HAHA. Serves Samsung right. Now I can actually give crap to my friends who love their Samsung phone/tablet and hate the iPhone/iPad. Of course they like it. It is design awesome sauce. Too bad it was stolen!
Er, the first jury verdict is that Samsung has to pay. The presiding judge has already pointed out two places where the jury made awards that are inconsistent with the law. This thing will be appealed forever. Probably until $1.5 billion is just taxi fare home from a party.
"Mediocre Writers Borrow; Great Writers Steal" - T.S. Eliot
The real value in this is the message. There's nothing innovative about ripping off someone else's work.
Those that think is this is all about "the rectangle" just haven't been paying attention. And those that think this stifles innovation are clueless.
No innovation happens when everyone just follows the leader. Where's the innovation in just copying a successful design (cough, Microsoft Store, cough)?
Real innovation happens when you have to come up with something completely different in order to compete with the established leaders. If anything, this will foster innovation. If the established industries can't compete with Apple without blatantly ripping them off, someone else will come along who can.
Seriously, sure Jobs was influenced by what he saw at Parc. And yes, he improved upon it. But it was shown to him under license (or with permission, if you will -- I don't believe any money changed hands). But that's a far cry from saying he "stole it".
First. Where did someone get 1.5 Billion. That isn't the correct amount.
Anyway
"I will agree that the box that my Samsung Nexus S came in is a dead ringer for an iPhone box. I just don't agree that it confused consumers."
I remember a few Samsung devices that when I first saw then, I actually did believe they were Apple products. Meaning I didn't see the name Samsung and I actually thought I was looking at an iPad. Now the iPhone stuff is not as exact copy as they did with the iPad. I mean Samsung's tablet is an exact ringer for an Apple iPad, I was definitely confused there.
I've seen a bunch of online comments about the design of the iPhone being "obvious". Yet, when it first appeared, it was widely criticized for having only one button and no physical keyboard. Not exactly obvious at the time, was it?
I also found this article about the hurdles of getting something like the iPhone to market interesting.
Bear Bibeault wrote:Seriously, sure Jobs was influenced by what he saw at Parc. And yes, he improved upon it. But it was shown to him under license (or with permission, if you will -- I don't believe any money changed hands). But that's a far cry from saying he "stole it".
Apparently Jobs did pay for it - not for the WIMP explicitly, but I believe it was 1 million dollars in shares in Apple just prior to the IPO so that he would be allowed into the PARC facility with their full knowledge of who he was and why he was willing to pay that much for access. And he did not go in alone - he brought one of his best and brightest engineers - again with Xerox's knowledge of who the engineer was and why he was involved. Wikipedia has some information on this
Bear Bibeault wrote:Yet, when it first appeared, it was widely criticized for having only one button and no physical keyboard. Not exactly obvious at the time, was it?
It was a radical departure from the smartphones of its day. And Apple set new standards in the maker/wireless carrier relationship model. AT&T paid Apple a lot
of money for the honor of selling the iPhone. It was radical, and yet it worked.
The late Chairman Steve had a thing for one button, the original Mac mouse was a single button device.
The wireless carriers gave Apple a huge amount of pushback, because they could not get their heads around the idea that
a phone could be controlled by software. They wanted dedicated physical buttons for each thing. That was a huge
innovation on Apple's part.
I have a hard time believing that he didn't just make all of that up. I know of no one who would interpret the outcome that way -- yet he claims that he just happened to be sitting there and hearing these conversations? Skeptical.
Ulf Dittmer wrote:Interesting angle on the verdict
This "explain to consumers that Samsung is the same as Apple for half the price" story is
floating around. Don't know, but it could make a billion dollar fine be well worth it.
This is a long play
Ulf Dittmer
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Bear Bibeault wrote:I know of no one who would interpret the outcome that way
I'd say both his and your experience is anecdotal, and not necessarily indicative of something widespread. IMO, the salient point is that there's some good PR in this for Samsung, as well as bad PR.
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