TheMacAdvocate » legal

Adobe Cries Anti-Trust to Feds, Narrowly Escapes Subsequent Lightning Bolt

JT — Wed, 05 May 2010 20:21:56 +0000

Adobe must not respect the anti-trust regulators in this country. According to the New York Post, the same company that bragged of their proprietary multimedia platform: “over 85% of the top web sites contain(ing) Flash content and Flash is running on over 98% of computers on the Web” is crying to federal regulators about Apple’s recent decision to ban cross-compilers from creating iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad apps. Nevermind that Apple doesn’t have anywhere near that kind of stranglehold on the smartphone market – or the app store market. I guess it does have a monopoly on the non-shitty smartphone market, but that’s kind of subjective.

So why would a company that brags about having a virtual monopoly on multimedia content creation on the web call attention to a company that doesn’t fit any rational definition of monopolistic conduct?

Oh. That would explain a lot.

Android 1.5 Clock App: Are You Serious?

JT — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 19:09:14 +0000

This is what TMA gets when he fusses around with Verizon phones (aside from better 3G service in NYC):

Those are the two “Clock” apps in the HTC Eris and the iPhone, respectively. Aside from the passing similarity between the 2 Timer tabs themselves, the 4 tabs across the bottom, World Clock, Alarm Clock, Stopwatch and Timer, use the same text and almost identical icons. Wow.

Now I realize the freetard chuckleheads want to scream about how the patent system sucks because such nebulous things like “naming a World Clock” and “sliding Hours and Minutes placeholders” get undeserved protection and that the winner is always the person with the biggest patent portfolio and litigious crappy blah, blah….

/BOOM

Excuse me while I reassemble my head.

As I was saying, kudos to the Obvious Brigade and their comments about the patent system. The shittiness of the system itself belies a pretty important point. Someone – probably a team of someones – spent months developing a way to represent 4 important things you might want to do with time on the iPhone. They came up with the names, the icons and the functional elements of each individual tab – in short, they put more work into it than anything you’ve ever worked on. Android 1.5 comes along and says “that’s pretty cool” and absconds to a degree that’s almost comical: 4 almost identical icons in the same order, with the same names. Nevermind that the timer tab’s dialer-alert sound-start top/bottom orientation is a straight-up rip-off of the iPhone’s.

There are a lot of things short of this comparison that would make innovation more competitive and less litigious. This exceeds that point. This is theft, plain and simple.

I had attributed a lot of the negative press around “Apple vs. Google” as just a way for hacks to drum up page hits (which it still is) and perhaps a little bit of the Jobster pissing on the fence posts of along his property line, however poorly the USPTO lets him define it. When I see stuff like this, which is not one of the documented claims against HTC, I can understand why Apple is dropping napalm too.

Apple vs. HTC: 2 Thoughts

JT — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 17:48:46 +0000

This Time It’s Personal
Steve Jobs was not leading Apple when the company lost the infamous “Look and Feel” lawsuit waged against Microsoft. Based on the existence of an ill-advised licensing agreement struck by then-CEO John Sculley, the courts ostensibly gift-wrapped the Macintosh UI for Microsoft to pillage. When you listen to Jobs talk about the loss, he absolutely seethes. All of the marketing about Apple’s role as the innovator that Microsoft copies stems from something that was entirely out of Steve’s control. It was much worse than if Jobs himself had lost the Mac’s GUI. But he didn’t. The person he personally recruited to put a Mac in every household – the person who ultimately betrayed him gave it away. This theft may not be all there is to Apple’s assault, but it’s definitely present. Consider the phalanx of patents cited, the unannounced nature of the attack (according to HTC) and Jobs’ own words about the lawsuit: they all suggest some of this came from a place that wanted to avenge a loss – and prevent another. To some, the “belligerent-feeling” nature of the suit is enough to detract from its virtue. It feels “evil“, “bullying” or “unnecessary“. The core of this sentiment, made by some of the smarter people on the tubes, is that this kind of whack-a-moling inhibits innovation, which leads me to my next point.

Apple is not Microsoft
Apple is not motivated by market share, earnings per share or number of markets entered. Apple’s motivation begins and ends with the design of excellent user experiences. The perception that Apple will get to a place in the industry where it stops innovating, sits on its cash cows and perpetuates its existence by bludgeoning more dextrous upstarts with its patent portfolio is simply never going to happen, at least not while Jobs is alive. Jobs relentlessly whips the crop at Apple, pushing innovation like WiFi, Firewire and DisplayPort to the point where comfortable technologies like floppy disks, serial connections and removable media drives are phased out with pundit (and occasionally fanboy)-wrankling regularity. Apple outpaces any other computer or consumer electronics maker in terms of version hustle. Anyone who believes that Apple is capable of laying off the gas at the expense of bleeding-edge innovation does not know the company.

Which, as usual, focuses the discussion not on the playa, but the game. The patent system is busted, but it’s the only game in town. If you’re in the computer business, if you’re not playing, you’re losing. This isn’t a case of Apple vaguely threatening *nix users with unspecified patents in an attempt to ward of people from using open-source OSs (*cough* Microsoft *cough*) or Apple trying to leech innovation and cash from competitors (*cough* Nokia *cough*). Jobs said “We’re not in the technology-licensing business”, which is different than “We’ve always been shameless about stealing great ideas”. If you listen to how Jobs describes what his company is about, you’d have no trouble understanding why Apple is defending its IP. That doesn’t stop pundits from slapping other companies’ motivations on the things Apple does, but then again, without drama, there are no pageviews.

Jobs has seen his rudderless ship boarded, plundered and almost sent to the bottom of the ocean and the captain didn’t even have the honor of going down with the ship. Regardless about how you feel about the means or the intent, he sure as hell isn’t going to let it happen again – not on his watch.