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The holier-than-thou attitude by Google here dumbfounds me. Android phones and tablets would not exist in remotely the shape they do today but for the innovatio
by ellyagg 16y ago
The holier-than-thou attitude by Google here dumbfounds me. Android phones and tablets would not exist in remotely the shape they do today but for the innovations of Apple. They organized with Apple's competitors to provide an offering extremely similar in spirit and often in form to what the iDevices do. There is zero chance Android adopts all the "conventions" it has without copying Apple. The world was not on a fast track to full phone, bright screen, touch capacitive displays and gestures and app markets before Apple pioneered them. iPhone was not the logical inevitable implication of the technology that had gone before. If Google thinks Bing is not playing fair, Google has 10x as much to answer for in real damages to Apple for thieving their innovation.
Some would say, "Well, Android has innovated on top of iPhone's precedents." So has Bing, right? In fact, I'd claim Android owes far more to Apple than Bing does to Google.
Some would say of Android copying iPhone, "Well, it's fair because we want competition in the mobile space, not for one company to dominate." Sort of like how Google dominates search? How much would I love for a true competitor to Google, so we can test, e.g., their policy of having terrible customer support.
- henryw 16y agoThe degree to which Microsoft is copying Google is to a much higher degree. Google did not do an exact "copy/paste" like Microsoft did here. At least Google did it from scratch.
- gscott 16y agoGoogle started with something, probably by scanning the Yahoo directory and starting from there. If they just pointed Googlebot to one site they would never get the whole web, they had to start from some source with a lot of sites that they could then branch out from.
- lazugod 16y agoAnd depending on the state of Yahoo's (or Lycos' or Altavista's) robots.txt at the time, that may be defendable.
- kemiller 16y agoThere's an "all's fair in love and war" point you have here that carries some water, but there's a difference between reimplementing ideas and literally reading the output of your competitor and using that in your algorithm.
- cookiecaper 16y agoAndroid existed back into 2003, well before iPhone was available or even announced: http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/aug2005/tc20050817_0949_tc024.htm http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/aug2005/tc200... Which is not to say that Apple hasn't contributed ideas to Android, but just an indication that some people were thinking about good mobile devices before Jobs came out with the iPhone (which, by the way, is a bright, colorful, phone-calling PDA, not all that different in principle from late Palm Pilots/Treos).
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- enjo 16y agoThat last part is key here. Almost everything that the iPhone does existed before the iPhone. You can find most of the UI concepts throughout the old Palm app eco-system. Apple did a great job of bringing it all together and (most importantly) bringing a consistent UI metaphor to it all. What Apple did was revolutionary, but they stood on a lot of shoulders to do it.
- Tiomaidh 16y agoThe relevant analogy to phones would be if the Windows Phone team took all of Android's source code--and somehow decompiled the proprietary bits--changed the branding, and distributed it as their product. There's a huge difference between doing work that is influenced by someone else and just stealing someone else's work.