

Apple CEO Tim Cook’s Memo to Employees on Patent Win Over Samsung - Brajeshwar
http://allthingsd.com/20120824/the-jury-has-now-spoken-apple-ceo-tim-cooks-memo-to-employees-on-patent-win-over-samsung/

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printer
This note is very clever. A lot of "fact" are just wrong but they are written
in a very convincing manner so that nobody will check them.

 _"sending a loud and clear message that stealing isn’t right"_ Well Steve
Jobs liked to quote something like this: _"Good artists copy. Great artists
steal."_ Jobs was clearly spreading the message that Apple liked to steal
mastering the "borrowed" product making it into a product of their own. Apple
made no secret about stealing design from Braun and Sony. Jobs had great
respect for those companies. And I think the same applies to Samsung. They
have great respect to Apple (although today that may have changed) and
mastered the iPhone into an even greater product than the iPhone.

 _"We value originality and innovation and pour our lives into making the best
products on earth."_ Well they may be the best looking products on earth for
some, but they are absolutely not the best products. Apple mouses look great
and are great to obtain RSI. MacOs is looking great but I can't get as
productive with it as with Windows or Linux. The Mac Mini is looking great but
I can buy twice the power for the same price. Most Apple products are looking
great but why not supply a standard connector? Well we know the reason for
that one. And now they are called the most valuable company of today.

Yes Samsung did look very closely to Apple's products but so did Apple to
other products.

We all copy!

-edit1- Brown -> Braun ;) thanks.

-edit2- I also was thinking about a tablet I once bought. This was a complete copy of the iPad. Even the box had the same white design. But Apple didn't go after that company. Why? Because it was a peace of crap. You had to break the tablet before the screen became responsive and the battery didn't last 10 minutes.

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mcantelon
>Brown

I'm guessing you mean Braun and, yes, Apple is very obviously influenced by
the aesthetic Braun popularized.

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csallen
Is copying really so bad? It seems to me that, in this case at least, it's
just synonymous for Samsung being heavily influenced by Apple. What's so
malicious about influence? As everyone has heard a billion times by now, Jobs
himself was a huge proponent of "stealing" the good ideas of others
(<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CW0DUg63lqU>). It's not as if Samsung tried
to confuse consumers by impersonating Apple products or anything.

Capitalism is competitive. If you do something profitable, people _will_ try
to beat you, and they'll piggyback on your research to do so. Tough cookie.
Your goal as a company should be to build a competitive advantage by (a)
capitalizing the fact that you're the first mover, and (b) building moats that
are tough for the competition to cross. Unfortunately for Apple, aesthetics
just isn't that big of a moat.

And, unfortunately for the world, the government is providing big businesses
that are too lazy, incompetent, and/or ill-equipped to do the above with an
underserved competitive advantage in the form of a broken patent system.

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gareim
What about that part where Samsung was basically like "Oh, Apple's icons look
like this using this light effect. We should definitely make our icons look
like that too."

What part of that is innovative and advancing technology? No, they just wanted
to piggyback off of Apple's success and make money that way. Which I don't
think is fair.

Just ask any app developer who enjoys success. The Chinese clones eat away at
revenue and potential markets. It degrades the experience for everyone when
one party leeches rather than innovates.

I always say that Microsoft came up with their own UI that looks and works
great. There isn't only one solution to this.

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csallen
Okay, and do you think having a glossy effect on your icons is important in
any way? Is that the magical secret sauce key to selling millions of phones?
And, even if it was, do you think it's a significant enough "innovation" to
warrant any kind of protection? While we're at it, do you think that if I comb
through every Apple product, application, and website, there isn't at least
_one_ minor element that a designer lifted from some pre-existing design found
elsewhere? Be realistic.

Finally, a "clone" is different than minor design similarities. I specifically
mentioned this in my post. Did Samsung copy every detail of the iPhone to make
an indistinguishable product? No. They made an easily-distinguishable
competitive product. I don't see how you can bring Chinese app clones into
this discussion. Samsung's goal was never to confuse consumers.

Btw, Microsoft didn't come up with their own UI design from scratch. They were
_heavily_ influenced by Apple's original OS designs. For the past two decades,
Jobs repeatedly accused Windows of being a copy. Look it up.

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205guy
The glossy effect, and all the other UI niceties took thousands of hours of
research to perfect. You think they just mocked up the design in a single
alpha release and shipped it as is? No, good UI takes tons of work, not just
development but user testing and dozens of feedback cycles. Hard to develop
and get right (so that it feels so effortless) yet so easy to copy. How do we
protect that?

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haberman
Would it be in line with those values for Apple to pay royalties to Google for
"stealing" the omnibar in the new version of Safari? What about the numerous
similarities that Apple's new maps app will undoubtedly have to Google Maps?
Or is it only important when other companies do it?

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jfb
If Google had patented the omnibar, or something about Maps, then sure. Of
course, Google _didn't_ , or they'd be suing so fast your head would spin. Say
what you will about the US patent system, it's the playing field we're on. I
would be first to line up against the USPTO (and I'm named on several bullshit
patents, some, yes, from my time at Apple), but until that day, we play by the
rules or we pay out.

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haberman
I'm not commenting on the legal issue, I'm commenting on the memo that claims
a moral, values-based argument for this legal action.

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tghw
How the "values" have shifted.

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CW0DUg63lqU&t=12s](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CW0DUg63lqU&t=12s)

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scorpion032
That stealing which is good is at the conceptual level.

When someone has a document that shows a hundred different things which are
developed over years of research copied blatantly without investing a minute,
something needs to be done really.

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tghw
How is that different than Jobs' "stealing" in any way?

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soup10
I think it was wrong for Samsung to blatantly copy the iPhone. But it's also
wrong for apple to refuse to license certain design patents, when they are
clearly superior.

I think a lot of the gestures and interactions that Apple has patents over are
so fundamental to touch screen device interaction, that not having them is
crippling. It's like if Apple patented the mouse or the keyboard and
monopolized the market.

The slavish cloning of Apple devices and software and subsequent
commoditization of the non-Apple market pushed RIM and windows phones into
unrecoverable positions. Windows and Rim played by the rules and lost, google
and samsung cheated and won. Not fair. I think these patent battles are pretty
much a side-show and won't significantly affect android market share. We'll
see though.

Now on a more macro scale, is this a net win for the industry and consumers?
The mobile market has consolidated into two camps very similar to how the
computer market consolidated. Apple with it's full vertical integration and
limited devices aimed squarely at high-end consumers. And Google taking the
place of Microsoft with an OS that supports a large range of high-end to low-
end hardware produced by outside manufacturers and much more open software
ecosystem.

I would argue that this kind of consolidation was inevitable, because it would
be too much work for software developers to target a truly diversified mobile
device market, each with their own proprietary APIs and quirks.

It's too bad that OS developers never created a standard for universal API's
for common tasks. Instead we got an endless onslaught of abstraction platforms
like Java, the web and flash. When what we really need is OS-level
support/standards for portable code. It doesn't really make sense that a game
I write in C for one OS needs to be endlessly fucked about with to get it to
run on another OS.

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edtechdev
For the first time yesterday, I heard regular (non-techie) folks mentioning
they didn't want to buy an iPhone because of Apple's behavior. People are
starting to smell something's wrong with all this, and I think the lawsuits
are nothing but bad PR for Apple.

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shadesandcolour
The great part about consumer is that they can say things like that all they
want, but when the newest, coolest gadget rolls off the assembly line, they're
buying one. Consumers don't know what they want, they have to be told what
they want.

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systems
"sending a loud and clear message that stealing isn’t right"

are copyright and patent infringement, the same as stealing, i find the choice
of words ... alarming

stealing should be kept related to tangible goods

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beedogs
I find the choice of words somewhat patronizing, as well. Yes, Apple, I _know_
stealing isn't right. I also know to look both ways before crossing the
street, and I eat my vegetables, too.

To reduce something as complex as this case to simply "stealing" is absurd and
shows the level of disconnect at that company right now.

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thomasf1
I´m personally quite conflicted in this case:

Apple has a point that Samsung was copying them. Pure, simple, stupid copying,
not using elements of it and turning it into something new and great.

On the other side, the ways of protection with patents of tiny bits of it is
silly and broken. They are trivial and regard the overall design and should
not be allowed.

Famously the Mac itself is based upon the work of Xerox Parc. To the credit of
Apple and Steve Jobs they put in a lot of work, made many concepts useable and
re-developed the mouse to actually make a consumer product out of it.

For me the morale right or wrong is the following:

make it your own: While heavily using concepts existing prior, you´ll re-
combine them into something way better than the thing you copy: That´s ok for
me, it has creative value.

copy: You simply dumbly copy things line-by-line without even understanding
the basic concepts of why something is great and throw it on the market at a
lower prive: That´s wrong and ripping of the creative work of others.

Samsung to me falls quite clearly into the copy category. I doubt that they
have a deep understanding of UX design and the subtleties what actually made
the iPhone great and delighted the users.

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205guy
When Apple copied from Xerox PARC, was the UI part of an already successful,
profitable mass-market product? No, they stole a research idea and ran with it
(though it's just as likely to have been patented). But when Apple has a
successful product that everyone is buying, and Samsung makes a product that
looks and acts like it, I think they were definitely trying to cause confusion
and take market share. If you fly to Europe with a fake Rolex and get caught
(they do have customs officers trained to look for and detect fakes), they
don't just confiscate the fake or turn you away, you get prosecuted. Morally,
I'm not sure why that should apply to luxury goods and not anything with a
distinctive look and feel.

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coecoventures
Apple also stole employees from PARC, some of which are still working at
Apple. They brought their talent with them.

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thomasilk
Is it good for the industry in the short term? I'd say No. Is it the best
thing that could have happened to the tech industry in the long term? Yes, I
think so.

Android and most devices started as a direct response to iOS. All the major
players saw that iOS was disrupting the market and there was no time left to
invent something on their own, so they simply built a clone.

From a business point of view the right decision, Microsoft invented a new UI
and new devices with Nokia, but it seems they failed, since they were late to
the market and to succeed they would have needed a really disruptive idea
themselves.

Google had the team and skills to invent something that could disrupt iOS, but
they decided to copy it instead and in the process wasted all the brain power
of the team that probably has the best chance of finding the next paradigm.
What a waste of talent to use all those great people for building a clone.

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MarkMc
I really don't understand how 'pinch to zoom' can be patentable.

Imagine showing a touch-screen tablet to a group of people who had never seen
one before. If you said, "Look, here's how to pan an image. How would you
zoom?" then surely a significant percentage would give you the 'pinch' answer
within 10 seconds. Wouldn't that clearly demonstrate that the 'invention' was
too obvious to be patented?

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shaydoc
I think Apple should just stick with innovation and pioneering great new
products that made them insanely huge as a company. It would also serve them
better than the lawsuits, there are always new markets to be created!

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hobbyhacker
<http://www.jacquesmattheij.com/tim-cook-memo-line-by-line>

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antirez
tap to zoom, seriously?

