Will Steve Jobs' final vendetta haunt Google?

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-501366_162-20124319.html

by dean • 15 years ago

23 41 15 years ago

jaylevitt• 15 years ago

"It suggests that Apple, which has pledged to be true to Jobs' vision, may try to derail Android in court."

Apple has pledged to be true to Jobs' vision? Really? Because I think we just saw a better-sourced article state that Jobs himself said "Don't ask, 'What would Steve do?'".

In fact, if anything, my big wish for Apple now is that they start cooperating with Google. If FaceTime and iMessage were available on Android, and Google Voice native on iPhone (other than Sprint), they could turn the carriers into dumb pipes. It's time.

masklinn2• 15 years ago

> If FaceTime and iMessage were available on Android

This is about as likely as them licensing iOS to other handset makers. There's little to nothing for Apple in such a move.

spot2• 15 years ago

metcalfe's law disagrees with you.

vetinari• 15 years ago

There is also nothing for Google in such a move. They already have GTalk, complete with audio & video.

technoslut• 15 years ago

>Apple has pledged to be true to Jobs' vision? Really? Because I think we just saw a better-sourced article state that Jobs himself said "Don't ask, 'What would Steve do?'".

I don't think that Jobs was alone in his feelings on Google and Android at Apple, whether it's justified or not. I'm reminded of a Gruber article:

http://daringfireball.net/2011/07/succeeding_steve_jobs

"ERIC SCHMIDT. Zero chance. Schmidt is viewed throughout Apple as a traitor, who perhaps used his knowledge of the iPhone, gleaned while then a member of Apple’s board himself, to give Google’s Android effort a leg up. There is a better chance of Apple choosing its next CEO through a raffle of ten golden tickets hidden inside iPad boxes distributed around the globe than that they’d give the job to Eric Schmidt. Wall Street might accept him but Apple rank-and-file would revolt."

trickjarrett• 15 years ago

While I understand Jobs' anger, I also can't help but remember how the Mouse was "stolen" from Xerox and other such tales in Apple's history. It comes across as "it's okay when I do it but not when Google does."

emp• 15 years ago

The mouse was invented by Doug Engelbart and 'stolen' by Xerox and then 'stolen' by Apple. Apple's mouse was well designed, compact, cheap, reliable, very dependable and consistent in its function. None of this was true of the two previous mice.

This is the difference when Apple 'steals'. They are inspired by something poorly executed and create something much better than the inspiration.

sbuk3• 15 years ago

I have seen this banded about the internet too much of late and it's about time it stopped, I mean it's not as if the information is out there, is it? The mouse wasn't invented by Xerox. The concept was invented by Doug Engelbart of SRI in the 1960's and first demoed in 1968 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfIgzSoTMOs). The GUI was around as a concept before PARC existed. Ivan Sutherland is credited as creating the first working GUI with Sketchpad in, released in 1963 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOZqRJzE8xg). You'll notice that the interface ideas found in the Alto and later systems (Star?) by PARC (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Alto_Neptune_Filemanager.g...) were influenced by those of Engelbart in his demo, or to use your language, "stolen". If you look back further, you'll come across Vannevar Bush, who outlined the majority of what went on to become modern computing in an essay about a conceptual system called 'Memex' in 1945, so I guess using your language, everyone 'stole' from him.

As a footnote, Xerox/PARC were remunerated fairly by Apple with 1 million pre-IPO shares, valued at around $7/share which Xerox later sold for $16 million (~$45 million today).

Finally, making criticisms like that is fine, but at least get the meme right. Apple were said to have "stolen" the GUI concept that Xerox apparently "invented".

jhuni3• 15 years ago

The point is Apple is a great marketer. The extent to which they are an innovator, on the other hand, is often exaggerated.

jsavimbi• 15 years ago

> "stolen"

There has been no invention in the history of mankind that was not produced without learning from the past work of others.

RexRollman• 15 years ago

According to Wikipedia, the first mouse was developed by Douglas Engelbart at the Stanford Research Institute in 1963. Regardless, Xerox was paid in pre-IPO Apple stock, so I don't understand why people try to say Apple stole anything from Xerox.

timrichard• 15 years ago

IIRC, Xerox were paid in exchange for engineer visits on the understanding that Apple would produce some form of GUI. Xerox were sufficiently aggrieved with the result to file a lawsuit against Apple, who were trying to do the same thing to Microsoft at the time. I don't think the Xerox/Apple arrangement is as straightforward as many make out.

MaxGabriel• 15 years ago

If you're on a mobile device, it redirects you to the home page of their mobile site.

This link to ABC should work http://abcnews.go.com/m/story?id=14795854

dazzla2• 15 years ago

Why do so many mobile site redirects get this wrong?

sudont• 15 years ago

Idiot implementation.

If you think about it, there shouldn’t be that much of a difference in markup between mobile and desktop, so serve the same shit, and only change the presentation. I think a lot of engineering groups try to over-complicate this, or simply don’t care. One document, one url, different presentation.

I’ve used this to great effect before, in conjunction with media selectors: http://detectmobilebrowsers.com/

ahi• 15 years ago

No, but it will sell books. It's rather gross seeing how many people are trying to make a buck off the guy's death.

healsdata• 15 years ago

I'm not sure if you were referring to the author of the book, but this is an authorized biography with interviews of Steve Jobs. I have no idea who the proceeds go to but this was obviously something Steve Jobs wanted to happen.

jhferris3• 15 years ago

"This almost sounds like a spiritual leader declaring a jihad on Android as his dying wish"

What the hell? Beyond the fact that this is one small part of a book (not the same as him saying it on video or written by himself on a website), there's no way the average joe is going to have his purchasing decision swayed by the opinions of Steve Jobs. Everyone who would already has (or is planning on procuring) an iPhone.

brudgers4• 15 years ago

In April of 2002, I bought a reconditioned Handspring Visor for $69 and an AirPrime PCS Digital Link Springboard module for $19.95 (down from several hundred bucks initially).

Though based on pen technology, numbers could be dialed by touch, and short of location based services and a gyroscope it had every major application of a modern smartphone including the iPhone.

That's why Job's sanctimony is pretty much bullshit, IMO - the iPhone didn't spring like Athena straight from Job's head. Though it was a significant step forward in the form factor, it was still no more than a step forward.

Phone plans, of course, are another matter, and the changes Jobs initiated in those is far more of a factor in Android's success than the implementation details of a touch screen interface (and also explain why I never used my Handspring phone for mobile data during the two and a half years it was my primary phone, and why it was replaced with a Razor rather than another smartphone).

[http://www.geek.com/hwswrev/pda/visorphone/]

[http://www.visorcentral.com/content/Stories/1246-1.htm]

glenra4• 15 years ago

Well before PalmOS, Apple spent ~100 million dollars developing the Newton which also ended up having most of the major applications of a modern smartphone, including - with the appropriate PCMCIA cards installed in the slot(s) or external devices attached to the serial port - both phone service and location-based services.

The first Palm product was a software program that ran on the Newton; the first PalmOS devices were far less capable than Newton. So if you're just going by the feature set, I think Apple wins this one.

brudgers4• 15 years ago

>"I think Apple wins this one."

Despite the difficulty I have of foregoing snark in a case where Scully's projects are deemed an Apple win; when it comes to the Newton: Apple != Jobs.

Keep in mind that both pen computing and digital organizers predate the Newton by several years - my sister had a RadioShack PC1 years before the Newton.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pen_computing#History]

[http://www.trs-80.com/wordpress/trs-80-computer-line/pocket/]

spitfire• 15 years ago

It's nice to see someone who actually remembers Palm. It's amazing how many people simply forget all about Palm altogether yet it was the thing to have in the 1996-2004 era.

ameen• 15 years ago

As someone who has been observing the tech-industry since 2004[1]. This is what I have to say, Android (as a startup) was supposed to be an open-source alternative to the Blackberry and the first Android device (made by HTC) was in a "Qwerty" form-factor.

And the UI was (at the time) plain and among the most uninteresting that I'd ever seen[2].

To explain things clearly:

[1] I've been a gadgeteer from the late 90's and owned a Nokia 5110 when it came out. I've been an early adopter since and had one of the first smartphones (which included a camera) from Nokia, the 7650. I started covering the industry as a freelancer and was with one of the leading print magazines on tech.

[2] In regards to UIs on smartphones-pre iOS, most UIs were palatable and even interesting. The Nokia S60, Symbian UIQ, WM, etc were all different - none of them were copies, and some were just too intuitive once you were used to it (S60). So, when I used the Android emulator (the first device wasn't publicly released) I knew that it would never succeed with a mediocre UI.

And in response to @brudgers, where is Handspring now? Nokia were THE innovators in the smartphone market, where are they now? Nokia had tons of services before any Google service was palatable - NGage, Nokia Store, Nokia Music (comes with Music later on), etc. WAP and career billing existed pre-Apple. And if you're talking about Apple's mobile browser, the Mobile webkit was first ported over to a mobile OS by Nokia themselves (it was open-sourced as well).

Its all about the implementation. When a behemoth like Nokia could be brought down, just because they didn't anticipate Apple's all out assault. Apple had one of the best strategies one's which would've been known to other board members, are you going to say Nokia, MS, and other smartphone companies where complacent when Apple and later Android assaulted them?

Google had a clear direction on how to move forward with their OS, and it wasn't until after the iPhone was launched (and when Schmidt was a board member) did that idea come into place. I'm not accusing Google of stealing Apple's plans but the data is all out for you to parse and make sense of. And since we have many entrepreneurs and businessmen here, let me just say that business plans are as important as the product itself, even more so in a few sectors. I'm not prejudiced, but I make sense of what I can.

mattmanser2• 15 years ago

Were you around when the iPhone came out? Do you remember the day you first saw it? As it frustrates me people reinventing history. I remember seeing an iPhone for the first time. It was literally a total game changer, revolutionary is a fair word and I use it rarely.

It was years ahead of anything else on the market. The UX was incredible. Everything just worked without incredibly complicated interfaces and clicking a million different options.

You're not looking at the whole product hard enough. The UX is what made it so incredible. The fact it was touch based when everyone said there wasn't a market or that it was too expensive was an added bonus rather than the main feature. But that multi-touch screen enabled Apple to make a truly gorgeous UX. The way it all ties together. The little (and totally un-noticable) UX features that just make it all work so well but you don't notice them any more because they're so ubiquitous because Android copied them all.

Specific examples:

1. The web browser. I remember being incredulous at the time. Nonsense! I said. Viewing normal websites on a mobile? It'll be unusable! Phooey! Then my friend passed me his iPhone and I played with the wonderful pinch and zoom. I switched websites using the on screen keyboard that unobtrusively appeared like magic when I clicked on the address. I was astounded. And totally proved wrong. They were very nascent at the time. People used to have to make websites specifically for browsers and no-one really bothered. My old company did for their browser based application (quite revolutionary at the time) and it was an extremely limited subset of functionality. See your own link, the first one, for how useless the first attempts were. What on earth are those little icons in the top right corner?

And Apple just walked into a market they had no experience with and, Plop! Incredible mobile web browser straight out the gate.

2. The home screen. You could customise it! And move stuff around. And it's accessible without pressing back 20 times! Wow. No longer were you locked into having the media player as option 8 that you had to press 9 buttons to get to. Gah, those old phone screens still make me shudder. They pretty much exposed every setting as a gigantic list on your home screen. And there were so many options. I still feel a little surprised every time I open the iPhone's general settings.

3. The contacts book, no phone before the iPhone had a usable contact book. It was a list. If you were lucky you could search. But that would probably be at least a few button presses on top of the search.

4. Text message interface. Totally different to how other phones did it, conversation based instead of just a list (see your own link for how it used to be done).

5. The email tie-in. A simple UX for emails? Nice little notifications? Push? In a consumer phone? It's not a blackberry? Incredible!

6. The media player. An intuitive interface for playing or manipulating playing songs? And iTunes! Crap as it may be in today's eyes, it was so much better than the crud that came bundled with other phones at the time.

7. The microphone, volume controls and phone answering.

8. The 'silent' mode switch. Faffing around through about 10 actions to turn on silent mode? No more, one tactile feedback switch with the added bonus that you can run your thumb over it in your pocket to see if silent mode is on.

9. The synch just worked. You just plugged it in and it worked. In the 3 or 4 years that the other manufacturers had computer tie-in they'd managed to produce every conceivable piece of rubbish synching software you could imagine. The iPhone was the first phone I saw anyone actually bother to synch with their computer.

10. The wi-fi. It has wifi? No way. And it just works? Not 20 minutes fiddling, it just worked. And it did amazingly smart things like use the wifi for email and browsing when you were near a known network. This. Is. Amazing. The reason it had this incredible feature was because it had a mobile browser that would have caned your mobile data plan which were restrictive to say the least. Other phones didn't have wifi connections.

The list is much, much longer than this. There's just so many little tweaks and incredible modifications they made to how a mobile phone should operate that beggar belief that anyone would claim it's just a 'step', it was a gigantic leap.

Phone manufacturers were total failures when it came to the actual software for their phones. Total and utter failures. They couldn't do it! The UX was always horrific. The iPhone changed that permanently.

It reinvented usable mobile phones. Before that everyone just used a tiny subset of the capabilities because they were so god-damn complicated.

And Android took it all. Copied it. This is what Android looked like when the iPhone came out, it looked like every other phone on the market, a terrible UX, with absolutely no vision:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FJHYqE0RDg

I've said before, credit where due to the android team for changing direction so fast and so well, but they lifted that OS from Apple, no doubt in my mind.

NB: I'm not an Apple fanboi, I only have an iPhone. But to dismiss the iPhone as a 'step' is absurd to me.

brudgers4• 15 years ago

>"Viewing normal websites on a mobile? It'll be unusable!"

What the iPhone changed was data plans and that's what made websites viewable on a mobile phone because the one you get is no longer by necessity a stripped down version - Yes, using a touchscreen provides a better experience, but the browser on my old Nokia with S60v3 is entirely functional for browsing.

I would mention the advantage the standard file system Symbian offers when it comes to moving data back and forth between devices or printing as compared with iTunes or Zune, but anyone who had a PalmOS device would already be familiar with them.

Please don't get me wrong, I remember when the iPhone came out, I tried to figure out how to get a manager's to work with Exchange.

weaselspice• 15 years ago

Typical ifanboi response: 1) Completely ignore post being replied to 2) Diatribe of rubbish about how apple invented everything 3) Oh, i'm not a fanboi btw lulz

Honestly, you seem to be selecting the worst examples of dumbphone design and then saying, "Look how great the iphone is cos it isn't the worst at this particular feature". If you're going to criticize people about reinventing history, at least learn some yourself. This list of "Stuff that mattmanser didn't know about Smartphones before the iPhone came along" is almost trollish.

Both Palm and WinMo had most of the features you seem to think first materialized on the iphone: Rows of Apps ie "Home Screen" (WinMo even had widgets, etc), web browsers, contacts, emails, texting, media players, cameras, third party apps, syncing, on screen keyboards, notifications, etc, etc, etc.

If anything apple BLATANTLY copied WinMo, but made it look nicer.

zrgiu_• 15 years ago

No matter what anyone says and the patents involved, no judge in this world will ever ban Android in US or (almost) anywhere else in the world. There are too many manufacturers involved, too many users having phones with the OS, and too many resources spent on this. It's simply too big. Steve Jobs knew that, and giving how a great PR person he was, this might have been just an attempt to put Google's Android in a bad light (which, in the eyes of the non-technical people, he succeeded).

Also, no matter what anyone says (brudgers, this is for you), without Apple, we wouldn't have the world full of touch-screen phones we have now. Yes, it is "only" a step forward, but remember, there were already touch-screen phones on the market. And their impact was ZERO. It is apple who built a real user-friendly OS, and conceived hardware that would make the device easy to use. And being honest with ourselves, every other mobile OS after that got it's inspiration from the iPhone OS.

Android will be the largest player (in numbers) in the mobile space for a long while because it's simply accessible to everyone. It's Microsoft vs Apple all over again. I sided with Android the day the G1 launched, I never looked back, and I'm not sorry at all. But I will never forget the first iPhone, which started an avalanche.

mattmanser2• 15 years ago

Aside from the Android/iOs thing, the other really interesting thing in the article is that Jobs essentially is part of the reason why so many Google services are shutting down.

Not that I disagree with the sentiment behind it, i.e. focus.

Will Steve Jobs' final vendetta haunt Google?

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