Battletard wrote:
I heard Steve Jobs was at a meeting or expo or something, and someone demonstrated the point and click mouse interface concept. It was not patented or otherwise protected in any way. I believe the company was Xerox.
Azelma wrote:
You have the basics of the story, but a lot of facts are missing.
It wasn't at a convention. Jobs had brokered a deal with Xerox. Xerox invested a significant amount of money in apple. Apple was then supposed to be shown Xerox's dev team/projects based out of Silicon Valley. Xerox's corporate HQ was in Connecticut and no one had any idea what the silicon valley xerox guys were working on (the point and click mouse interface concept). So Jobs and his crew went to Xeroxes offices and requested to be shown the technology. Well, the Xerox engineers were leery of Steve Jobs and didn't want to show him anything...so they showed him some boring bullshit that wasn't the point/click stuff. Jobs had an inside guy at Xerox, so he knew there was more they weren't showing him.
A few calls to Xerox's corporate HQ and the silicon valley engineers were forced to show Steve Jobs EVERYTHING. That's when he/his top engineers saw the point and click interface and took the idea back to apple, improved it, and revolutionized the industry.
Before Jobs/Apple intervened, the work Xerox was doing was being implemented terribly and no one was buying their clunky boxes.
Under copyright law, it's not actually necessary to file for a copyright to enforce it after the fact. As long as the original developer can provide tangible proof that they did the work first and that the competing product was based off their research, they can action the copyright.
In any event, 25 years later Steve Jobs went on a rage about how Android stole his ideas. lol.
Azelma wrote:
Aestu wrote:
For a time Apple competed with Wintel, but ultimately, the firm left no legacy.
Quoted for lunacy. I'd say the fact that Apple is
1/2 most valuable company in the world is a legacy.
US Steel? General Motors? RCA? AOL?
Market valuation is the most fleeting of glories. You need to look past the here and now.
Azelma wrote:
I'd say the Macintosh and advances in personal computers in the 80s are a legacy. I'd say the iPad, iPod, iPhone, all dominating their respective markets are legacies.
When you read history books 100 years from now, Apple will surely still be covered for their impact on tech. Don't kid yourself.
Why? What are the history books going to say? "There was once this company called Apple, and they sold some proprietary stuff for like 10 years, then the world moved on."
A legacy lays in the future, not the past. When we say that someone or something has left a "legacy", we don't mean they did something in the past, we mean that future generations live with and benefit from whatever they created.
Apple didn't really "advance" personal computing, and the iPad/iPhone/iPod are just slightly more refined versions of technologies that existed in the past and will continue to be refined into the future.
Compare, for example, the iPod with the Walkman. The Walkman was utterly revolutionary. For the first time, it was possible to have personal music, that could be picked up and carried on the person.
The iPod is basically an improved Walkman with some technical advantages such as better sound quality, more capacity and improved ease of use. And no rewind button. The iPod only appears to be a big deal because of a well-funded advertising campaign that leaves an impression on people stuck in the present.
The iPhone? Nothing revolutionary about it. It's a competitor to the Android, it's a link in the chain between smartphones/PalmOS and whatever the next generation of palm device proves to be. Again, it's a refinement of existing technologies, not a revolutionary, earthshaking idea.
The iPad has a better claim to being revolutionary in that it is the first tablet PC, and the first piece of proprietary computing technology, to achieve wide acceptance. Still, all it really is an underpowered and overpriced laptop that isn't capable of multitasking...and again...the phenomenon is largely driven by advertising, not innovation.
Whether the iPad has more staying power than the Apple II or iMac remains to be seen.
