’I'm Going to Destroy Android, Because It's a Stolen Product' | Hacker News Reader

’I'm Going to Destroy Android, Because It's a Stolen Product'

daringfireball.net

18 pointsshawndumas13 comments

Gruber adds nothing to the discussion.

Previously discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3137723

Steve Jobs: "Picasso had a saying, 'Good artists copy, great artists steal.' We have always been shameless about stealing great ideas."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CW0DUg63lqU

Exactly. This is the man who stole the mouse (and the UI?) from Xerox 20+ years ago. Boo hoo.

Xerox invested $1 million in Apple by purchasing 100000 shares at $10 each.

I doubt this is really about ideas. It's probably more about feeling betrayed by a friend and former member of the board.

Here's the thing. Apple took the desktop metaphors and input technology from PARC. But it then made its own interface. The Xerox PARC machines don't look like a Macintosh. I don't think you can compare that to what Google did with Android.

Android basically stole the iPhone interface in its entirety. Right down to the screen resolution and icon placement (bottom of the screen on each app).

In fact, to put an even finer point on it, Google scrapped its version of Android (see here: http://techcrunch.com/2007/12/17/android-prototype-lets-hope...) and went to work on a full on copy of the iPhone.

I'm glad Android's out there to provide competition. But there's no doubt Android's theft of the iPhone interface is more brazen than any other example I can think of.

Apple stole ideas and made them better.

Google and MS stole ideas and made them worse.

No offense, but you sound like a bit of a fanboy.

I won't argue that Apple has done some amazing things through the years, but I wouldn't say that Android or Microsoft have made anything they've done worse.

Besides, some of the stuff that Android has been doing for years is now showing up in iOS, so it can't all be bad.

no offense taken. I guess you can call me a fan boy. but that doesn't mean i'm wrong.

Android = crappy poor man's iOS Windows = crappy poor man's Mac

"Besides, some of the stuff that Android has been doing for years is now showing up in iOS, so it can't all be bad."

what? like multitasking, copy/paste, widgets? if you want to be technical, iOS is a derivative of MAC OS X/NextStep, and MAC OS X/NextStep had multitasking, copy/paste and widgets years/decades before Android.

Actually, you're wrong. Windows is far from the a poor man's OS X. The dock in OS X is copy of Stardock, which was originally done for Windows. NeXTStep was not definitley not the first OS to have multitasking. In fact, Windows 2.0 which was released 1 year had it first. Once Apple released a development environment and office toolkist that is as widely used as either Visual Studio or Office 2010, then maybe you can make that claim. Or when the company creates it owns command line processor, or IDE for a phone. I realize many people such as yourself like to believe Apple is some innovative company, but they're just as guilty of stealing ideas as every other tech company in the Valley. Apple's strength is taking those ideas and weaving into a consistent and polished UX.

Google should be ashamed at such shameless copying.

By the way, I really like the new iOS 5 notifications and Find My Friends. So original!

[a copy of the comment I made on the ars submission]

This just popped up on ars, and it provides a plausible explanation for something that had been bugging me. Why patent-a-geddon?

I mean seriously, Patents, and patent battles, have happened for decades and they have generally all followed the same pattern, A sues B, B countersues A, one or more trials get to the point where folks can see how they are going to go, and then that determines the settlement. Apple->Xerox, Kodak/HP, IBM/Memorex, Intel/AMD, SGI/Sun, SGI/Microsoft, Microsoft/Sun, Etc etc.

But with Apple suing HTC and all of the other Android makers, to the point of injunctions and pulling products off shelves and disrupting commerce, have gone past the 'ok how much to settle?' phase. They have become vindictive.

And that, for me at least, was confusing. Since generally its just business and once you've normalized the business aspects of things you can proceed. So why continue this war?

According to Ars, in the upcoming biography, Steve felt so intensely personally affronted by Android that he would only be satisfied if Android ceased to exist. Given his conviction, and war chest, that would explain a lot about the durability (or longevity) of the current patent litigation.

For a guy (Jobs) who stood on the shoulders of a lot of people, I find this quote of an obvious rant indicative of some serious misunderstandings. BTW, he didn't steal the mouse from Xerox, he stole it from SRI down the street...

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