The Google and the Hare

My mother wrote last week with news of Apple’s lat­est patent vic­tory, this time State­side. It got me going, and I’ve flat­tened it out here for your pleasure.

I read an arti­cle a while ago about how this age of law­suits in Apple’s his­tory rep­re­sents a lack of inno­va­tion. I’ve been say­ing for years now Apple would have con­sid­er­ably less to fear if they spent all those resources think­ing up new fea­tures; instead, they spent three years rest­ing on their haunches, adding a com­pass here, an auto-​​focus (oth­er­wise unim­proved) cam­era there, while com­peti­tors caught up. Essen­tially, they were asleep until the iPhone 4, and by that time, their com­peti­tors caught up: faster proces­sors, dif­fer­ent form fac­tors, bet­ter cam­eras, and most impor­tantly, cheaper phones. There still good rea­sons the iPhone trumps oth­ers – its resale value is impres­sive – but the fact remains Apple fed us a bunch of marketing-​​bullshit about how every other phone soft­ware devel­oper is just scram­bling to reach the ter­ri­tory they staked in 2007.

That’s sim­ply not true: Android-​​based phones have been much more at-​​pace with consumer-​​desired fea­tures, like gen­eral visual cus­tomiza­tion and assign­ing your own SMS tones to par­tic­u­lar con­tacts. For many of us, we jailbreak/​broke our phones to get access to a lot of cool stuff Android users have enjoyed out-​​of-​​the-​​box. Sure, Google’s oper­at­ing sys­tem requires some advanced knowl­edge to put those changes into effect, but jail­break­ing and down­load­ing non-​​approved soft­ware is a far more com­plex process than tin­ker­ing with your con­tact set­tings – and there are mil­lions of jail­break­ers out there.

But that only skirts the issue. Accord­ing to Apple, it’s not enough that com­peti­tors “can’t keep up;” they’ve gotta wear ankle-​​cuffs. Says an Apple spokes­woman, “Com­peti­tors should cre­ate their own orig­i­nal tech­nol­ogy, not steal ours.” We’ll sue.

Prob­lem is, if humans didn’t “steal” and inde­pe­nently develop one another’s tech­nol­ogy, we wouldn’t have knives, bicy­cles, auto­mo­biles, stereo equip­ment or… cell phones. Hell, we “stole” fire. Apple’s con­flat­ing intel­lec­tual prop­erty with the innate human com­pul­sion to improve our lives as tech­nol­o­gists. That’s a ridicu­lous, embar­rass­ing, and dan­ger­ous game.

They’re using the more sophis­ti­cated patent courts of the 2010s to pro­tect them­selves where the courts of the 1980s paved the road for the Microsoft/​cheap drone rev­o­lu­tion. Amid the waves of hard­ware man­u­fac­tur­ers pump­ing out phones that run on the competition’s soft­ware, they want to pro­tect their mar­ket advan­tage, as they famously failed to 23 years ago. But I have far less sym­pa­thy for the “ripped-​​off innovator” when they sub­sti­tute liti­gious­ness for inno­va­tion. (Not that I have much sym­pa­thy for a cor­po­ra­tion whose cash assets totaled more than the US Treasury’s at one point this year. Or who man­u­fac­tures all their goods in obvi­ous sweat­shop con­di­tions.)

They’re begin­ning to lose the bat­tle because they played the hare to Google’s tor­toise. Now Google, fanned by a pro­lif­er­a­tion of hard­ware man­u­fac­tur­ers, is catch­ing up, and faster than a tur­tle should ever be able to move.