Comment by podperson | Hacker News Reader

Comment by podperson | Hacker News Reader

I think this article pretty much nails a key part of it. What Apple wants to do is implement a seamless digital world that Just Works. (It remains to be seen whether it does in fact Just Work.)

Oddly enough, you could accuse them of, once again, stealing ideas from Xerox PARC (and, once again, be redirected to Douglas Englebart et al) ... the kind of thing Apple is demonstrating with iCloud, iOS5, and Lion is essentially the computing paradigm described in a Scientific American article on Xerox PARC in the 80s (I wish I could give the exact issue, but the article described four basic kinds of computers - post-it notes, slates, desktops, and wall screens - all, except the post-its which were a rough prototype with a rudimentary display, sharing a common UI with data stored on the network.)

An interesting remark that touches on this topic on The Talk Show was (and I paraphrase) "how come this [the app-centric universe] feels so reasonable and natural and yet has taken so long to come". In fact, there was a huge detour in the opposite direction exemplified by OpenDoc (on the Mac) and OLE (on Windows). How many of us remember copying a table from excel, pasting it into PowerPoint and getting some kind of weird icon? In the 90s the idea was to remove the app and make the document (or perhaps the workflow) the center of attention. This may actually have been a Good Idea but it was (in the case of OpenDoc) badly conceived and not especially well-implemented. Or, perhaps, it was just too far ahead of its time.

Oddly enough, you could accuse them of, once again, stealing ideas from Xerox PARC

Some people criticize Apple for this, but I think I'm actually quite okay with it to an extent if you think of this as just a natural example of science & engineering working hand in hand to make cool stuff.

Xerox PARC did the science, Apple is doing the Engineering. It's not really much different than basic R&D in materials science and physics modeling getting turned into a bridge or a skyscraper. Or basic academic research in medicine becoming the next billion dollar drug.

A side question is, with these kinds of R&D shops now quite rare (Microsoft Research and....) and seeing how Xerox and AT&T not able to capitalize on their research, what does this mean for the modern version of these places? Is some other company going to just come along and build what Microsoft is researching today? Or is there a chance for one of these companies to actually benefit from these paradigm shifting revolutions in research?

Of course I agree, but felt like I should point out that this was another example of Apple picking up a ball Xerox "dropped".

The article you're referring to I think was written by Mark Weiser. It was called "The Computer for the 21st Century" unless you were thinking of a different one.

It's quite a vision for 1991:

http://www.ubicomp.com/want/papers/ubi-sciam-sep91.pdf

Thank you sir, that's the one. I was off by a few years I guess :-)

I think this article pretty much nails a key part of it. What Apple wants to do is implement a seamless digital world that Just Works...

Oddly enough, you could accuse them of, once again, stealing ideas from Xerox PARC

It's also a pragmatic vision of what a seamless Object Oriented world would look like. Steve and the Next gang went and made it work. Now they're in a position to take the computing world out of the early 1990s, just like they took it out of the 70's with Macintosh.

In a way, Xerox PARC did get compensated for some of its ideas. Quoted from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PARC_(company)

"The first successful commercial GUI product was the Apple Macintosh, which was heavily inspired by PARC's work; Xerox was allowed to buy pre-IPO stock from Apple, in exchange for engineer visits and an understanding that Apple would create a GUI product."

Yes, Xerox later did sue Apple but...

"The lawsuit was dismissed because the presiding judge ruled "that Xerox's complaints were inappropriate for a variety of legal reasons,""

I guess the way I feel about ideas is that you don't own an idea just for having described it once, thus if someone else implements it they didn't steal it either.

In my opinion, you don't even own an idea that you've implemented poorly. Thus if someone else thinks they can implement it well, they didn't steal the idea.

You own an idea when you've implemented it well, maybe even really really well. Before that it's just a proof of concept.

And even then you still don't own the idea, you've just got bragging rights to it.

A good example would be the tablet. In the minds of most people, Apple owns that concept, everybody else are imitating it; that's what Apple gets for making the first really good implementation of it, even though Microsoft and a bunch of other companies made several really poor implementations of it years before.

I've just had my first branded backup device fail (with electronics grief, not media grief), received contradictory information about whether it was supported, and been told that, even if it was, there's no plan to put the media into new electronics, so I'm currently very resistant to any 'it just works' story.

Isn't GNUstep working on an evolution of OpenDOC? I thought I read or heard about it once, but couldn't find much info on it. OpenDoc is something I really want to work.

No. GNUStep is an implementation of the OpenStep standard (designed by NeXT and Sun, based on NeXTStep).

OpenDoc was designed by Apple in the pre-OS X days.

After more searching I realized I'm thinking about Etoile, a GNUstep based environment that's trying to break down the document model similar to how OpenDoc tried to. It's interesting, but seems a long way from maturity.

Interesting-looking project.

you could accuse them of, once again, stealing ideas from Xerox PARC

To steal means to deprive someone of something that by all rights they should have had. So the only way this could be construed as theft is if Xerox PARC's plan was to wait 20-30 years and then capitalize on the idea. But damn, Apple stole it at the last moment!

To prevent the world from benefiting from an idea just because it came to you first is the ultimate theft. Fortunate the Xerox PARC guys are not evil or dishonest and won't charge Apple with theft. If they don't call it theft, no one else can.

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