
Google and Apple have different innovation signatures - hunglee2
https://www.fastcodesign.com/3068474/the-real-difference-between-google-and-apple
======
inlined
I'm not sure I buy the argument that Apple's inventors per patent means
they're a more open or egalitarian companY. The hotspots seems to suggest that
Apple just has a culture of giving management credit on the patents.

~~~
logicallee
Apple has an "invent this for me" culture at the very top. That does not mean
those are not real patents, but I doubt if someone travels back in time from
2040 and we posit they are now are at the top of Google today, you can speak
three sentences and give the instruction "invent this for me" and have your
name at the top of a patent filing that essentially just prettifies those
three sentences, turns them into claims, and does the prior art research.

You _should_ be able to, because by 2040 there are lots of things that would
be considered genuinely novel advancements to the state of the art today, but
which can be described in three sentences.

It's a question about whether top executives can ask someone to invent
something for them or not. At Google, no, at Apple, yes.

~~~
petra
>> At Google, no, at Apple, yes.

Why ? Is this the cultural, or more related to the type and complexities of
those inventions ?

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QuercusMax
Wonder if part of it has to do with incentive structures for patents? My
understanding is that at Google, if you have <= K (2? 3?) inventors on a
patent, they each get $X,000, and more than K, $X*2,000 is split N ways. (I
have not received any patent bonuses personally, so this is all second- and
third-hand.) This means that it pays to keep the number of inventors on a
patent small.

If Apple has a different structure, this may account for the differences.

~~~
madeofpalk
How interesting, that the company gives out bonuses for patents. I would not
be surprised if Apple doesn't do this, much like how their retail staff don't
get paid in commission.

~~~
krzyk
I know at least two more companies that give bonuses for patents: IBM and
Motorola (before being bought by Google).

~~~
QuickThrow22
My employer pays a decent bonus (> the $4000 cited for Google earlier) and we
have a pretty small patent portfolio - I always imagined it was pretty typical
for tech companies to but maybe that's not the case?

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aisofteng
This entirely ignores the politics that lead to people listed on a patent that
contributed nothing. It happens a lot, if not almost always, on patents filed
by employees at a large company.

~~~
sgt101
Although having an inventor that you can't attribute a contribution to
invalidates the patent.

~~~
hinkley
Sure, but say I come up with a novel idea. I run that idea past another lead
as a sanity check, but I do most of the work myself. At one large company we
were at the point where if the patent folk came around again it was our plan
to milk the process. (Especially after we worked for three years on what was
supposed to be a common data format for interchange between manufacturers,
OEMs and customers and some halfwit thought it would be a great idea to patent
the whole thing at the end. Asshole. We became highly motivated to publish our
docs to start the patent clock ticking and eventually got the whole idea
canned.)

In a world where the company is going to patent my work no matter what my
opinion is,, 'collaborating' with people I didn't really need to collaborate
with is a net positive for me.

One, I can let them make or review draft documents so that I'm not the one
doing all of the bullshit paperwork. If they participate in the vetting and
documentation process (especially the 'arguing with the patent attorneys' over
scope and wording), then they legitimately collaborated on the patent. We
extract more dollars from the bounty system and we make frivolous patents
slightly more expensive.

Then when one of those two people think up an idea on their own, why not put
me on it, especially if I offer the same kind of help?

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mtgx
Can we stop attributing "innovation" to the number of patents one company has?
We know by now 80% are bullshit, especially if they are software patents.

------
debatem1
This seems to say more about the incentives around patents at Apple and Google
than it says about innovation or anything else at those companies. In
particular, it seems to say that patents are more highly encouraged at Apple
and that there's more incentive to put them in your own name at Google.

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wtbob
> "Over the past 10 years Apple has produced 10,975 patents with a team of
> 5,232 inventors, and Google has produced 12,386 with a team of 8,888,"
> writes Wes Bernegger, data explorer at Periscopic. Those numbers are,
> frankly, pretty similar in terms of proportion.

Ummm, Apple's 2.0977 patents per inventor and Google's 1.3936 patents per
inventor are pretty _dissimilar_, I'd think, unless many companies have yet
more or far fewer.

~~~
TheSpiceIsLife
Close enough, no?

Or: if we've got data let's go with the data. If all we've got is opinions
let's go with mine.

~~~
zepto
If you think 1.3 is close enough to 2, I have some investment options for you
to consider.

------
rodionos
Nice graphs, I wonder how Samsung graph of patents looks like.

    
    
      Apple: ISD/1/1/2016->12/31/2016 AND AN/Google - 3389 patents
      Google: ISD/1/1/2016->12/31/2016 AND AN/Apple - 2535 patents
      Samsung: ISD/1/1/2016->12/31/2016 AND AN/Apple - 10163 patents
    

USPTO search: [http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-
Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=H...](http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-
Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-
adv.htm&r=0&f=S&l=50&d=PTXT&RS=%28ISD%2F20160101-%3E20161231+AND+AN%2FSamsung%29&Refine=Refine+Search&Query=ISD%2F1%2F1%2F2016-%3E12%2F31%2F2016+AND+AN%2FApple)

Better yet, how does the Samsung crystal ball of patents looks like, if I
filter the set for washer dryer, for example. Hairy perhaps?

------
amelius
Related question: how many scientific papers does an Apple researcher get to
publish, versus a Google one?

~~~
johnsmith21006
Agree. Publishing research is a more accurate way and removes the fact the two
companies fundamentally view pattents differently.

------
johnsmith21006
Think this article misses a fundamental difference between Google and Apple
and that is fundamentally the two view patents differently.

------
PSeitz
Seems to me, that apple bosses want to put their name on every patent created
in their division.

------
sgt101
Is this linked communities in R ?

------
rxbudian
It would be interesting to see Microsoft's pattern compared to the 2

------
floatalong
This article makes a deeply flawed assumption by including "outside" patents,
that is to say, patents which were acquired (rather than
developed/filed/patented by the company's own employees). Notice this tidbit
disclaimer buried towards the end of the article:

 _" In Google's case, we get a clue. One of the company's largest super
inventors lives out there, in the periphery, disconnected from other products.
That inventor is Kia Silverbrook, who sold the company 269 granted patents on
cameras and printers in 2013. Obviously patents that have been recently
acquired, rather than developed in house, would lack the interconnections with
other employees that centralize the largest bubbles."_

This is not a clue. This is a sign that you're biasing your sample. Compare
this statement to the premise of the study:

 _" Over the past 10 years Apple has produced 10,975 patents with a team of
5,232 inventors, and Google has produced 12,386 with a team of 8,888."_

Wrong, not all of those people were even employees, see above. And what about
the huge patent purchase Google made by buying Motorola and then selling it
off (Arris, Lenovo) while keeping the vast majority of the patents. [0] Is it
accurate to count Motorola’s patents as Google-developed innovations? Is it
accurate to group Motorola inventors along with Google inventors?

 _" This seems to indicate a top-down, more centrally controlled system in
Apple vs. potentially more independence and empowerment in Google."_

I disagree, this really doesn’t indicate anything and mis-characterizes the
inventors. Google and Apple have purchased a sizable number of patents whose
inventors are not employees and not involved in Google's or Apple's R&D. If
anything, this may indicate that Google purchased more outside patents than
Apple. Some examples of Google's purchases beyond Motorola are IBM [1],
Silverbrook [2], IP3 [3]. One of Apple's biggest set of outside patents is
Nortel [4].

 _" Google, on the other hand, has a relatively flat organizational structure
of many small teams filled with empowered individuals."_

Not disputing this but the more obvious explanation is that Google has been
working on a wider variety of products and services than Apple which would
mean a greater variety of patentable subject matter by inventors working in
different technologies. Don't use patents or that visualization as any
indicator of R&D organizational structure.

 _" But that would take further sleuthing to confirm."_

In the patent search community, it's pretty easy and quick to filter a search
to only include company-invented patents (it's as quick as filtering down to a
specific company, just compare latest assignee to original assignee). So why
not do that here? This is such a simple search that I'm surprised that the
data provider _" Portland-based data visualization studio Periscopic"_ didn’t
team up with any of the dozens of patent analytics providers [5] who probably
would have done the work for free for some publicity, not to mention address
the glaring flaw of including outside patents (that is, non-employees as
inventors).

 _" Our intention behind PatentsView was to create interfaces that could
inspire the public to explore patent data," says Periscopic cofounder Dino
Citraro. [...] Indeed, Apple and Google may only be a start. You could
probably write a book on the corporate organizational structures revealed in
PatentsView."_

I hope no one uses this tool to write a book. I think it's a noble goal to
open up the data and visualization to the public, but users should be very
wary of what they’re really looking at.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_Mobility](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_Mobility)
[1] [http://www.iam-
media.com/blog/detail.aspx?g=54821371-e57d-47...](http://www.iam-
media.com/blog/detail.aspx?g=54821371-e57d-4742-b10e-bcfe5c48f6c4) [2]
[http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.seobythesea.com/2013...](http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.seobythesea.com/2013/01/google-
printer-camera-patents/) [3] [http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/calling-
all-patent-o...](http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/calling-all-patent-
owners--google-ibm-ford-cisco-and-other-leading-global-companies-want-to-buy-
your-patents--through-the-new-ip3-purchase-program-by-ast-300270804.html) [4]
[http://www.reuters.com/article/rpx-rockstar-ip-
idUSL1N0U713M...](http://www.reuters.com/article/rpx-rockstar-ip-
idUSL1N0U713M20141223) [5]
[https://www.piug.org/vendors](https://www.piug.org/vendors)

