Documentary On The History Of Apple And Microsoft Show It Was All About Copying, Not Patents

from the just-a-reminder dept

We recently posted about an absolutely ridiculous NY Times op-ed piece in which Pat Choate argued both that patent laws have been getting weaker, and that if we had today's patent laws in the 1970s that Apple and Microsoft wouldn't have survived since bigger companies would just copy what they were doing and put them out of business. We noted that this was completely laughable to anyone who knew the actual history. A day or so ago, someone (and forgive me, because I can no longer find the tweet) pointed me on Twitter to a 45 minute excerpt from a documentary about the early days of Microsoft and Apple and it's worth watching just to show how laughably wrong Choate obviously is. There are two key themes that stand out incredibly strongly in this: both Microsoft and Apple did an awful lot of what they did by shamelessly copying the work of others, and the big companies floating around the space (mainly IBM and Xerox) clearly had no clue at all about what was going on. The few times they discovered interesting things, they didn't know what to do with them, and let Microsoft and Apple walk all over them to build something better that people wanted. And when they tried to jump into these markets by copying the work of Apple and Microsoft, they tended to do a really bad job of it. On the copying front, while most people are familiar with Apple copying the GUI from Xerox, less well known is the story of Tim Patterson at Seattle Computer Products reverse engineering CP/M based on understanding CP/M's APIs to create the early versions of DOS that Microsoft licensed to IBM.

Also noteworthy: no discussion of patents at all. At the very end of the clip there's a bit of a discussion from former Apple CEO John Sculley concerning Apple's legal fight with Microsoft over the look and feel of the GUI. He mentions there was nothing patentable, but that they felt it was a copyright violation. However, he also notes that Apple's strong belief that they could stop Microsoft via copyright also led to complacency within Apple, and less focus on competing by innovation.

In other words, the claims Choate makes are laughable. There was little to no reliance on patents during the early days, and a very strong culture of copying anything and everything, while competing by trying to out-innovate each other. Furthermore, big companies couldn't figure out what was going on, even if they wanted to copy these successful upstarts. At one point, Larry Ellison jokes about how IBM stupidly ceded the chip market to Intel and the OS/application market to Microsoft when it could have owned it all.

One point about the video. The YouTube link says this is from the "documentary" Pirates of Silicon Valley. That's incorrect. If I remember correctly, Pirates of Silicon Valley was actually a "TV movie" based on the same subject material, with Noah Wylie playing Steve Jobs and Anthony Michael Hall playing Bill Gates. Instead, I'm pretty sure that the clips are actually from the documentary Triumph of the Nerds, put together and narrated by Mark Stephens, who is better known as Robert X. Cringely (there's another interesting historical story about the legal fight over the Cringely name, but that's a totally different tangent). This documentary actually came out in 1996, so it's interesting to see how it mostly predates the internet (though there is some discussion of the internet), Jobs' return to Apple and a variety of other things that happened over the past 15 years. Either way, it should put to rest Choate's silly claims.

Filed Under: bill gates, copying, innovation, patents, steve jobs, triumph of the nerds
Companies: apple, ibm, microsoft, oracle, xerox