If you sit experts in separate rooms and give them the same problems, often they will converge to the same solution. Whether that is due to physical limitations, mathematical or statistical considerations, the current state of the market, what have you.
There are a lot of narrow physical constraints operating in this market: the size of the human hand, the size of a fingertip, the range of human vision, the distance from the eye to the screen in terms of arm's length. There are other technology givens like the resolution of a screen that fits in the hand and the precision of touch technology. There are cultural givens to pull something apart to stretch it or push it together to make it smaller, or to advance a view by turning a page.
The more you think about these problems, the more you realize how narrow the space for innovation was in them, and in fact how many of Apple's innovations were anticipated by the market. Apple got there first with the whole package and reaped the benefits in mindshare. But they shouldn't be able to seek rent on a solution that experts would create in a vacuum.
>If you sit experts in separate rooms and give them the same problems, often they will converge to the same solution.
As a universal truth, I don't buy this. This is partially based on my own engineering experience, but in terms of the smartphone market I see WP7 (and to a lesser extent Palm) and see touch phone experiences that are significantly different than what Apple developed/evolved with iOS (although it is true that some of the implementation details like pinch-to-zoom are present there as well, but other details are different).
There is no universal axiom that says that a smartphone experience has to look like an iPhone. I think everyone would be better off if Google took more of an independent route rather than just building an experience using bits and pieces of iOS and WP7.
I'm an engineer as well. I would say that in interfaces especially, we converge toward best practices globally. Your customer is not happy to have to learn a hundred interfaces or switch interfaces when they get a new device or program. For instance, the VCR. Or Windows version bumps. Or the Ribbon. They prefer one interface to rule them all, like Logitech Harmony remotes, the browser, the command line, Emacs.
70% of the smartphone market is in iOS and Android, two very similar smartphone experiences. RIM's distinctive experience is at 20% and falling fast (it was at 27% in March). WP7 is an also ran at 5%. Symbian is at 2%. Palm is not in the chart.
If you believe those numbers, the contest is all but over. Every non-iOS non-Android experience is failing in the market. It may not be just because of their designs, but I think you have to believe on other grounds that UX/design is the major selling point for all smartphones. The second contender might be applications, and iOS and Android are the leaders there too, by a wide margin over the field.
I think Google decided to beat Apple at its own game. Whatever you believe about how they used Apple's patented material (or not) or how valid the patents are (or not), clearly at some point a decision was made to compete with Apple not just on features, but also in UI polish and look and feel.
And somebody probably looked at Apple and said, how can we top that? When they couldn't, they kept it as similar as possible for a variety of reasons: the patents were too broad to be enforceable, they could justify deriving the same concepts in a vacuum because they come from well known UX principles that predate the patents, the design elements were universals that all phones should have, they should lower switching costs from iOS to Android.
I agree with you that Google could have gone its own way when designing a phone experience. But I don't know that that would have been a path to success. You would only have to believe the preceding paragraph to imagine that a think-different UX could have been worse for consumers.
Deja vu - Apple has pretensions that everyone (and especially its biggest rivals) are stealing from them, while simultaneously copying successful features from countless other products.
The non-recognition of this fact of course is the biggest threat for Apple and non-recognition of pretensions of owning 'innovation' a threat. Because selling pretentiousness is the business model.
Google scrapped that and then turned around and copied the iPhone. And they copied everything about the iPhone. The resolution was the same. There were the same number of icons per row. Applications placed icons in the same place. You pinched to zoom on both devices. You switched between screens by swiping on both systems. Both systems had an app store (a previously unheard of way to deliver applications).
This isn't Mac vs. Windows or Xerox vs. Mac. This was way above that in the theft department.
Palm was making touchscreen smartphones for years before iOS came on the scene. My Windows Mobile smartphone in 2006 had the same resolution as the iPhone. Windows Mobile 6 was released before the first iPhone and had a very similar look and feel. Devices running it had a big, bright display that covered nearly the entire front of the phone, with large icons that launched apps.
Microsoft was showing off their Surface product (with 1:1 user interactions, pinch to zoom, and swiping around) before iPhone's release. The concept behind it was pretty prevalent in science fiction, most prominently the movie Minority Report.
Laying out apps in rows of icons has existed since some of the first UIs have been created. You don't have to look further than any Blackberry to see exactly where Apple got the idea from for doing it on a mobile device.
The Danger Hiptop (commonly known as the T-Mobile Sidekick) had a complete app store that they called the Download Catalog. You wrote apps using their Java ME SDK, and the only way to get them onto the device was by distributing through this central repository. Apps would have to be curated and tested. Sound familiar? And this was back as early as 2002. Not to mention the plethora of Linux package repos. The concept of a centralized distribution store existed long before iOS.
iOS was completely built on the work and ideas that already existed in the industry. Android was no different, only it happened to come out after iOS. So it incorporated those ideas as well. That's practically the definition of innovation. Trying to white-knight and make out Apple to be some saint of a company that didn't do the exact same (and completely justified) thing as Google is just naive. Google didn't "steal" from Apple any more than they did from Palm or HTC or Microsoft. Or any more than Apple "stole" from Palm or HTC or Microsoft.
Can you name an Apple like app store before the iPhone? The closest you can come is Nokia and Symbian and that was a download an executable type thing.
An app store as we understand it today where you click a buy button and the app installs on your computer was an Apple innovation
Fits the bill, minus the polish. And that's really where Apple's genius is, polishing the hell out of a concept in order to make it desirable. Just don't pretend it's an original concept.
* Danger Hiptop, though that's been mentioned in other places.
* My Verizon featurephone had a "Verizon Wireless Store" where you could purchase little apps and games.
* Linux package managers have been doing this for literally years, just not on mobile devices and without GUIs.
I appreciate that Apple's done good work but they built on the shoulders of everyone that came before them.
You call that the original prototype, but even that article says "The original demo video showed a handset that was closer to an iPhone (although with keyboard) than a Blackberry,complete with touch screen interface,".
That seems kind of at odds with what you're saying. It makes this seem more like a proof of concept, released after videos of touch-based phones, that Android could work under multiple forms.
I couldn't find a link but it was later shown this prototype pre-dated the iPhone-like video. If I recall correctly this prototype was actually from the pre-Google acquisition days.
I just thought the point would be obvious since it makes no sense for Android to be more iPhone like, then go to this, then go back to being iPhone like.
Ahhhh, appreciated. I made an assumption as to why, but yeah, that makes more sense. That sentence just threw me off.
But your core point is probably right; they probably did see the iphone and say "well shit. Call up the team." I don't think it should be illegal, but you're likely correct on what actually happened. And yeah, it's funny people are so averse to saying that.
(And I recently realized I'm a big Google fan. ... Is there a name for us? I need to get to know my people!)
The major difference from the prototype is that Android now is touch oriented. Swiping is a gesture - the Opera browser had one for ages. Its logical. App stores aren't unheard of before. Linux distributions had their equivalents for ages (that included proprietary application next to open-source ones)
Why should Google screw up their platform so that they wouldn't look like Apple?
It wasn't just touch. The icons were placed differently. The resolution was different. The screen size was different. The touch interface was different (you can't just say touch because Windows Phones had touch way before the iPhone but it wasn't anywhere near the same thing).
As for screwing up their platform I'm not saying they should of. The patent system is screwed up and I'm glad Android stole from the iPhone because it means there's actual competition.
But there's a difference between saying "Yeah, Google stole from the iPhone but its the fault of a bad patent system" and denying Google stole from Apple at all.
Is it not possible that someone, deciding to make a touch phone at about the same time would look at:
What is a good physical size for the screen.
What is the kind of resolution we can get on a LCD of that size?
How many icons can we fit on that screen, which can be easily manipulated by users (there aren't that many options, as you can't fit that many icons on the screen).
It seems to me many of these kinds of things fit into into a set of "only one real option", once you've decided (and this might be the 'big copied thing') to have a phone which is just a touch screen + a single button (or 3 on android)).
Not really. The metaphor is completely different. There are no desktop icons. You side scrolled through things (see the arrows on the left and right side). On that note navigation was done through the multidirectional button in the center where as the current candybar types are done through touch.
You make a factually-correct point but I think it's worth taking a step back and asking ourselves what do we want to happen and why?
Do we want to say that if a company A does something that's similar to company B's work, we shouldn't allow that to happen. Ever. I think breaks down pretty badly if you consider the case of, say, generic AIDS drugs. These "copied" drugs are saving lives and that to me is way more important than any IP-infringement issues.
In the Apple vs Google case, it seems like this copying has been a good thing - we now have a lot of really great smartphones trying to out-compete each other. So it's not clear to me that if this copying was banned, this would've been good for human society as a whole.
OTOH, if you consider something like Intel copying the RISC microarchitectures of the 90s and essentially driving the likes of Compaq, DEC and MIPS out of business, allowing those ideas to copied was almost definitely bad for consumers.
The point is that there isn't a clear-cut right-or-wrong answer on this one. It seems like whether copying is a good thing depends more on who is copying who, and how much money each of the participants have, than on exactly what is copied.
if you consider something like Intel copying the RISC microarchitectures of the 90s and essentially driving the likes of Compaq, DEC and MIPS out of business, allowing those ideas to copied was almost definitely bad for consumers.
I don't understand how you can argue this was bad for consumers when it made fast CPUs so much cheaper. Okay, it stuck us with the x86 architecture, which wasn't so great for programmers, you could argue. But how was this a problem for consumers?
I think the reality is quite the contrary: if Intel hadn't done that (and BTW it wasn't just Intel), modern consumer-grade machines would be 1/10 as powerful, or less. The kind of power I now have in my laptop would be confined to $20k workstations.
One reason it was bad was because all these other guys died.
If you remember back to 2000 or so, Intel had killed all their competitors, bought Alpha and then threw it way were trying two rather briandead architectures in the P4 and the Itanium. They were able to get away with it because essentially they had no competition. AMD saved us from this with the Greyhound and x86-64 and there's no guarantee that Intel would've done anything similar if not for them.
I think the reality is quite the contrary: if Intel hadn't done that (and BTW it wasn't just Intel), modern consumer-grade machines would be 1/10 as powerful, or less. The kind of power I now have in my laptop would be confined to $20k workstations.
The reason you have that kind of performance increase over the last 30 years or so is because of CMOS scaling and let's not kid ourselves into thinking that this is driven by Intel. CMOS scaling was predicted by IBM's Bob Dennard back in the 70s and all we've done since then is pretty much just follow his roadmap.
It's not like computers weren't getting cheaper and faster before Intel became the dominant monopoly.
I don't disagree. I'm GLAD Google stole from Apple. My only issue is with those who deny that's what happened. That's disrespectful to the innovation represented by the iPhone.
The problem is the term "stole", IMO. No one says "Apple stole the smartphone idea from Palm" or "Apple stole the idea of the MP3 player from Creative". It's just taken as a given that the current technology landscape influences what comes after it.
If you develop a useful UI paradigm or technology, I may make use of it if it is fitting.
The time when "stole" seems appropriate is if Google stole the design from a non-public version of the iPhone. Which maybe did happen (via Schmidt), but that's generally not what people are referring to when they use the term.
I think the rate of change of the underlying technology plays a role here.
If you make a new cooking device that's somehow easier, it seems like a patent is a reasonable protection of your innovation. Cooking has been around for a long time, so if you come up with something clever that saves a few minutes, then that must be novel.
However, with technology changing so fast, it seems to change the equation. When good touchscreens came out that would fit nicely on a phone, there was really no "standard" way of using them in that context. So, almost by definition, the first few things that people implement are both new and obvious.
It's not that such things aren't somewhat innovative. But it seems like it's going too far to grant long-term patent protection for such things.
Maybe we need a 3-year version of a patent that can cover fast-changing areas like this? I feel pretty confident that someone would have invented a good UI independently of the iPhone (whether similar to the iphone or not) within about 3 years of the availability of the underlying technology.
One needn't look further than Windows Phone 7, with Metro, as an example of how to do an original smartphone and tablet UI. Google could have ripped the guts out of the underlying interface assumptions that Apple made and did something completely different, but they didn't.
I'd personally prefer a competitive landscape where players do what Harris's team did at Microsoft or what Palm did with WebOS, which is to make it their own. Tiles instead of icons. Cards for switching and closing apps instead of iOS's in and out. Big players who copy are bad for innovation, not good for it.
Let's even accept your implicit contention, which is that Apple is the origin of features used by Android (and ignore all the points to the contrary given by others in this thread). What about Android's millions of satisfied users, who I suppose were, shall we say, taken away from Apple's rightful clutch? To you, do they not constitute prima facie evidence of a competitive landscape that's extremely healthy, forcing Apple to innovate again whilst having given consumers greater choice and cheaper access to paradigmatic phone design?
I haven't read the Steve bio yet, however my guess is that his issue lies with the fact that Schmidt was a board member and how that relationship panned out, rather than the specific technology that showed up in Android. If technology of mine showed up in one of my board member's companies, I'd be pretty upset about it as well - but primarily on the basis that the board member "stole" from me instead of upholding his fiduciary obligation to my organization. Its a tricky one, but I think that Steve might have been right in this case.
It was more than that. Jobs issue was that Google flat out stole the entire interface. Not the look and feel but the entire thing down to resolution, icon placement, user interactions and app delivery.
He did feel betrayed by Schmidt but he makes it clear he feels animosity towards the whole company (there's a depicted scene where he grudgingly agrees to advise Larry Page because he feels its his duty as an elder statesman)
I respect what Apple's done with the iPhone a lot more than I respect Google's contributions, but I don't see what Apple gains (beyond a little bit of marginal profit from slowing down Android adoption with lawsuits) from this holy war. In my mind, they've profited in exact proportion to how much they innovated in the phone market - Android just means that they'll have to keep innovating if they want to keep profiting.
Ultimately, I think Job's emotional reaction is one common to forward thinking people. Andrew Masson has been similarly disgusted with Groupon clones. PG hasn't exactly been sanguine about the YCominator knockoffs. The copycat competitors contribute in many ways, but I think that great minds can only respect people who bring truly new ideas to the table, not those that find a niche or an edge in the marketplace after riding in their wake.
Part of having a differentiated product is avoiding market confusion. While there is certainly some back-and-forth between Google and Apple, are there those here that don't think Samsung may have gone too far in mimicking so much about the iPhone/iPad experience? (From using Apple's icons in their sales displays to photoshopping iPhone screenshots for their phone, along with similar packaging and unboxing, ... the list goes on.)
Yes, some sharing is good for consumers, but at some point the knockoffs need to be called on it. The whole discussion boils down to where that line is.
There was an article recently about how, in a courtroom, a judge held up an iPad and a Samsung tablet and asked the Samsung lawyers to identify which was their tablet, and they couldn't. I think that's a clear indication that Samsung hurtled over the line.
(I'd provide a link but I'm on a flaky connection right now. It was on reddit, and probably on HN as well).
Again, not to belabor a point but in a previous HN post, I noted that Microsoft Surface was likely an earlier prototype with multi-touch, as well as demos of a working "Pinch-to-zoom" back in 2006. I have no clue if and when iPhone already had this feature in a prototype, but Microsoft was definitely demoing this pre-iPhone.
So the funny thing about the article is that it states as fact that Google copied Apple's pinch-to-zoom (but that it was a good thing), when in fact the case could be made that Apple copied Microsoft's pinch-to-zoom (I'm not sure if they did or not).
A breakthrough occurred in 1991, when Pierre Wellner published a paper on his multi-touch “Digital Desk”, which supported multi-finger and pinching motions.
... however both the function and the term predate the announcement or patent requests, except for such area of application as capacitive mobile screens, which did not exist before Fingerworks/Apple's technology
Multitouch is not necessarily the issue but the technology used to accomplish multitouch. Multitouch has been in development for 30 years. The Surface did not use the same kind of tech as in the iPhone to accomplish multitouch.
If the courts were to ever rule in Apple's favor, it would probably revolve around the tech behind it.
I really wished Google or (more appropriately) Blackberry would have gone the opposite direction from Apple. Good keyboard support something more in the Raskin's Cat vein. It's nice to see Microsoft go with their Metro interface or the card metaphor of WebOS. Heck, just starting with a browser ala Chrome would have been better. The talk shouldn't be about patent violations, it should be about lack of vision.
I too believe much of this has to do with Schmidt on the board and the radical change of Android from pre to post iPhone. It just seems we really lost something when they made their switch.
> It just seems we really lost something when they made their switch.
I don't know about that. If they changed their "vision" from "replicate blackberry" to "replicate iPhone", we (where "we" = "society"/"everybody") didn't stand to gain anything in the first place, apart from cheaper phones maybe (and even that...)
I was hoping more for a more refined follow on to the Danger, not a Blackberry clone. Guess you're right though, any replicant would have not expanded anything.
There was really a shot at trying a lot of new ways to interact with mobile devices and very little made it to market in the quest to follow the other guy.
> There was really a shot at trying a lot of new ways to interact with mobile devices and very little made it to market in the quest to follow the other guy.
I'm glad Microsoft at least is going that way. Palm tried it as well (and as far as I'm concerned WebOS still has the nicest notification system) although they failed for other reasons.
The whole "imitate me and I'll sue" mentality is eventually going to stop innovation when we get to a point that you can't even use the same features regardless if they are accomplished in opposite ways.
This reminds me of Ford's stance when Robert Kearns took them to court for his design of the intermittant windshield wiper (the story was made into a movie a while back).
It's a sad fact that Google became more of a follower than innovator recently.
I can't remember of a successful innovative product by Google in the past few years, but we all know Google deals after Groupon, Google plus after Facebook and Android after IOS.
Google disrupted the search market. Sure, the basic idea of searching the web wasn't new, but Google did it so much better than anyone else. Since then, they haven't done anything at all disruptive. They've just been copying other people's products and hoping their huge size will let them win.
I think there's an easy answer to this problem but it gets obscured by an "either/or" mentality. Either you support patents or you think it's ok for Google to outright steal the iPhone interface.
Allow companies to patent innovations but legally force them to license it to others for a "fair price". That way companies can still build on top of each other's innovations but inventors still get financial compensation for their invention.
I recognize there would be a problem in pricing the license but since these cases end up in court anyway (where a judge or jury determines the fair value) I don't see how allowing companies to resolve what "fair price" means would be any different than what we have now. Except it would take out the ambiguity for the consumer(since a company like Google would never have to pull the product from the market).
Either you support patents or you think it's ok for Google to outright steal the iPhone interface.
What if you think they copied the Palm Pilot GUI?
Music publishing has compulsory licensing, so there's some precedent about how it might work, but music copyrights are nearly as fucked as software patents. In neither case is the root problem addressed.
> What if you think they copied the Palm Pilot GUI?
Apple did copy it from the Treo-era PalmOS. A grid of fingertip-sized tappable app icons.
And I'm OK with that, because it fosters progress, competition, and iterative improvements of existing technologies. I don't see the big issue with copying user interfaces. You'll either take the idea and improve on it, or make a mockery of it and your product will fail.
There are a lot of narrow physical constraints operating in this market: the size of the human hand, the size of a fingertip, the range of human vision, the distance from the eye to the screen in terms of arm's length. There are other technology givens like the resolution of a screen that fits in the hand and the precision of touch technology. There are cultural givens to pull something apart to stretch it or push it together to make it smaller, or to advance a view by turning a page.
The more you think about these problems, the more you realize how narrow the space for innovation was in them, and in fact how many of Apple's innovations were anticipated by the market. Apple got there first with the whole package and reaped the benefits in mindshare. But they shouldn't be able to seek rent on a solution that experts would create in a vacuum.