In 1996, in Bob Cringely's documentary Triumph of the Nerds, Steve Jobs said:
Picasso had a saying, he said "good artists copy, great artists steal". We have, you know, always been shameless about stealing great ideas.
Here's the video:
Today, Apple's press release says:
“We can sit by and watch competitors steal our patented inventions, or we can do something about it. We’ve decided to do something about it,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “We think competition is healthy, but competitors should create their own original technology, not steal ours.”
Apple has suffered through many patent trolls over the years, and should understand how software patents limit innovation, indeed their consistent position on supporting Open Source Codecs in HTML5 has been that they are afraid of patent lawsuits. So this action can only be seen as an attack on innovation.
4 comments:
My hope is that Apple gets slapped on their patent portfolio and finds this way of competing more expensive than they can imagine.
I think stealing an IDEA is very different than stealing TECHNOLOGY
That's awesome journalism Kevin. Patents are ideas, not technology, otherwise you'd have to have a working example before it was patented. That's not true, no matter how complex the descriptions are. They are just ideas.
Pure genius bringing this back and comparing it to what's going on now.
As he has evolved and Apple has became the new Microsoft, it's hard to look at him in the same light as we did 10 years ago.
Thanks again for showing, this post made my day!
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