Imagine If Everyone Had To Start From Scratch And Reinvent The Wheel Every Time They Wanted To Build A New Car?
from the not-a-recipe-for-innovation dept
So, a couple of weeks ago, our submissions were slammed by a whole bunch of you with submission subjects along the lines of "Gizmodo is losing it" or "Gizmodo fails" or "Gizmodo doesn't get innovation" (all actual submissions). senshikaze got the first submission in, though, and so gets the credit. From the summaries, it was clear that Gizmodo had published a pro-patent post, and specifically a pro-Apple patent post, written by Jesus Diaz. Figuring that it was a long and thorough defense of Apple and patents, and knowing I had a crazy busy few weeks, I actually set aside the post to wait until I had a nice block of time to read it and think about it. I always like thoughtful pieces that disagree with my general outlook on things, because they often make me think and reconsider my viewpoint. Unfortunately, this piece was not that, and I shouldn't have bothered waiting. This was claptrap.The entire crux of the argument is in this sentence, which says that we should celebrate the complete dismissal of any product that has any element of an idea from someone else:
Because they are a cheap bag of lazy, unimaginative bastards, that's why.Yeah, according to Diaz and Gizmodo, the point of the patent system is that everyone should reinvent the wheel every time they want to build a new car:
Those rivals, like Google, Samsung, or HTC, just said "oh fuck this, let's all do the same" and came up with devices that are mostly copies of what Apple put out in their first iPhone. Sure, they added some stuff of their own and sure, Apple's user interface has some aspects that are not original. But mostly the iPhone's competitors are clones that show no imagination, no better ways to do things.Of course, seeing as some of Apple's recent "innovations" actually copy directly back from Google, Samsung or HTC, should we say the same thing about Apple?
Sometimes we've seen similar arguments in our comments, and it's ignorant of history, of economics and of innovation. Innovation is all about building on the backs of others, taking what works, but improving and changing in other areas. Apple's second big hit, the Macintosh, borrowed liberally from the graphical user interface designed at Xerox PARC (which itself borrowed liberally from the work at SRI). But it added key innovations on top of it and around it. And that's how real innovation works. It's not in starting from scratch and reinventing. It's from building on what else is there, and making it better and more compelling, or tweaking it for a different market. None of that precludes doing something entirely new, but making everyone start from scratch to do something entirely new is ridiculous and anti-innovation.
Hell, let's take Diaz's argument to it's insane logical conclusion. Motorola invented the first handheld mobile phone. Thus, really, shouldn't Apple be working on something different than a mobile phone? After all, by making a mobile phone, all it's really doing is being "a cheap bag of lazy, unimaginative bastards." Instead, Apple should have come up with a totally new way of communicating.
And, really, the specifics of Diaz's post are even more ridiculous. In it he praises the fact that Samsung's devices may get blocked out of the EU entirely because they have a "swipe to unlock" feature -- a tiny feature among thousands of features on a mobile device today. And, if we really broke down all of the possible features on a standard iPhone or iPad today, how many do you really think were first invented by Apple? According to Diaz, Apple should have come up with brand new ways of doing all of that. They shouldn't have email (done by someone else). No web browser (someone else did that too). Apps? I mean, come on, how derivative can they be?
Innovation is the process of improving on what came before, and part of that is taking what came before and building on it. Sometimes it will involve something entirely new, but that's exceptionally rare. In most cases, it's a minor tweak. Hell, one of the most famous "inventors" in the world is Thomas Edison, and really, when you look, almost all of his "inventions" were really minor tweaks on work others had done. But if the Diaz/Gizmodo view of the world held true, Edisons "minor tweak" to make a lightbulb actually work, would have been a waste because, you know, someone else already had created the lightbulb.
Innovation involves copying. Out of that copying come improvement and new ideas. Complaining about something just because it involves some element of copying is not complaining about a lack of innovation. It's complaining about some artificial useless standard.
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Filed Under: building, innovation, invention, patents
Companies: apple
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It is a strawman comparison, because < 20 years from now, all that you bitch and whine about today will be out of patent and freely in use. One might, in 2030, ask the wheel question about App stores or rounded corners.
Time has a way of solving all of your problems.
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You are also involved in deep non sequitur. The Gizomodo claim was that any kind of copying was lazy and unimaginative (L&U). But your answer is that, after some arbitrary 20 year period, then copying someone's work is no longer L&U? So copying old ideas is not L&U, but copy anything fresher than 19yrs 364 days is L&U. How does it suddenly become OK?
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There are two things here:
First, time seems long only when you are right there in it.
Second, while the "whee" may be locked under patent, there is no patent for the "ball" or the "track" or other solutions. One of the great things about true innovation is that we are not trapped by a single "solution" to issues.
App store locked up? Whatever - open a widget store.
I would rather have 5 different solutions vying to be the best over time, which can be settled out at some point in the future (say 20 years from now). Rather than being slaves to a single solution (aka, all having Iphones or their "clones"), we can have dozens of solutions.
True innovation always wins. Innovation by paint color loses.
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Did you just say that it wouldn't matter if the wheel was patented, because people could just use balls and tracks instead?
Wow. I'm sure everyone is just desperate to hear more of your incredible insights after that stroke of genius.
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The patent laws..
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Definition, Applephile: Someone who will love anything if it is shiny and made by Apple. http://goo.gl/3f6iM
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Welcome to the Jobs' Reality distortion field (JRDF)
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Same for sony.
Rated R
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8AyVh1_vWYQ
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Jesus Diaz
Couldn't the person bother to invent a non-fake-sounding name for their rant?
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IN truth Gizmodo has become nothing more then flamebait in general. Sad, as it use to be a nice little blog.
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Ridiculous. Everyone is standing on another's shoulders. Sometimes you are standing on the shoulders of someone who is standing on yours...to really strain that metaphor. :)
We build this notion into our intellectual property schemes. It is all part of the mythology which is used as a reason for strengthening these laws. Protect innovation!
They wouldn't know real innovation if it hit them square in the face.
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Enforce Diaz's ideas against Apple
Computers had keyboards prior to the Apple II, Apple ///, Lisa and Macintosh. Apple should be sued to recover damages from all of those past computers. By using keyboards instead of inventing something original, Apple is just a cheap bag of lazy, unimaginative bastards.
Mobile phones had color LCD screens prior to the iPhone. Apple is just a cheap bag of lazy, unimaginative bastards.
Other phones and handheld devices displayed icons in a grid before Apple built the iPod or iPhone. Apple is just a cheap bag of lazy, unimaginative bastards.
Other companies made mp3 players before Apple's iPod. Apple is just a cheap bag of lazy, unimaginative bastards.
Other computers had color displays before the Macintosh II (1987) had color. Apple is just a cheap bag of lazy, unimaginative bastards.
Using the standards of Diaz, it would be easy to put Apple out of business.
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Somewhere in the mid 1990's, Apple lost its way. Gradually, I lost interest in Apple. By 2000 I was using Linux.
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Color screens? I think you need to look back 40 or 50 years for color TV.
I could go on. Your rant is amusing, but it sadly misdirected and entirely missing the point.
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Re: Re: Enforce Diaz's ideas against Apple
The point is that using Jesus Diaz idea, any company, including his beloved Apple, could be put out of our misery.
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Heh, heh. You're all Socialists, just won't see it.
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Re: Heh, heh. You're all Socialists, just won't see it.
This comment is so ridiculous that I'm sure you're just playing Devil's advocate, but since you asked...
The "minor effort" you refer to is but one tiny aspect of the what Gates and Jobs brought to their respective companies. They got rewarded for, amongst other things, taking the financial risk of bringing products to the market that they hoped people would want, and then building on that success.
But you knew that...
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Apple and Patents and Lawsuits Oh My!
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Re: Apple and Patents and Lawsuits Oh My!
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Slippery slope
If they don't like copying, then STFU and GTFO.
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this is a fun game, let's all play.
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Zealots
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When I went to school they taught me a number of existing, known techniques for programming different problems. Decades later I still use those techniques because they work, and they're applicable to the problems I'm trying to solve. Does it make me a cheap, lazy, unimaginative bastard for not trying to come up with a new way to do something instead of using an old, proven way of doing it, every single time I have to sort data?
People discover things and then pass them on to other people so they don't have to re-discover them; instead, our knowledge and technology base accelerates because we start from a foundation of previously learned knowledge, experience, ideas, failures, techniques, understanding, technology, science, art, you name it. This is why we have schools. This is why people teach. This is why people study. It's to understand the knowledge of the past in order to apply it to the future.
Creativity is about applying knowledge, not ignoring it. Jesus and his ilk want us to win a relay race by having each runner dash back to the starting line and start the race over. How does that even make sense?
(BTW you can spend a lot of money on Connections, but The Secret Life of Machines is free for download. Legally. http://www.secretlifeofmachines.com/dvds_and_videos.htm)
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http://www.everythingisaremix.info/
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There was a handheld of sorts that predated Motorola's work, and it was a part of a battlefield communication system developed for the US Army by Martin Marietta back in the late 60's. Since Martin Marietta was not in the commercial telephony business, the technology (including patents) was transferred some years later to Motorola. The same was also done with respect to pagers.
BTW, the word "innovation" seems to be being used on this site with multiple meanings. In previous articles I have understood it to mean taking something from inception to market. Here it is used in a much more limited sense, i.e., improving a product.
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1) StarTac phones were the first truly portable, mass market cell phones and a lot of the miniaturization from the car phones of the 80s was done by Motorola.
2) They basically created the GSM standard, which solved the CDMA code breaking problem (could hack phone calls by spoofing another phones code) and gave us the modern cell phone network. Very big deals.
A lot of the MMI patents involve the miniaturization techniques developed for the creation of the first cell phones (and yes, for the battlefield communications of the day) and while not explicitly related to mobile communications, are probably very much applicable to almost any piece of consumer electronics today.
Interestingly enough, MMI would probably also own some of the patents originally used to create the first Macs...
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Standing On The Shoulders Of Giants
Ultimately, any justification for why the name X, rather than W or V, is the one primarily associated with Y, is little more than circular.
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Apple Settlement
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Diaz has a reputation for banning commenters who call him out on his love of Apple and being petty and immature.
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Heh, this is the part that makes me think the whole thing must be tongue in cheek.. How can you right a statement like that and not realize that it's completely subjective whether or not the "new" stuff that each guy adds on their product is important enough to fall into your "this is original" category instead of your "this is a copy" category.
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actually....
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Bread
First check your preconceptions at the door and then consider this for a moment. What is a loaf of bread? Obviously it is many things but the one I am concerned with is that to make a loaf of bread you are following a recipe that has been copied so many times that you couldn't trace where it originally came from or what the original recipe was. If you want to improve the recipe you add raisins or some other additional ingredient. An existing idea or "invention" is like a recipe and when you add an "ingredient" (adding email access to a cell phone for instance) it improves it. Just like a recipe for cinnamon and raisin bread is not the same as a recipe for wheat bread even though they are both bread recipes. A cell phone and a cell phone w/ email access, etc. are not the same even though they are both cell phones. By improving a thing in any way it becomes something new, and it should be recognized as such.
Not a perfect analogy I know but you get the gist.
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Actually Edison invented "a" lightbulb
Edison made a modest step forward for the light bulbs development, which in the end never became the main lightbulb of the world.
His innovation however (product and manufacturing facility) did lead the world into the light.
The very basic idea of passing current through some structure to emit light was done in the lab in the 1810's (Davy's lab I believe).
The key invention was the tungsten wire light bulb and the trick of creating a filament from this obdurate and brittle material. Edison did not invent the tungsten wire incandescent bulb although his bulb was incandescent.
The tungsten wire coming along at the turn of the century (1890's) became the worlds lightbulb.
Edison also invented Edison as the Inventor of the Lightbulb by dint of PR and self-promotion. It worked for Colt, Edison, Edwin Land and the Steve's whether any of them deserved it or not.
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