as a business practice.

A free or discounted ad based OS is reasonable for them to try. I would not want my OS to be ad supported but I am sure many people would be willing to use this to save a few bucks.

Is it even -possible- to buy Windows without gigs worth of crap preloaded on?

Maybe not a new machine, but how hard is it to immediately wipe to a clean installation? "Windows" doesn't come with the "gigs worth of crap", the machines typically sold with Windows preloaded do.

My HP laptop had no CD to do a clean install with. Only a built-in partition with an image on it, already pre-loaded with their crapware. And when I go in install/uninstall programs and try to get rid of it, a few uninstallers give me errors, and the other crap won't uninstall if I don't get rid of them first! I can't understand by what reasoning they arrived to the conclusion that paying a team of programmers to implement this kind of crap was a good idea. There's a password manager which works when it feels like it, plenty of useless tray icons for things such as keyboard shortcuts that never worked, an anti-virus trial, a couple firewalls (the Windows one isn't sufficient, apparently), auto-update for the HP utilities, and the rest I don't even remember because it was just too useless. And it all loaded when the machine booted, yay!

Sorry for the venting, I spent quite a few hours to get this machine to a usable state, and even now there's some leftovers that I just can't remove without a fresh, clean, pirated copy of Windows. It's frustrating.

I have one of those, too. Vista SP2 won't install. I seldom use that side of the machine, though... these HPs play nicely with Fedora out of the box. (pavilion dv)

.. and they can install Ubuntu!

Perhaps it's for Apple TV. The images in the patent obviously look more like a traditional OSX desktop, but the patent does mention other types of devices.

Maybe they just want to prevent others from doing this. Or they could be preparing some location-based ads/offers for iPhone.

Advertising through disabling features? That's against Apple's (and Steve's) ethos. He wouldn't venture down that road. This is probably just to prevent competitors from doing that.

One more reason the patent system is royally screwed up.

I suppose that would be one way to ship OS X for non-Apple PC's. (Disclosure: I used to work there, but definitely not on anything like ads for OS X.)

This isn't for a desktop computer, its for the iPhone or a tablet, right?

It's odd that the pictures of Mac OS X are Tiger.

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