Google is not all that secretive; they publish a lot of their most interesting research (you do have to be a subject matter expert to fill in the blanks, but th

Google is not all that secretive; they publish a lot of their most interesting research (you do have to be a subject matter expert to fill in the blanks, but they give you a lot to work with). Apple is very secretive, but they are more and more in the minority and I don't think this policy of theirs has anything to do with patents (more like controlling the entire product marketing and PR process as much as possible). The idea of the lone genius inventor is no longer true (if it ever was) and needs to go away. These days, these are often the people doing the worst science--the ones with some algorithm that no one else has thought of. Big technological shifts are the result of millions and millions of tiny little innovations, none of them in themselves worthy of monopoly guarantees. I think innovation would actually increase if the entire patent system simply did not exist (but I admit this is a very extreme stance and therefore would be more in favor of making patents easier to invalidate via a public peer review jury kind of thing. Patent office needs help and volunteer experts could lend a hand, particularly with the internet and better search tools to uncover overly broad patents and prior art automatically.) If you've got a great product and can't figure out how to make money off of it without patents, it's not a great product.