Notice that even if he was at a keynote, selling to the world Mac OS 9 and new iMacs, he personally used a PC laptop running a version of NeXT/OpenStep and the software that was sold to Sun. They eventually hired the same developers to build Keynote.
I just found a quote from Steve that could be one of my favourites quotes ever:
"I started to realize that maybe Thomas Edison did a lot more to improve the world than Karl Marx and Neem Kairolie Baba put together."
Sorry, but I have a helluva lot more respect for Steve Jobs than I do for Jonathan. Steve has legit bragging rights. What can Jonathan brag about? Taking $12 million in severance from Sun while his employees got two months of pay at most?
Jonathan answered that question directly in his blog:
"My response was simple. "Steve, I was just watching your last presentation, and Keynote looks identical to Concurrence – do you own that IP?" Concurrence was a presentation product built by Lighthouse Design, a company I’d help to found and which Sun acquired in 1996. [...] Steve had used Concurrence for years, and as Apple built their own presentation tool, it was obvious where they’d found inspiration."
Whether or not we respect him for what he has done in Sun, through this post he gave us a window into a world that for most of us is completely hidden. He also showed that it takes balls to stand up to the likes of Apple, MS etc.
It's hard salvaging a shipwreck after Scott McNealy was done with it ;)
And regardless of any merits Jonathan had while CEO at SUN (starting 2006), under his guidance we've got open-source Java and OpenSolaris, not to mention increased focus on other open-source products like OpenOffice. So for the rest of us developers, it was a bigger win than anything Apple did from 2006 until now.
Also, your comment got "fanboy" written all over it.
He's done something worthwhile with a fairly small portion of the riches and is using that as a very successful propaganda machine to counter his negative image.
Please keep in mind that this was the CEO under which a number of very questionable actions (anti-trust, SCO) were effected.
Propaganda? Please. Outside of the open source tech bubble Bill G doesn't/didn't have a negative image to counter. He has given away ~$30 billion which is not a small portion at all (> half of his current net worth). It's his main focus and he will likely donate teh bulk of his remaining fortune. iMacs and iPods don't save lives, providing vaccinations saves millions.
"Having watched this movie play out many times, suing a competitor typically makes them more relevant, not less. "
I don't think that's exactly true. I think suing people has largely no effect on relevance, but you tend to sue competitors whose relevance is on the upswing. Nobody is going to sue Myspace right now for IP infringement, for instance, they're going to sue Facebook.
Some history is illuminating. The first important lawsuit that Apple filed was against the Franklin Ace. This was in the early 80s. Heard about the Franklin Ace recently?
No matter how many times people tell Steve Jobs otherwise, he's been here before. And the very first time he did it, he won an important victory.
It also seems like the suits that people hear about are the ones involving the hot new companies, which happen to be those who are gaining relevance but haven't yet established their position and thus are still interesting.
So we have patent trolling targeting interesting companies on the rise, and the media selecting for stories about interesting companies on the rise. It could definitely be causality in the other direction.
Playing devil's advocate. He could be saying that they're shameless in stealing ideas from different fields, like the examples he gives: music, art, zoology, history. Copying the sleek lines of a panther's eyes for your icons is one thing, blatantly cloning a competitor's UI is another.
This may be why he can reconcile suing HTC while practicing the "great artists steal" mantra.
Project Looking Glass, while certainly inspired by current UIs, it was definitely not a clone ... pretty innovative actually, although it wasn't usable yet.
I really enjoyed reading Jonathan's blog at Sun. I'm not sure if he was the first, but he was certainly one of the first large company CEOs to blog and blog candidly (within the constraints of his position).
There were a few posts that stuck with me. I remember this one in particular, from 2005, about reducing their customer survey to a single question: would you recommend Sun?
love it. to quote steve again from his famous commencement speech:
for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.
I wonder if he's proud of suing HTC over those silly software patents like "Unlocking A Device By Performing Gestures On An Unlock Image"
I'm not sure what to be more appalled at, the fact that the patent office actually issued that, or that apple is seriously suing over it.
Is there something specific about that patent that you find silly or do you find the whole notion that the specific way that an interface element works to be silly?
It seems to me that if such things can't be copyrighted, or trademarked, aren't covered by design patents, and shouldn't covered by utility patents, then choosing to implement something in software rather than hardware would be a losing proposition for anyone trying to differentiate or innovate.
I don't understand. What component? We're talking about software here.
Just because an interface object behaves in a way reminiscent of a physical object does not mean it is that object. It has an entirely different mechanism. What you're saying is that one kind of mechanism should be patentable while another should not, but it's not clear why there is a distinction.
But where is the innovation that would justify a patent lock-in [npi]? Is it still (really?) "non-obvious" that GUI elements may mimic physical devices? What is so innovative about a virtual toggle switch?
But where is the innovation that would justify a patent lock-in [npi]?
Read the patent. It describes the specific way the iPhone's unlock screen works, which to my knowledge (and evidently that of the USPTO) was novel at the time it was patented. If you want to know what is supposedly innovative about it, that would be the logical place to look, wouldn't it?
With that in mind, I'll ask again: is theres something specific about that patent that is amiss, or is the whole idea that software-defined interface behaviors can be patented wrong to you?
Is it still (really?) "non-obvious" that GUI elements may mimic physical devices?
Irrelevant. There is no patent on "GUI Element That Mimics Physical Device". That's a concept, not a thing that can be patented. The idea of software interfaces that behave somewhat like physical objects may not be novel, but that tells you nothing about the novelty or lack thereof in any specific interface.
What is so innovative about a virtual toggle switch?
Depends on the switch. But again, this is not a patent on "the idea of virtual toggle switches", it is a patent on the specific way that Apple's unlock screen works. It should be obvious to anyone that there is more than one way to implement an unlock screen, few of which would infringe on Apple's patent, and many of which don't involve ersatz switches at all.
It is not ironic that Jerome H. Lemelson, arguably the most successful individual U.S. inventor ever [Sony paid him royalties for magnetic tape drive used in tens of millions of Sony Walkman], equated financial success as an inventor with protracted litigation.
"The American dream is that if the average American invents something novel and worthy of patenting, he'll find someone to license it. However, for most contemporary inventors , it hasn't worked out that way. The independent inventor today still has an extremely difficult time convincing corporations that he has a product which deserves to be on the market. Most companies have a tremendous resistance to ideas and technology developed on the outside."
"You cannot develop a reputation for somebody who gives up. You have to be known as a fighter for your rights. Otherwise, you'll never license anything...Even Thomas Edison had a tough time supporting and protecting his patents. He spent about $1.4 million [to defend his inventions], and this was around the turn of the century, when beer was a nickel."
"IBM today announced that it received 4,914 U.S. patents in 2009, marking the 17th consecutive year it has topped the list of the world's most inventive companies."
Good article but scary. If you've a start up without a wad of defensive patents what can you so if a large company gives you a "stepping all over our IP" threat?
He's probably not even aware of it; it's the default on WordPress. To get rid of the ads, you'd first have to be aware that there are any at all (and you won't normally be served ads when you're logged-in as an author), and then pay for the no-ads upgrade. http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2008/09/18/go-ad-free/
I wish someone would point out to me a software patent which he thinks justifies the patentability of software/business processes. I haven't seen any yet which makes me think that software patentability results in an economy more optimal than if it was not protectable under patent (as opposed to copyright) law.
I don't get this idea of sueing just for the sake of it, most of the times they just fall on there faces. Not a good tool to cut down competition. Its like pricking someone with a pin, you certainly annoy them but never actually accomplish anything.
At most I thought it was just a distraction technique or see if you can scare them. While you threaten the company with your lawyers and patents the top brass will have to dedicated some amount of time to fight it with their lawyers, figuring out which patents your infringing on, or what they can say to get rid of you.
If you're lucky you might get a settlement out of it. Otherwise you've slowed them down a little while they were distracted fighting your lawsuit.
In terms of IP, Sun had pretty big cojones ... while the number of patents they got was certainly smaller than Microsoft's, their arsenal touched practically anything you can think of in our field.
So yeah, he's the big stud who "faced down Steve Jobs and Bill Gates". If you want to critique something, disagree with what he's saying, since ad hominems add nothing of value and are insipid / rude / a waist of time for everybody reading.
Notice that even if he was at a keynote, selling to the world Mac OS 9 and new iMacs, he personally used a PC laptop running a version of NeXT/OpenStep and the software that was sold to Sun. They eventually hired the same developers to build Keynote.