Google Chairman 'Not Too Worried' About Apple Lawsuits Over Android

[samcraig]

You shouldn't need to put that up. But some folks could use a little reminder.



Yeah, there would be smartphones without Apple. Not sure how "smart" they'd be though. We saw the state of the industry before the iPhone. I'm quite sure most of us would like to forget all about that period. The changes that happened were so sudden and profound it was like night and day. The landscape looked totally different. But not everyone was pulling off the cloning effort that well.


What R&D? Apple had already done it for everyone. Yes, manufacturers rushed clones to market (and it showed), just like they rushed tablets to the market after the iPad (and it shows - boy does it ever.)

Did THIS take a lot of R&D??

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/reviews/2010/11/worst-gadget-ever-ars-reviews-a-99-android-tablet.ars

Your ignorance must be bliss.

There were MANY smart (and smarter) phones that then iPhone. The iPhone barely had functionality until a year AFTER it was released when the AppStore opened.

And as I've said - I worked in the industry - before and during the iPhone - so I think I have a little more inside information and actual facts at my fingertips when I state (to you) that you're wrong. The evolution of the smartphone wasn't all because of the iPhone and Apple. That's not to say that Apple didn't have incredible influence beginning in 2007. But that's ignoring MANY years before the iPhone and the R&D that took place.

But I expect nothing less from you LTD...

 

[ChazUK]

Did THIS take a lot of R&D??

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/reviews/2010/11/worst-gadget-ever-ars-reviews-a-99-android-tablet.ars

What does this have to do with any credible manufacturer or Google for that matter? Cheap knockoffs have existed for as long as I remember.

 

[*LTD*]

What does this have to do with any credible manufacturer or Google for that matter? Cheap knockoffs have existed for as long as I remember.

Especially after the iPhone. And iPad.

And as I've said - I worked in the industry

I can't really tell.

Was it repairing iPhone knockoffs?

 

[jacobj]

Your ignorance must be bliss.

There were MANY smart (and smarter) phones that then iPhone. The iPhone barely had functionality until a year AFTER it was released when the AppStore opened.

And as I've said - I worked in the industry - before and during the iPhone - so I think I have a little more inside information and actual facts at my fingertips when I state (to you) that you're wrong. The evolution of the smartphone wasn't all because of the iPhone and Apple. That's not to say that Apple didn't have incredible influence beginning in 2007. But that's ignoring MANY years before the iPhone and the R&D that took place.

But I expect nothing less from you LTD...

The iPhone and the iPhone 3G represented a gestalt switch: if not in completely new technology, in the presentation of that technology and the perception of it.. Your insider position may well in fact be to your disadvantage and you will almost certainly being seeing it from a bias, "we all made this happen together" point of view. That is typical of any industry going through major change as it is half revolution and half evolution and depending where you sit, you choose your position.

 

[ChazUK]

Especially after the iPhone. And iPad.

perhaps its just my age but some of the earliest clones I remember are of the ZX Spectrum. That was a little before the iPhone was released.

Cloning has been rife even before the iPhone existed.

 

[KnightWRX]

If you think the iPhone is only a piece of hardware, then I guess you have never heard of iOS?

Deleted the insults. I have heard of iOS. iOS is not a full screen slab with a capacitative touch screen though, it's also a piece of software. What 0815 and others are talking about is the form factor of the devices, something Android doesn't know about and is basically agnostic to.

Pray tell what of iOS is found in Android ? The notifications mayhaps ?

 

[samcraig]

The iPhone and the iPhone 3G represented a gestalt switch: if not in completely new technology, in the presentation of that technology and the perception of it.. Your insider position may well in fact be to your disadvantage and you will almost certainly being seeing it from a bias, "we all made this happen together" point of view. That is typical of any industry going through major change as it is half revolution and half evolution and depending where you sit, you choose your position.

No.. I agree with your opening statement. I have no biases. I'm pretty technologically unbiased. The right tool for the right job for me pretty much.

I wasn't an engineer - nor did I have "ownership" of anything that would give me the sense that we did it all together. I'm merely relaying what I saw happening - which was that the company I worked for - at any given time - had 5-10 different phones of ALL varieties on the roadmap at any given time. They changed names, form factors, features, etc along the way.

The point I was making was that that phones don't magically hit consumers within a month or two when the competition releases a phone. When that happens - it typically because a similar phone was already in or around production and the timing just SEEMS coincidental. Not ALL THE TIME.

But LTD is a different beast. He'll go on and on about Apple starting it all while ignoring history in its entirety.

Apple evolved and revolutionized much of the smartphone industry and "how things should work." - but to ignore the marketplace and contributions of other companies and technologies is just ignorant or wishful thinking.

Apple (and Jobs) has stated that they've (paraphrasing) stolen/borrowed and "made it better." That's subjective of course.

Smartphone history is rich and dates much further back than 2007.

 

[BC2009]

The Nokia suit was a bit different from most others. Apple wasn't claiming that the patents were invalid, rather that Nokia was asking unfair terms for licensing. Since the suit was settled, we don't know the specific terms of the deal. For all we know Apple got the price they wanted. As a result we can't claim that Nokia 'won'.

Everybody pays Nokia. Their patents are intrinsic to GMS and wifi.
(except Google. Google doesn't sell anything that requires a license. Android phones are sold by HTC, Moto, Samsung, etc... They have licenses with Nokia already)

Good to know. But Fortune reported that this was a "sweet defeat" for Apple since Android manufacturers were likely next on Nokia's list. Several other outlets ran this story with the same spin (including Foss Patents), but the very IP-Law-Knowledgable Nilay Patel over at This is My Next makes no mention of a down-side for Android.

 

[unicorn025]

The Nokia suit was a bit different from most others. Apple wasn't claiming that the patents were invalid, rather that Nokia was asking unfair terms for licensing. Since the suit was settled, we don't know the specific terms of the deal. For all we know Apple got the price they wanted. As a result we can't claim that Nokia 'won'.

apple will pay nokia royaltie fee for every phone they sell and have already payed 300 to 600 million for the total amount of iphone sold since 2007.

think i got this from mac daily

 

[jacobj]

No.. I agree with your opening statement. I have no biases. I'm pretty technologically unbiased. The right tool for the right job for me pretty much.

I wasn't an engineer - nor did I have "ownership" of anything that would give me the sense that we did it all together. I'm merely relaying what I saw happening - which was that the company I worked for - at any given time - had 5-10 different phones of ALL varieties on the roadmap at any given time. They changed names, form factors, features, etc along the way.

The point I was making was that that phones don't magically hit consumers within a month or two when the competition releases a phone. When that happens - it typically because a similar phone was already in or around production and the timing just SEEMS coincidental. Not ALL THE TIME.

But LTD is a different beast. He'll go on and on about Apple starting it all while ignoring history in its entirety.

Apple evolved and revolutionized much of the smartphone industry and "how things should work." - but to ignore the marketplace and contributions of other companies and technologies is just ignorant or wishful thinking.

Apple (and Jobs) has stated that they've (paraphrasing) stolen/borrowed and "made it better." That's subjective of course.

Smartphone history is rich and dates much further back than 2007.

Not that you may care; but I agree.

 

[Mr Fusion]

He sounds a lot like a late 80's Bill Gates.

I LOVE IT!!!

Everyone knows Google's taking over the world. Deal with it!

 

[franswa za]

seems VERY arrogant to me mister schmidt, i think that you and google are actually browning your pants

apple got whacked by kodak just now, you might also get slapped

...now sit back and invent, or steal....

and eat another burger while you are at it, or perhaps a murdoch cream pie?

 

[err404]

Deleted the insults. I have heard of iOS. iOS is not a full screen slab with a capacitative touch screen though, it's also a piece of software. What 0815 and others are talking about is the form factor of the devices, something Android doesn't know about and is basically agnostic to.

Pray tell what of iOS is found in Android ? The notifications mayhaps ?

It seems dishonest (maybe just shortsighted) to completely segregate your view of the OS from the hardware it runs on.
That kind of dichotomy is what caused early Windows tablets to fail.
The iPhone or any Android handset need to be considered as a whole. In order to properly optimize an experience, the OS needs to be aware of how the device will be used.
Consider the more unique 'BlackBerry" and dual screen form factor Android devices. These devices suffer from a lack of integration with Android eco-system. Many third party apps scale in unexpected ways or fail to be functional at all. Ultimately an Android phone that is NOT a touch screen slab of approximately 4" is a somewhat compromised experience.

 

[maclaptop]

What a hypocrite.

Borrowed from Apples play book.

 

[err404]

apple will pay nokia royaltie fee for every phone they sell and have already payed 300 to 600 million for the total amount of iphone sold since 2007.

think i got this from mac daily

I read that, but we don't know the original terms requested by Nokia. Without that information, we don't know how Apple fared in the negotiations.

 

[unicorn025]

Apple isn't responding to competition with lawsuits, it's responding to to theft of its protected innovations with lawsuits. The Google statement is twist on Steve Jobs comment the other day that its competitors would rather steal its ideas than pursue their own innovations and compete. The problem with it though is that it doesn't work well turned around on Apple, who just won the first round in the patent case affirming that it was Apple that was the innovator and had the property right.

so apple was steeling from nokia since 2007 and profiting from it also, since they just started paying for nokia patent.

apple did this knowing they did not hold the patent for gsm, wifi and still came out and sold the iphone.

 

[kdarling]

I must be totally uninformed, but why would he accuse Schmidt 'during' the iPhone design?

See forehead slap from Erwin-Br above

Some here act as if Schmidt stole secrets during Board meetings. Yet Jobs himself has never accused him of that. Only fanboys do.

Reportedly, Schmidt kept himself detached from the Android project while he was on the Apple board. He also recused himself from board meetings about iPhone future designs. It all makes legal sense.

For that matter, Android did not begin using any iPhone-like features for another two years after Schmidt was on the board and a year after the iPhone came out. If he was stealing ideas in 2006, Google could've easily been much further ahead than that.

So what he invited him to the Apple board. It does not imply that he's now allowed to steal?

Of course not, but again, no one at Apple says he stole anything while on the board. That's a strawman.

What Jobs was upset about is that he thought Google would never make a directly competing phone OS. As he bitterly put it at D8, "We didn't go into search."

Of course, some of that anger is gone. As we know, Jobs and Schmidt met quite publicly for coffee last year. Or perhaps the anger has gone into patent attacks.

So the discussions should be about these things:

• Why did Jobs think Google would not become a competitor? Because he put Schmidt on the Apple board? Was that a reason why?
  
• Did Schmidt promise Jobs not to be a direct competitor?
  
• Why did Google wait an extra year before enabling multitouch?
  
• Why did Jobs think Apple had a patent on multitouch and/or pinch-to-zoom? Was he misled internally? Was he just not paying close attention?

 

[KnightWRX]

It seems dishonest (maybe just shortsighted) to completely segregate your view of the OS from the hardware it runs on.

Why is it dishonest when Google is shipping a software OS that is hardware agnostic ? That's what it is, not every vendor is about vertical integration like Apple.

There is nothing dishonest about it, that's how Android works.

That kind of dichotomy is what caused early Windows tablets to fail.

Then if it brings about Android's failure, let Android fail. What's the big deal ?

The iPhone or any Android handset need to be considered as a whole.

But that would be ignoring how Android works. Android is hardware agnostic. Why consider it as a whole when it isn't presented as such ?

In order to properly optimize an experience, the OS needs to be aware of how the device will be used.

Again, applying Apple principles to something that is not Apple's stuff. Not everyone goes for vertical integration and yet it doesn't mean that the stuff doesn't work.

Again, if this is Android's weakness, let the market decide. However, it is very much disingenuous to claim "Android" copied the "iPhone" because some manufacturers sold Android handsets with the same form factor as the iPhone. What about the Blackberry styled Android handsets ? What about the PSP Go style handset ? What about the sliders ? Android doesn't dictate hardware.

 

[ftaok]

There were MANY smart (and smarter) phones that then iPhone. The iPhone barely had functionality until a year AFTER it was released when the AppStore opened.

If I can remember back to 2007, when the first iPhone was introduced, many folks complained about what the iPhone wasn't. The iPhone wasn't a Blackberry, it wasn't a Moto Q, it wasn't a Palm Treo. It didn't integrate with Exchange, it didn't have robust PDA abilities, etc.

But what these folks didn't realize was what the iPhone was. It was an always connected internet communicator/multimedia device. It made phone calls, it browsed the web (with an enjoyable browser), it played music and movies. These were the features that captured the minds and hearts of the masses, not the stuff that the iPhone didn't do (or didn't do well).

I recall Steve Jobs laying out the future of smartphones ... only most of us didn't even realize the seismic shift that was happening in the smartphone industry. He put of a graphic of the 3 things that the iPhone was. The first was the iPod, the second was the cell phone, and the last was Safari. This was the playbook for the future of smartphones; yet hardly anyone "got it". Jobs' cautious modesty regarding Apple's sales projections ("hopes"???) probably played into our collective underestimating of the original iPhone.

Anyways, to say that the original iPhone wasn't "fully functional" is a little unfair. Apple intended the iPhone to be an iPod with a cell radio PLUS the internet.

NOTE - the $20 unlimited data plan was a big key in getting mass adoption of the iPhone as well.

 

[Rodimus Prime]

See forehead slap from Erwin-Br above

Some here act as if Schmidt stole secrets during Board meetings. Yet Jobs himself has never accused him of that. Only fanboys do.

Reportedly, Schmidt kept himself detached from the Android project while he was on the Apple board. He also recused himself from board meetings about iPhone future designs. It all makes legal sense.

For that matter, Android did not begin using any iPhone-like features for another two years after Schmidt was on the board and a year after the iPhone came out. If he was stealing ideas in 2006, Google could've easily been much further ahead than that.



Of course not, but again, no one at Apple says he stole anything while on the board. That's a strawman.

What Jobs was upset about is that he thought Google would never make a directly competing phone OS. As he bitterly put it at D8, "We didn't go into search."

Of course, some of that anger is gone. As we know, Jobs and Schmidt met quite publicly for coffee last year. Or perhaps the anger has gone into patent attacks.

So the discussions should be about these things:

• Why did Jobs think Google would not become a competitor? Because he put Schmidt on the Apple board? Was that a reason why?
  
• Did Schmidt promise Jobs not to be a direct competitor?
  
• Why did Google wait an extra year before enabling multitouch?
  
• Why did Jobs think Apple had a patent on multitouch and/or pinch-to-zoom? Was he misled internally? Was he just not paying close attention?

those darn pesky facts are getting in the way of the bashing.

 

[Consultant]

Do you have a link? Not that I don't believe you but it sounds interesting.

Recently there is Psystar.

But at least 2 companies made iMac knockoffs about a decade ago:
- Future Power
- eMachines

Apple won injunctions that killed the products for x years

Law journal article pdf cache and some dates on the bottom of this article:
http://obamapacman.com/2011/04/apple-vs-samsung-galaxy-iphone-infringement-lawsuit-analysis/

 

[marksman]

This should be made a sticky thread. Too many Apple evangelicals seem to think everything Apple does is revolutionary, most of it, if not all is just evolutionary.

Some people should learn that just because devices in the same category existed before does not make new devices only capable of being evolutionary.

The iPod was REVOLUTIONARY to the MP3 market not evolutionary. I owned MP3 players for years before the iPod came out, they changed the game.

The iPhone was REVOLUTIONARY to the smart phone market. Smart phones existed for years before the iPhone. Now every smartphone is a copy of the iPhone whereas none of them where anything like it before.

the iPad is REVOLUTIONARY to the tablet market. Tablets existed before, but now the entire tablet market is the iPad. No other products are even a factor and of those trying to be a factor, they are all mimicing the iPad.

I think people who want to be Apple bashers need to learn the difference between evolutionary and revolutionary.

Those are three of the biggest revolutionary technology developments for consumer products in the last twelve plus years. Introduction of the DVR being up there as well but what else?

Google revolutionized Search when they came along. All search engines were a chatoic mess of news/web portals that were scary to look at and results that were even worse.

Google changed all that in a massive way. Even though search engines existed before Google, Google's deployment of Search was REVOLUTIONARY.

When you change the marketplace for a product so all competitors are then following you and copying you, you have revolutionized the marketplace for that product.

That is what Google did in search and that is what Apple did with the iPod, iPhone and iPad. There is no question there.

 

[kdarling]

There were touch-based smart phones as early as 2000. So it's natural that phone manufacturers were EVOLVING the technology and their hardware.

Absolutely. Especially by 2006, there were plenty of all touch designs floating around, such as the Black Box Concept, the Synaptics Onyx, the Nokia Aeon and many others. It was just a mattter of time before one or more were put into production, which is no doubt why Apple felt pushed to announce theirs months ahead of sales launch.

Other manufacturers were trapped trying to retain back compatibility, an issue that Apple did not have... at first. As the iPhone matures, we see Apple beginning to have the same issues, dealing with older resolutions, speeds, memory, missing sensors, and especially becoming seemingly locked into their original basic UI paradigm.

Apple also had the advantage of waiting until all the other manufacturers had done the R&D to build mobile radio chipsets, displays and go through the growing pains of cellular networks slowly standardizing on modes and frequencies around the world.

This is not to take away from Apple, though. The industry needed a kick in the tail to get moving, to get stuff out of R&D. It's similar to the way cars were so boring in the 1980s-90s until Chrysler went broke and came back saying "Oh heck, let's build all the showcars instead of waiting."

It WAS the first phone to use multi-touch, though.

It was the first to be sold, yes. It was not the first to announce the idea. This one was, by a few months. Although it ended up not using it, they had announced plans for multi-touch, pinch-to-zoom, multi finger scrolling, etc. However, since they weren't a big name like Apple, few paid attention until the iPhone came out.

Point is - the talk of how there'd be no smartphones (or even that there were no smartphones before Apple) without Apple is just ridiculous. And wishful thinking for some.

As I've commented before, when the iPhone came millions of us around the world were using touchscreen smartphones with Slingplayer, Google Maps, GPS, thousands of available apps. Were they as slick to use? Not really. Were they useful? Very much.

If anyone has a few minutes, read this now humorous CIO article from 2001 for fun. It's about a reporter trying to use a smartphone in NYC back then, when comms topped out at 19Kbps. What's interesting, is the apps she had even then, such as a Starbucks Locator.

 

[AppleScruff1]

What if Apple loses and they give Steve 20 years in prison? Wouldn't that be hilarious?

 

[MacNewsFix]

Considering how high the stakes are, it is any surprise?

Think about it this way. When you surf the web, whether it be through a Mac, PC, or Linux box, the ads you see are the same.

Now, when you are on a smartphone using ad supported applications, those ads are sometimes influenced by the phone manufacturer. iAds are only on iOS devices, while Google tries to persuade developers to use AdMob.

With more and more people gravitating to tablets and smartphones as replacements for computers, the platforms with large market share stand to not only gain incredible profits, but also incredible power.