> "I will spend my last dying breath if I need to, and I will spend every penny of Apple's $40 billion in the bank, to right this wrong. I'm going to destroy Android, because it's a stolen product. I'm willing to go thermonuclear war on this.
What about all the technology (and engineers) at XEROX PARC that Jobs stole from there? Funny how history repeats itself.
> I'm going to destroy Android, because it's a stolen product.
First time I'm reading up on it, but seems Android was both conceived as an idea and worked on as a mobile idea before Jobs started thinking about the iPhone?
> Android Inc. was founded in Palo Alto, California, in October 2003 by Andy Rubin, Rich Miner, Nick Sears, and Chris White. [...] The early intentions of the company were to develop an advanced operating system for digital cameras, and this was the basis of its pitch to investors in April 2004 [...] and five months later it had diverted its efforts and was pitching Android as a handset operating system that would rival Symbian and Microsoft Windows Mobile.
> In 2005, when Steve Jobs began planning the iPhone, he had a choice to either "shrink the Mac, which would be an epic feat of engineering, or enlarge the iPod". Jobs favored the former approach but pitted the Macintosh and iPod teams, led by Scott Forstall and Tony Fadell, respectively, against each other in an internal competition, with Forstall winning by creating iPhone OS.
Reportedly, the original Android was more of a Blackberry ripoff, with a keyboard and directional keys instead of a touchscreen. Once they saw what the iPhone was doing, they quickly pivoted and changed the whole product, so the Android we see today has nothing to do with the Android of 2004.
I think this was just more of a function of technology. Good quality capacitive touchscreens only really started to become available in the mid 2000s, and even the early ones weren't that great (e.g. no multi-touch). Without this you're forced into using keyboards if you want to have any kind of usable interface for typing, or you do something like the graffiti writing system that psion PDAs had in the 90s.
The CoRecursive podcast has an episode with Chet Haase where he specifically outlines how they were cloning BlackBerry and then had to drop everything and rebuild when they heard about the iPhone OS. He directly states that Android wouldn’t have had a touch interface if the iPhone didn’t exist.
GUI interfaces using a capacitive touch screen became good because of iPhone, not as part of a natural progression of technology.
No they were just pressure sensitive screens. You could use a finger to navigate but again not as accurate. The solution instead was to perfect one handed navigation which was what palm os 5 did and input writing with either a keyboard (handheld/onscreen) or graffiti like you said.
But I had a Samsung PalmOS phone with no keyboard or numpad or dpad, and a full color touch home screen grid of 3rd party app icons, in full final production in the hands of users like me, in 2000 or 2001.
Steve was probably complaining/accusing Eric, that Google bought Android because they've seen what Apple is doing and realized that it is a big deal. Plus, perhaps what Apple was doing also shaped/influenced Android in the later stages before release.
> "You're ripping us off!", Steve shouted, raising his voice even higher. "I trusted you, and now you're stealing from us!"
> But Bill Gates just stood there coolly, looking Steve directly in the eye, before starting to speak in his squeaky voice.
> "Well, Steve, I think there's more than one way of looking at it. I think it's more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it."
Maybe they did see the commercial value, but they were more FOSS-minded people thinking this technology must be free for the world to use. But I don't know any of the specifics of this particular transfer of IP.
Jobs famously muscled his way in and took their ideas, albeit from a dumb board.
Famous story:
Steve Jobs confronted Bill Gates after he announced Windows' GUI OS. "You’re stealing from us!” Bill replied "I think it's more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it."
Or much more closely, Nokia's Maemo running on a Nokia 770. The nokia 770 had more resolution, actually supports apps and app store (Apple only supports weblets in gen 1), had an icon based UI, and supported a stylus.
Sure the apple had a nicer touch screen and WAN, but the grid of icons to launch an app was very similar.
It is beyond me how a CEO can serve at any board, at all, let alone the CEO of one billion dollar corporation serving at the board of another billion dollar corporation.
There are potential issues with non-compete agreements, any and all deals between the companies, hiring and compensation of executives, board members actually having the time to do the job of a board member, and or course also sensitive information leaking to where it shouldn't.
But neither of those outcomes is desirable from a wider viewpoint. Society doesn’t benefit from companies only innovating by stealing from each other, nor does it benefit from active collusion.
Active collusion - right. Companies stealing from one another? I think it can be argued that the consumer benefits from corporations imitating the good ideas of other corporations. A world with Android and iOS is better than a world only with iOS.
Executives usually have quite a bit of leverage and have multiple ways of retaliating against a company, typically in the form of a lawsuit and dragging it on for years.
This is also the reason why C-suites are given "golden parachutes", because firing them may end up triggering a lengthy legal battle that neither party benefits from.
Samsung SPH-i300
In the hands of ordinary users by
2000 or 2001.
No keyboard, no numpad, no d-pad, color touch screen, home screen with a grid of 3rd party app icons, even internet so those apps even include email and web browser.
So it was very much a smartphone like today, not just a palm pda, and one in the all-screen form not the Treo/Blackberry form.
The specs and tech are all 7 years earlier because the device is 7 years earlier. Neither Apple nor Android invented that screens got better and cell networks got 3g in that time etc.
All Apple did was have Steve's high standards to produce a product that didn't look and feel like every other normal silver painted plastic product (including the i300), with 7 years later tech.
That is something, and even something significant, but to try to say that Android is a stolen product is ridiculous, unless you want to say it was stolen from Samsung! But it wasn't stolen from them either. It just wasn't a new or unique idea in general by then. Devices with OS's and interfaces like that had already existed for many years, they just weren't phones simply because the cell network itself didn't exist yet.
> He was a bully and a tyrant, who's purported genius was built off the backs of far more worthy people.
Is a conductor of an orchestra "building off the backs of" other people? Or do the instrument players need to be talented and the conductor also has to be talented in a different way for a symphony to be preformed well? How about the coach of a sports team?
A conductor needs to be able to play an instrument among other things. Applying this to the tech / design world, I doubt Jobs could really design or build things.
Conductors also need to have great team work skills and empathy. Jobs was not known for that. He was known for being a petty jerk.
Jobs was a great salesman and story teller and yes, also a good curator.
He was a major asshole, however he was very good at running tech companies and managing tech products. That's why people drool over him. Watch the YouTube videos from his Next days, and show me a corporate CEO on that level of competence and involvement who's not an asshole.
At least in his case, he was an asshole who actually made something good - not apologizing it, but in most cases it's assholes making up bullshit just to be assholes. Jobs made his employees a lot of money through Apple stock, others usually just take your life force and money away.
Apple didn't own a touchscreen phone interface, lol. Android started earlier than iOS did, and was always, always significantly ahead of the curve.
Apple made the concept 'cool' and benefited from their loyalist userbase, but if anything Apple copied Android. Even simple things like widgets and app folders Apple didn't get for like 10 years. Honestly, it's shocking.
Apple obviously didn't originate the mobile OS, I can't help thinking these board level political, commercial and legal big-man shenanigans are of historical interest but not hugely relevant to guiding obvious technical paths other than in the stories some of them like to tell amongst themselves.
I really enjoy reading these "old" articles and how the game finally "ended". Have to admit - most of these don't really end the way we thought, but great general knowledge and review.
These guys in the Valley were all "borrowing" from each other all the time. This cross-pollination was what made fast progress such as we saw possible. They were so petty about it, it's kind of pathetic.
I think it was to Job's advantage that he left this world before social media really blew up. He was a brilliant product visionary but a pretty horrible human being.
Apple 'stole' the rectangular capacitive touch screen form factor from the LG Prada [1,2] which they combined with their own operating system. Android which was initially targeted at devices with physical keyboards and pointing devices then 'stole' the form factor from Apple. Microsoft took the idea and ran with it to create their own multi-touch capacitive display devices, as did many others. Most fell by the wayside but let's all be glad that there are at least two competitors instead of a single vendor hogging this important market.
Jobs himself claimed that 'good artists copy, great artists steal' (another 'stolen' quote by the way [3]) so the pot could call the kettle black but that did not make him any less so.
What about all the technology (and engineers) at XEROX PARC that Jobs stole from there? Funny how history repeats itself.