Anyone and everyone that has been following the market in recent months knows that Apple has had a pretty significant falling out with Google. To put it bluntly, when Google started developing Android, Apple essentially decided they no longer wanted Google’s CEO, Eric Schmidt, to be a member of their board and he was cordially booted from their ranks. At the time, the press releases were all nice and fluffy and the PR spin said it was a mutual agreement. Google’s intention to get into the VoIP and mobile markets, and the growing business around Android, became a conflict of interest and meant that Eric Schmidt had to excuse himself from more and more aspects of the board meetings to avoid the notion that he was learning insider information from Apple to benefit Google.
Since then, we have learned that things are not always what they appear to be.
A recent article in the New York Times suggests that Steve Jobs is very upset and very annoyed with Google and Eric Schmidt. From the very close relationship of 3 years ago, things have completely soured to the point where Google is no longer welcomed at all by Apple.
Yet according to interviews with two dozen industry watchers, Silicon Valley investors and current and former employees at both companies — most of whom requested anonymity to protect their jobs or business relationships — the clash between Mr. Schmidt and Mr. Jobs offers an unusually vivid display of enmity and ambition.
At the heart of their dispute is a sense of betrayal: Mr. Jobs believes that Google violated the alliance between the companies by producing cellphones that physically, technologically and spiritually resembled the iPhone. In short, he feels that his former friends at Google picked his pocket.
“We did not enter the search business. They entered the phone business,” Mr. Jobs told Apple employees during an all-hands meeting shortly after the public introduction of the iPad in January, according to two employees who were there and heard the presentation. “Make no mistake: Google wants to kill the iPhone. We won’t let them.”
One of these employees said Mr. Jobs returned to the topic of Google several times in the session and even disparaged its slogan “Don’t be evil” with an expletive, which drew thunderous applause from his underlings.
Apple’s Spat With Google Is Getting Personal – New York Times
Now, this has a lot of interest to me because this is almost exactly the same thing Apple said of Microsoft about Windows back in the 1980s. Microsoft stole their ideas and produced Windows. Which is interesting given that Apple had a very proud “pirate” culture in the early days. Everyone remembers the 1984 Superbowl “Big Brother” Macintosh advertisement that was a direct shot at IBM. Not to mention Steve Jobs himself being very proud of the way they stole the GUI and mouse idea from Xerox. So it is interesting that this very same argument is coming around again, and that once again its Apple at the heart of it.
But times have changed significantly since the 1980s. Laws are very different today from what they were 30 years ago. Intellectual Property is the buzzword of the first decade of the 21st Century, and whether you’re in ICT or Movies or Music, it has become very much the catch cry for any perceived injustice.
What is really interesting is the speculation that because of Google’s entrance into the cellphone market with Android, several phones sponsored by Google (including the T-Mobile G1, myPhone, the Motorola Droid and the Nexus One) and a potential notebook/netbook Operating System, speculation has been running rife that Apple is ready to dump Google entirely from the iPhone and the iPad. When the big dispute over the rejection of Google Voice from the Apple App Store was flying about, it was also noticed that in July 2009 Apple had purchased their own map platform. More recently, Apple purchased mobile advertising company, Quattro Wireless.
Taken individually, its not a major. But when you consider that all of these are deliberate moves into well established markets that Google dominates, its very evident that this is a blatant attempt to distance themselves from the Search Giant.
But what are their alternatives? Realistically, when it comes to search, they could go with AOL or Microsoft. Ultimately, these are the last two significant players in the search space since Yahoo! conceded to Google and sold out its search platform to Microsoft.
Which is made more interesting by the fact that Microsoft has now had one of their corporate VP’s, who happens to also be one of their higher General Counsel lawyers, weigh in on the subject quite publicly on a corporate blog.
Over the past two weeks or so, I have followed with interest the coverage of Apple’s suit against HTC. Reactions to the suit run the gamut from those who defend Apple’s taking steps to protect its IP to those who claim that Apple’s suit will impede further development in the smartphone market.
I don’t agree with the latter viewpoint. There is a long history of IP litigation in the mobile phone market, and innovation has continued apace. As the New York Times noted, “Nearly every large mobile phone player . . . has recently been involved in some sort of patent litigation involving mobile technologies.” Whether it is Nokia v. Apple, RIM v. Motorola, or now Apple v. HTC, companies active in the smartphone space are taking steps to protect their inventions. To me, the interesting questions are, “Why is this? And what does it tell us about the evolution of the smartphone market going forward?”
Apple v. HTC: A Step Along the Path of Addressing IP Rights in Smartphones – Horacio Gutierrez – “Microsoft On The Issues” blog
If we completely ignore his timeline and his lack of smartphone history knowledge, he basically says that the situation is now at the point where Smartphone companies are essentially at the point where the convergence of these devices, going from telephones without wires in the 1990s to the current mobile/personal computers with telephones, is no longer a simple endeavour. No longer can device manufacturers make a phone that has essentially the same features as most other similar devices out there. Now, differences in functionality are a big deal and each new innovation in mobile technology is being guarded very strongly by the original developer of such innovation.
Unfortunately, he doesn’t really have a useful opinion on the Apple vs HTC suit, but a more generic summation.
The smartphone market is still in a nascent state; much innovation still lies ahead in this field. In all nascent technology markets, there is a period early where IP rights will be sorted out. This is particularly true in a market, such as smartphones, in which a number of different technologies previously offered on a standalone basis now converge into a single device. Indeed, smartphones are a product of the ‘open innovation’ paradigm – device manufacturers do not do all of their development in-house, but add their own innovations to those of others to create a product that users want. Open innovation is only possible through the licensing of third party IP rights, which ensures that those who develop the building blocks that make a new technology possible are properly compensated for their investments in research and development. After all, technology just doesn’t appear, fully-developed, from Zeus’s head. It requires lots of hard work and resources to create.
We see that in the radio stack. We also see it in the media stack, where royalties for codecs (which encode and decode digital media) and other technology represent 1-2% of the price to operators. And now the industry is in the process of sorting out what royalties will be for the software stack, which now represents the principal value proposition for smartphones. In the next few years, as the IP situation settles in this space and licensing takes off, we will see the patent royalties applicable to the smartphone software stack settle at a level that reflects the increasing importance software has as a portion of the overall value of the device. In the interim, though, we should expect continued activity. Apple v. HTC was not the beginning of this process, and it isn’t the end of the story either.
Apple v. HTC: A Step Along the Path of Addressing IP Rights in Smartphones – Horacio Gutierrez – “Microsoft On The Issues” blog
For me his claim of open innovation only being possible through the licensing of other peoples Intellectual Property is completely symptomatic of the problem that exists with the US patent system and the completely frivolous Intellectual Property debates that have been raging for the past few years.
The original patent system in the US was designed to allow inventors of new devices to profit from their inventions in such a way that their competitors were not legally allowed to copy the invention, and profit from said copies, without getting permission from the inventor for the right to do so. And it was very reasonable in those times. The majority of inventions were tangible and had very valid uses.
Sometime in the 1980s and 1990s, software companies decided to start patenting software. Something I am personally very opposed to. You cannot patent math. But they get away with it. The US Patent Office now receives so many patent applications that it is seriously over worked, and in many cases is unable to put in the due diligence required to determine whether the patent is legitimate or not.
Sidebar: If you want a good example of a really bad patent, completely unrelated to the topic at hand, look at this
patent awarded to LSI Logic Corp for Linked Lists. Linked lists have been around at least 20 years longer than I’ve been alive, and this was awarded in 2006. Enough said.
Case and point. One of the patents in question in the Apple vs HTC case is a “Slide to Unlock” mechanism where by a digital switch represented on a touch screen is moved across the screen with a finger, or other pointing device, to unlock the phone and allow access to its functions.
Excuse me? A digital representation of a common switch has been awarded a patent? The only thing that makes it different from any other switch is that it is digital and represented on a screen rather than a physical toggle switch. But it is still a switch.
What has instead been the case, and one that is rather frightening to me, is that patents in the past 20 years have tended to stifle innovation rather than promote it. They have been used to threaten competitors and to block new comers from entering the market. In the case of Apple, they ignore other people’s patents while playing a very nasty game to stop others from (re)gaining market share. The suit Nokia filed against them is a perfect example of that.
Which also deserves some notice. If you read the suit that Nokia filed against Apple, there are several patents that could sink Apple’s suit against HTC rather rapidly if Apple loses.
Another warlike strategy that the boys from Espoo are employing is cluster bombing with multiple legal challenges. Their recent patent-infringement filing, for example, is a multi-pronged affair, attacking seven specific patents that Nokia believes Apple is infringing upon.
A quick scan of the seven patents mentioned in this recent lawsuit reveals that some of them – listed below in order of the dates they were grated and identified by their US Patent and Trademark Office number – are quite broad indeed:
- 6,073,036, “Mobile station with touch input having automatic symbol magnification function,” 2000, which is a rather straightforward description of how a touch-screen display works
- 6,262,735, “Utilizing the contents of a message,” 2001, which describes a method in which a command can be sent to a device by the user touching a “character-based message” – pretty much how any touch-screen display works
- 6,518,957, “Communications device with touch sensitive screen,” 2003, which in equally broad language describes a phone with a touch screen, of which part can be disabled when required, such as when holding the phone to your ear
- 6,714,091, “VCO with programmable output power,” granted in 2004, which describes a method for reducing power losses in a phase-locked loop by using a microcontroller-equipped voltage-controlled oscillator
- 6,834,181, “Mobile communication device and related construction method,” 2004, which describes a method of combining a mobile phone’s antenna and speaker in the same chamber to improve bass response
- 6,895,256, “Optimized camera sensor architecture for a mobile telephone,” 2005, which in what appears to be quite broad language describes an integrating a lens and sensor to comprise a digital camera
- 6,924,789, “User interface device,” 2005, which appears for all the world to simply be a keypad built using a standard capacitive touch screen that can accept input by touching keys or “sliding a finger”
The interesting thing about this collection of patents is that Nokia identifies them as “implementation patents” and differentiates them from the patents in its earlier lawsuit, which it defined as “essential patents” – meaning patents from which industry standards can be derived.
As Nokia explains in the lawsuit, these implementation patents “are particularly important to Nokia’s success because they permit Nokia to differentiate its products from those of its competitors.”
Nokia sues Apple (again) — The Register
What the El Reg guys fail to understand is the time at which these patents were applied for and awarded. The most recent one was filed in 2001, and awarded in 2005, which is significantly before Apple even considered a portable device beyond a laptop. They were still beaming over the relatively fresh MacOSX release in 2001. Nokia has been producing touch screen devices for a substantial time. Significantly longer than Apple. Nokia was the first cellphone maker to include a camera in their devices. The Nokia 7650 released in 2001 was the first ever phone (smartphone or otherwise) to include a built in camera.
So what do I think will be the case?
To be honest, I don’t know. I think its far too early to tell. But what I do know is that Apple needs to reconsider its strategy and pull its head in a little bit. While it may be significantly better funded than both Nokia and HTC, the amount of damage these suits will do to their reputation in the tech circles could potentially cost it millions in lost sales and bad publicity. And if it loses against Nokia, there is very little chance they will succeed against HTC and Google’s Android platform.
It became very clear when Apple first entered the market with the iPhone that they were looking for a fight. Now they have several. I wouldn’t be surprised if Google jumps into the fray soon too. And given Android is built on the Linux kernel, we might even start to see companies like IBM throwing their support behind HTC and Google.
Well, not really. Dreams are free though 
So now I’ve rambled on and on, what do you think? Does Apple’s behaviour bother you at all? Does it affect your decision to consider their devices when you’re looking to buy? Or do you simply not care and the courts will deal with it on their own, in their own time.
Apple’s tantrum against cellphone makers
Anyone and everyone that has been following the market in recent months knows that Apple has had a pretty significant falling out with Google. To put it bluntly, when Google started developing Android, Apple essentially decided they no longer wanted Google’s CEO, Eric Schmidt, to be a member of their board and he was cordially booted from their ranks. At the time, the press releases were all nice and fluffy and the PR spin said it was a mutual agreement. Google’s intention to get into the VoIP and mobile markets, and the growing business around Android, became a conflict of interest and meant that Eric Schmidt had to excuse himself from more and more aspects of the board meetings to avoid the notion that he was learning insider information from Apple to benefit Google.
Since then, we have learned that things are not always what they appear to be.
A recent article in the New York Times suggests that Steve Jobs is very upset and very annoyed with Google and Eric Schmidt. From the very close relationship of 3 years ago, things have completely soured to the point where Google is no longer welcomed at all by Apple.
Now, this has a lot of interest to me because this is almost exactly the same thing Apple said of Microsoft about Windows back in the 1980s. Microsoft stole their ideas and produced Windows. Which is interesting given that Apple had a very proud “pirate” culture in the early days. Everyone remembers the 1984 Superbowl “Big Brother” Macintosh advertisement that was a direct shot at IBM. Not to mention Steve Jobs himself being very proud of the way they stole the GUI and mouse idea from Xerox. So it is interesting that this very same argument is coming around again, and that once again its Apple at the heart of it.
But times have changed significantly since the 1980s. Laws are very different today from what they were 30 years ago. Intellectual Property is the buzzword of the first decade of the 21st Century, and whether you’re in ICT or Movies or Music, it has become very much the catch cry for any perceived injustice.
What is really interesting is the speculation that because of Google’s entrance into the cellphone market with Android, several phones sponsored by Google (including the T-Mobile G1, myPhone, the Motorola Droid and the Nexus One) and a potential notebook/netbook Operating System, speculation has been running rife that Apple is ready to dump Google entirely from the iPhone and the iPad. When the big dispute over the rejection of Google Voice from the Apple App Store was flying about, it was also noticed that in July 2009 Apple had purchased their own map platform. More recently, Apple purchased mobile advertising company, Quattro Wireless.
Taken individually, its not a major. But when you consider that all of these are deliberate moves into well established markets that Google dominates, its very evident that this is a blatant attempt to distance themselves from the Search Giant.
But what are their alternatives? Realistically, when it comes to search, they could go with AOL or Microsoft. Ultimately, these are the last two significant players in the search space since Yahoo! conceded to Google and sold out its search platform to Microsoft.
Which is made more interesting by the fact that Microsoft has now had one of their corporate VP’s, who happens to also be one of their higher General Counsel lawyers, weigh in on the subject quite publicly on a corporate blog.
If we completely ignore his timeline and his lack of smartphone history knowledge, he basically says that the situation is now at the point where Smartphone companies are essentially at the point where the convergence of these devices, going from telephones without wires in the 1990s to the current mobile/personal computers with telephones, is no longer a simple endeavour. No longer can device manufacturers make a phone that has essentially the same features as most other similar devices out there. Now, differences in functionality are a big deal and each new innovation in mobile technology is being guarded very strongly by the original developer of such innovation.
Unfortunately, he doesn’t really have a useful opinion on the Apple vs HTC suit, but a more generic summation.
For me his claim of open innovation only being possible through the licensing of other peoples Intellectual Property is completely symptomatic of the problem that exists with the US patent system and the completely frivolous Intellectual Property debates that have been raging for the past few years.
The original patent system in the US was designed to allow inventors of new devices to profit from their inventions in such a way that their competitors were not legally allowed to copy the invention, and profit from said copies, without getting permission from the inventor for the right to do so. And it was very reasonable in those times. The majority of inventions were tangible and had very valid uses.
Sometime in the 1980s and 1990s, software companies decided to start patenting software. Something I am personally very opposed to. You cannot patent math. But they get away with it. The US Patent Office now receives so many patent applications that it is seriously over worked, and in many cases is unable to put in the due diligence required to determine whether the patent is legitimate or not.
Case and point. One of the patents in question in the Apple vs HTC case is a “Slide to Unlock” mechanism where by a digital switch represented on a touch screen is moved across the screen with a finger, or other pointing device, to unlock the phone and allow access to its functions.
Excuse me? A digital representation of a common switch has been awarded a patent? The only thing that makes it different from any other switch is that it is digital and represented on a screen rather than a physical toggle switch. But it is still a switch.
What has instead been the case, and one that is rather frightening to me, is that patents in the past 20 years have tended to stifle innovation rather than promote it. They have been used to threaten competitors and to block new comers from entering the market. In the case of Apple, they ignore other people’s patents while playing a very nasty game to stop others from (re)gaining market share. The suit Nokia filed against them is a perfect example of that.
Which also deserves some notice. If you read the suit that Nokia filed against Apple, there are several patents that could sink Apple’s suit against HTC rather rapidly if Apple loses.
What the El Reg guys fail to understand is the time at which these patents were applied for and awarded. The most recent one was filed in 2001, and awarded in 2005, which is significantly before Apple even considered a portable device beyond a laptop. They were still beaming over the relatively fresh MacOSX release in 2001. Nokia has been producing touch screen devices for a substantial time. Significantly longer than Apple. Nokia was the first cellphone maker to include a camera in their devices. The Nokia 7650 released in 2001 was the first ever phone (smartphone or otherwise) to include a built in camera.
So what do I think will be the case?
To be honest, I don’t know. I think its far too early to tell. But what I do know is that Apple needs to reconsider its strategy and pull its head in a little bit. While it may be significantly better funded than both Nokia and HTC, the amount of damage these suits will do to their reputation in the tech circles could potentially cost it millions in lost sales and bad publicity. And if it loses against Nokia, there is very little chance they will succeed against HTC and Google’s Android platform.
It became very clear when Apple first entered the market with the iPhone that they were looking for a fight. Now they have several. I wouldn’t be surprised if Google jumps into the fray soon too. And given Android is built on the Linux kernel, we might even start to see companies like IBM throwing their support behind HTC and Google.
Well, not really. Dreams are free though
So now I’ve rambled on and on, what do you think? Does Apple’s behaviour bother you at all? Does it affect your decision to consider their devices when you’re looking to buy? Or do you simply not care and the courts will deal with it on their own, in their own time.