The Great SmartPhone War

It is a good article and reminds us that Samsung are not all sweetness and light. On the other hand, I wonder how Samsung's bribery matches up to Apple's lobbying. No matter, dear PJ gives me an insight on the facts of the article:





Samsung were serial copyists of successful competitor designs. Apple were quite right to be outraged that all their outstanding work to re-imagine the mobile phone had been copied. Apple's achievement was to devise the concept of a mobile phone with internet access and media player capability and then use a multi-touch screen to replace multiple buttons. They worked on the usability and responsiveness to make all this into a great new user device.

Now, what about the law?

The iPod mock-up may well have been the basis for a future design patent. However, note how, in the third quote, edges, corners, height and width were wrestled with to make the single button phone usable. That suggests that rounded corners and those other factors were all about the functionality of the design and functional details are excluded from design patents.

It is my understanding that Apple did not invent multitouch devices; not even the capacitive glass design used in the iPhone. Steve Balmer demonstrated multitouch screens to the general public including 'stretch and squeeze' to zoom in and out and Microsoft demonstrated the original Surface table that did the same thing and went much further that any Apple products. Many of the Apple gestures were available on the multi-touch laptop touchpads that appeared way before the iPhone.

The brainstorming sessions resulted in ideas being expressed as a computer-based model and a mock-up device. Many of the detailed elements, including multi-touch, were drawn from other companies products and design ideas. My key point is not that some of the ideas were Apple's and some were not. Apple did an amazing job in pulling all the features together into a practical device. My key point is that all the effort was centred on the abstract ideas of how such a device could be made usable. Once the final mock-up was produced, these ideas were passed to the software and hardware groups to turn into a working product. Abstract ideas are not patentable subject matter. The Apple patents tie those abstract ideas to a 'phone with a multi-touch screen, but do not claim a patentable machine invention to implement those ideas.

In the final quote, we hear how outraged that Christopher Stringer was that the Samsung S blatantly copied the iPhone ideas (and not any patentable machine). Quite right too. However, Apple should not be able to use invalid patents on abstract ideas and design features chosen for functionality to take Samsung to court.

Steve Jobs might also have remembered his own history of copying before becoming incendiary about the iPhone. The iMac and its predecessors were a blatant copy of the Rank Xerox Star system. He copied the graphic user interface, single button mouse and object oriented software design, but failed entirely to understand the network system design (printer objects, filing cupboard objects, desktop objects and communication objects).

Steve Jobs' concentration on the user interface and Bill Gates concentration on user bling has blighted desktop computing ever since. Samsung use their patents (and I'm sure I would consider many of them to be invalid) to fight back in court. Samsung does not use them to attack the competition. Apple and Microsoft do and Microsoft also use invalid patents to extort revenue.

Samsung have not got an attractive business ethic, what with cash and other presents to people in power and with price-fixing. However, the Samsung S is successful because it copied the ideas from the iPhone and then innovated at a faster rate than Apple to produce a more marketable product. It is also successful because Samsung moved towards the Apple concept of a limited product range with one or two outstanding flagship products. Copying ideas is not ethical, but is not illegal. It's what big global businesses do.

There's lots to like and detest about both companies. Apple has done some fantastic design work. Samsung has done fantastic work on producing less expensive phones with great capabilities.

Just like there's lots to like and detest about Microsoft. Microsoft produced a less expensive Mac clone. Of course Microsoft also copied from a lot of other people too. Most of them had also copied Apple of course

Remember GEOS from Berkely Softworks? Loved using that on the C64.

Wayne
madhatter.ca

IDevices aren't technologically advanced. They are damned easy to use, and excellent time savers. That's where Apple's genius has been.

The question is, will Apple be able to continue that without Steve Jobs?

Wayne
madhatter.ca