

Patent Application from "Steven Jobs et al": Advertisement in Operating System - blasdel
http://www.google.com/patents?printsec=abstract&zoom=4&pg=PA1&id=PVjJAAAAEBAJ#v=onepage&q=&f=false

======
marcell
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.

------
jbrun
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?

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

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

~~~
houseabsolute
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.

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

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

------
pierrefar
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.

~~~
julio_the_squid
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.

------
motters
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.

------
eurokc98
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.

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

~~~
jordyhoyt
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.

~~~
ramchip
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.

~~~
dhimes
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)

------
evandavid
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.

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

------
mcav
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.

------
zaidf
One more reason the patent system is royally screwed up.

------
wooster
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.)

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

------
x5315
It's odd that the pictures of Mac OS X are Tiger.

