4 ms·

Yes, Google "Stole" From Apple, And That's A Good Thing

45 points by darklighter3 15y ago

freejack 15y ago
I haven't read the Steve bio yet, however my guess is that his issue lies with the fact that Schmidt was a board member and how that relationship panned out, rather than the specific technology that showed up in Android. If technology of mine showed up in one of my board member's companies, I'd be pretty upset about it as well - but primarily on the basis that the board member "stole" from me instead of upholding his fiduciary obligation to my organization. Its a tricky one, but I think that Steve might have been right in this case.
- TomOfTTB 15y ago
  It was more than that. Jobs issue was that Google flat out stole the entire interface. Not the look and feel but the entire thing down to resolution, icon placement, user interactions and app delivery. He did feel betrayed by Schmidt but he makes it clear he feels animosity towards the whole company (there's a depicted scene where he grudgingly agrees to advise Larry Page because he feels its his duty as an elder statesman)
- bitsweet 15y ago
  Schmidt is on record (http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/11934 http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/11934) that he would step out of board meetings when there were conflicts of interest.
  - wycats 15y ago
    It seems as though he didn't disclose those conflicts though.
  - technoslut 15y ago
    If rumors are true then Eric Schmidt had an iPhone prototype in 2007. http://gizmodo.com/5479684/google-ceos-mistress-tell+all-blog-prototype-iphones-and-steve-stoned-jesuit-jobs http://gizmodo.com/5479684/google-ceos-mistress-tell+all-blo... I don't think that Schmidt stepped out of board meetings until early demos of the G1 were shown off bearing a resemblance to the iPhone.
TomOfTTB 15y ago
I think there's an easy answer to this problem but it gets obscured by an "either/or" mentality. Either you support patents or you think it's ok for Google to outright steal the iPhone interface. Allow companies to patent innovations but legally force them to license it to others for a "fair price". That way companies can still build on top of each other's innovations but inventors still get financial compensation for their invention. I recognize there would be a problem in pricing the license but since these cases end up in court anyway (where a judge or jury determines the fair value) I don't see how allowing companies to resolve what "fair price" means would be any different than what we have now. Except it would take out the ambiguity for the consumer(since a company like Google would never have to pull the product from the market).
- jamesbritt 15y ago
  Either you support patents or you think it's ok for Google to outright steal the iPhone interface. What if you think they copied the Palm Pilot GUI? Music publishing has compulsory licensing, so there's some precedent about how it might work, but music copyrights are nearly as fucked as software patents. In neither case is the root problem addressed. We need more pirate, less navy.
  - runjake 15y ago
    > What if you think they copied the Palm Pilot GUI? Apple did copy it from the Treo-era PalmOS. A grid of fingertip-sized tappable app icons. And I'm OK with that, because it fosters progress, competition, and iterative improvements of existing technologies. I don't see the big issue with copying user interfaces. You'll either take the idea and improve on it, or make a mockery of it and your product will fail.
- uriel 15y ago
  > Allow companies to patent innovations but legally force them to license it to others for a "fair price". And who gets to define what is a "fair price"? The whole point of patents is that they are a monopoly, and they are inherently anti-competitive.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
dimitar 15y ago
Deja vu - Apple has pretensions that everyone (and especially its biggest rivals) are stealing from them, while simultaneously copying successful features from countless other products. The non-recognition of this fact of course is the biggest threat for Apple and non-recognition of pretensions of owning 'innovation' a threat. Because selling pretentiousness is the business model.
- TomOfTTB 15y ago
  This was different. Look at the original Android Prototype: http://techcrunch.com/2007/12/17/android-prototype-lets-hope-looks-can-be-deceiving/ http://techcrunch.com/2007/12/17/android-prototype-lets-hope... Google scrapped that and then turned around and copied the iPhone. And they copied everything about the iPhone. The resolution was the same. There were the same number of icons per row. Applications placed icons in the same place. You pinched to zoom on both devices. You switched between screens by swiping on both systems. Both systems had an app store (a previously unheard of way to deliver applications). This isn't Mac vs. Windows or Xerox vs. Mac. This was way above that in the theft department.
  - comm_it 15y ago
    I cannot tell if you're being facetious or not. App stores were not unheard of in the slightest.
    - dimitar 15y ago
      Its just effects of the reality distortion field. I'm also under its influence sometimes :-D
    - TomOfTTB 15y ago
      Can you name an Apple like app store before the iPhone? The closest you can come is Nokia and Symbian and that was a download an executable type thing. An app store as we understand it today where you click a buy button and the app installs on your computer was an Apple innovation
tmh88j 15y ago
The whole "imitate me and I'll sue" mentality is eventually going to stop innovation when we get to a point that you can't even use the same features regardless if they are accomplished in opposite ways. This reminds me of Ford's stance when Robert Kearns took them to court for his design of the intermittant windshield wiper (the story was made into a movie a while back).
protomyth 15y ago
I really wished Google or (more appropriately) Blackberry would have gone the opposite direction from Apple. Good keyboard support something more in the Raskin's Cat vein. It's nice to see Microsoft go with their Metro interface or the card metaphor of WebOS. Heck, just starting with a browser ala Chrome would have been better. The talk shouldn't be about patent violations, it should be about lack of vision. I too believe much of this has to do with Schmidt on the board and the radical change of Android from pre to post iPhone. It just seems we really lost something when they made their switch.
- masklinn 15y ago
  > It just seems we really lost something when they made their switch. I don't know about that. If they changed their "vision" from "replicate blackberry" to "replicate iPhone", we (where "we" = "society"/"everybody") didn't stand to gain anything in the first place, apart from cheaper phones maybe (and even that...)
  - protomyth 15y ago
    I was hoping more for a more refined follow on to the Danger, not a Blackberry clone. Guess you're right though, any replicant would have not expanded anything. There was really a shot at trying a lot of new ways to interact with mobile devices and very little made it to market in the quest to follow the other guy.
    - masklinn 15y ago
      > There was really a shot at trying a lot of new ways to interact with mobile devices and very little made it to market in the quest to follow the other guy. I'm glad Microsoft at least is going that way. Palm tried it as well (and as far as I'm concerned WebOS still has the nicest notification system) although they failed for other reasons.
- chugger 15y ago
  Google has a long history of thievery and/or patent infringement starting with Adwords (originally from ideaLab/Bill Gross).
Shenglong 15y ago
Alternate Title: The reason why 17 USC 102(b) exists. http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/102.html http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/102.html
steve8918 15y ago
Again, not to belabor a point but in a previous HN post, I noted that Microsoft Surface was likely an earlier prototype with multi-touch, as well as demos of a working "Pinch-to-zoom" back in 2006. I have no clue if and when iPhone already had this feature in a prototype, but Microsoft was definitely demoing this pre-iPhone. http://channel9.msdn.com/blogs/laurafoy/a-peek-inside-microsoft-research-reveals-tom-cruises-technology-today http://channel9.msdn.com/blogs/laurafoy/a-peek-inside-micros... So the funny thing about the article is that it states as fact that Google copied Apple's pinch-to-zoom (but that it was a good thing), when in fact the case could be made that Apple copied Microsoft's pinch-to-zoom (I'm not sure if they did or not).
- robin_reala 15y ago
  Apple bought FingerWorks along with their associated multitouch patents in 2005: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FingerWorks http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FingerWorks
- alok-g 15y ago
  See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-touch http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-touch Excerpts: A breakthrough occurred in 1991, when Pierre Wellner published a paper on his multi-touch “Digital Desk”, which supported multi-finger and pinching motions. ... however both the function and the term predate the announcement or patent requests, except for such area of application as capacitive mobile screens, which did not exist before Fingerworks/Apple's technology
  - tensor 15y ago
    It's even worse, the pinch gesture goes back to 1983. [1] [1] http://www.billbuxton.com/multitouchOverview.html http://www.billbuxton.com/multitouchOverview.html
- recoiledsnake 15y ago
  Click here to see pinch to zoom in action in 2006. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKh1Rv0PlOQ&feature=player_detailpage#t=174s http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKh1Rv0PlOQ&feature=playe...
folkster 15y ago
It's a sad fact that Google became more of a follower than innovator recently. I can't remember of a successful innovative product by Google in the past few years, but we all know Google deals after Groupon, Google plus after Facebook and Android after IOS.
- cbs 15y ago
  >It's a sad fact that Google became more of a follower than innovator recently. Haven't they always been a do x good company? Web search and email were around for years before google showed up.
  - eridius 15y ago
    Google disrupted the search market. Sure, the basic idea of searching the web wasn't new, but Google did it so much better than anyone else. Since then, they haven't done anything at all disruptive. They've just been copying other people's products and hoping their huge size will let them win.
    - kgen 15y ago
      Gmail was pretty disruptive, not to mention Chrome which reignited the browser wars in a way that Firefox never really did...
saturdaysaint 15y ago
I respect what Apple's done with the iPhone a lot more than I respect Google's contributions, but I don't see what Apple gains (beyond a little bit of marginal profit from slowing down Android adoption with lawsuits) from this holy war. In my mind, they've profited in exact proportion to how much they innovated in the phone market - Android just means that they'll have to keep innovating if they want to keep profiting. Ultimately, I think Job's emotional reaction is one common to forward thinking people. Andrew Masson has been similarly disgusted with Groupon clones. PG hasn't exactly been sanguine about the YCominator knockoffs. The copycat competitors contribute in many ways, but I think that great minds can only respect people who bring truly new ideas to the table, not those that find a niche or an edge in the marketplace after riding in their wake.
- alttag 15y ago
  Part of having a differentiated product is avoiding market confusion. While there is certainly some back-and-forth between Google and Apple, are there those here that don't think Samsung may have gone too far in mimicking so much about the iPhone/iPad experience? (From using Apple's icons in their sales displays to photoshopping iPhone screenshots for their phone, along with similar packaging and unboxing, ... the list goes on.) Yes, some sharing is good for consumers, but at some point the knockoffs need to be called on it. The whole discussion boils down to where that line is.
  - eridius 15y ago
    There was an article recently about how, in a courtroom, a judge held up an iPad and a Samsung tablet and asked the Samsung lawyers to identify which was their tablet, and they couldn't. I think that's a clear indication that Samsung hurtled over the line. (I'd provide a link but I'm on a flaky connection right now. It was on reddit, and probably on HN as well).
msg 15y ago
If you sit experts in separate rooms and give them the same problems, often they will converge to the same solution. Whether that is due to physical limitations, mathematical or statistical considerations, the current state of the market, what have you. There are a lot of narrow physical constraints operating in this market: the size of the human hand, the size of a fingertip, the range of human vision, the distance from the eye to the screen in terms of arm's length. There are other technology givens like the resolution of a screen that fits in the hand and the precision of touch technology. There are cultural givens to pull something apart to stretch it or push it together to make it smaller, or to advance a view by turning a page. The more you think about these problems, the more you realize how narrow the space for innovation was in them, and in fact how many of Apple's innovations were anticipated by the market. Apple got there first with the whole package and reaped the benefits in mindshare. But they shouldn't be able to seek rent on a solution that experts would create in a vacuum.
- chugger 15y ago
  that's like saying the Beatles are shit and anyone could've written all the songs in Sgt. Pepper.
- Anechoic 15y ago
  >If you sit experts in separate rooms and give them the same problems, often they will converge to the same solution. As a universal truth, I don't buy this. This is partially based on my own engineering experience, but in terms of the smartphone market I see WP7 (and to a lesser extent Palm) and see touch phone experiences that are significantly different than what Apple developed/evolved with iOS (although it is true that some of the implementation details like pinch-to-zoom are present there as well, but other details are different). There is no universal axiom that says that a smartphone experience has to look like an iPhone. I think everyone would be better off if Google took more of an independent route rather than just building an experience using bits and pieces of iOS and WP7.
  - msg 15y ago
    I'm an engineer as well. I would say that in interfaces especially, we converge toward best practices globally. Your customer is not happy to have to learn a hundred interfaces or switch interfaces when they get a new device or program. For instance, the VCR. Or Windows version bumps. Or the Ribbon. They prefer one interface to rule them all, like Logitech Harmony remotes, the browser, the command line, Emacs. The current market provides some evidence. http://searchengineland.com/comscore-android-nears-50-us-smartphone-market-share-95768 http://searchengineland.com/comscore-android-nears-50-us-sma... 70% of the smartphone market is in iOS and Android, two very similar smartphone experiences. RIM's distinctive experience is at 20% and falling fast (it was at 27% in March). WP7 is an also ran at 5%. Symbian is at 2%. Palm is not in the chart. If you believe those numbers, the contest is all but over. Every non-iOS non-Android experience is failing in the market. It may not be just because of their designs, but I think you have to believe on other grounds that UX/design is the major selling point for all smartphones. The second contender might be applications, and iOS and Android are the leaders there too, by a wide margin over the field. I think Google decided to beat Apple at its own game. Whatever you believe about how they used Apple's patented material (or not) or how valid the patents are (or not), clearly at some point a decision was made to compete with Apple not just on features, but also in UI polish and look and feel. And somebody probably looked at Apple and said, how can we top that? When they couldn't, they kept it as similar as possible for a variety of reasons: the patents were too broad to be enforceable, they could justify deriving the same concepts in a vacuum because they come from well known UX principles that predate the patents, the design elements were universals that all phones should have, they should lower switching costs from iOS to Android. I agree with you that Google could have gone its own way when designing a phone experience. But I don't know that that would have been a path to success. You would only have to believe the preceding paragraph to imagine that a think-different UX could have been worse for consumers.

45 points by darklighter3 15y ago

I haven't read the Steve bio yet, however my guess is that his issue lies with the fact that Schmidt was a board member and how that relationship panned out, rather than the specific technology that showed up in Android. If technology of mine showed up in one of my board member's companies, I'd be pretty upset about it as well - but primarily on the basis that the board member "stole" from me instead of upholding his fiduciary obligation to my organization. Its a tricky one, but I think that Steve might have been right in this case.

TomOfTTB 15y ago
It was more than that. Jobs issue was that Google flat out stole the entire interface. Not the look and feel but the entire thing down to resolution, icon placement, user interactions and app delivery. He did feel betrayed by Schmidt but he makes it clear he feels animosity towards the whole company (there's a depicted scene where he grudgingly agrees to advise Larry Page because he feels its his duty as an elder statesman)
bitsweet 15y ago
Schmidt is on record (http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/11934 http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/11934) that he would step out of board meetings when there were conflicts of interest.
- wycats 15y ago
  It seems as though he didn't disclose those conflicts though.
- technoslut 15y ago
  If rumors are true then Eric Schmidt had an iPhone prototype in 2007. http://gizmodo.com/5479684/google-ceos-mistress-tell+all-blog-prototype-iphones-and-steve-stoned-jesuit-jobs http://gizmodo.com/5479684/google-ceos-mistress-tell+all-blo... I don't think that Schmidt stepped out of board meetings until early demos of the G1 were shown off bearing a resemblance to the iPhone.

TomOfTTB 15y ago

I think there's an easy answer to this problem but it gets obscured by an "either/or" mentality. Either you support patents or you think it's ok for Google to outright steal the iPhone interface. Allow companies to patent innovations but legally force them to license it to others for a "fair price". That way companies can still build on top of each other's innovations but inventors still get financial compensation for their invention. I recognize there would be a problem in pricing the license but since these cases end up in court anyway (where a judge or jury determines the fair value) I don't see how allowing companies to resolve what "fair price" means would be any different than what we have now. Except it would take out the ambiguity for the consumer(since a company like Google would never have to pull the product from the market).

jamesbritt 15y ago
Either you support patents or you think it's ok for Google to outright steal the iPhone interface. What if you think they copied the Palm Pilot GUI? Music publishing has compulsory licensing, so there's some precedent about how it might work, but music copyrights are nearly as fucked as software patents. In neither case is the root problem addressed. We need more pirate, less navy.
- runjake 15y ago
  > What if you think they copied the Palm Pilot GUI? Apple did copy it from the Treo-era PalmOS. A grid of fingertip-sized tappable app icons. And I'm OK with that, because it fosters progress, competition, and iterative improvements of existing technologies. I don't see the big issue with copying user interfaces. You'll either take the idea and improve on it, or make a mockery of it and your product will fail.
uriel 15y ago
> Allow companies to patent innovations but legally force them to license it to others for a "fair price". And who gets to define what is a "fair price"? The whole point of patents is that they are a monopoly, and they are inherently anti-competitive.

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

dimitar 15y ago

Deja vu - Apple has pretensions that everyone (and especially its biggest rivals) are stealing from them, while simultaneously copying successful features from countless other products. The non-recognition of this fact of course is the biggest threat for Apple and non-recognition of pretensions of owning 'innovation' a threat. Because selling pretentiousness is the business model.

TomOfTTB 15y ago
This was different. Look at the original Android Prototype: http://techcrunch.com/2007/12/17/android-prototype-lets-hope-looks-can-be-deceiving/ http://techcrunch.com/2007/12/17/android-prototype-lets-hope... Google scrapped that and then turned around and copied the iPhone. And they copied everything about the iPhone. The resolution was the same. There were the same number of icons per row. Applications placed icons in the same place. You pinched to zoom on both devices. You switched between screens by swiping on both systems. Both systems had an app store (a previously unheard of way to deliver applications). This isn't Mac vs. Windows or Xerox vs. Mac. This was way above that in the theft department.
- comm_it 15y ago
  I cannot tell if you're being facetious or not. App stores were not unheard of in the slightest.
  - dimitar 15y ago
    Its just effects of the reality distortion field. I'm also under its influence sometimes :-D
  - TomOfTTB 15y ago
    Can you name an Apple like app store before the iPhone? The closest you can come is Nokia and Symbian and that was a download an executable type thing. An app store as we understand it today where you click a buy button and the app installs on your computer was an Apple innovation

tmh88j 15y ago

The whole "imitate me and I'll sue" mentality is eventually going to stop innovation when we get to a point that you can't even use the same features regardless if they are accomplished in opposite ways. This reminds me of Ford's stance when Robert Kearns took them to court for his design of the intermittant windshield wiper (the story was made into a movie a while back).

protomyth 15y ago

I really wished Google or (more appropriately) Blackberry would have gone the opposite direction from Apple. Good keyboard support something more in the Raskin's Cat vein. It's nice to see Microsoft go with their Metro interface or the card metaphor of WebOS. Heck, just starting with a browser ala Chrome would have been better. The talk shouldn't be about patent violations, it should be about lack of vision. I too believe much of this has to do with Schmidt on the board and the radical change of Android from pre to post iPhone. It just seems we really lost something when they made their switch.

masklinn 15y ago
> It just seems we really lost something when they made their switch. I don't know about that. If they changed their "vision" from "replicate blackberry" to "replicate iPhone", we (where "we" = "society"/"everybody") didn't stand to gain anything in the first place, apart from cheaper phones maybe (and even that...)
- protomyth 15y ago
  I was hoping more for a more refined follow on to the Danger, not a Blackberry clone. Guess you're right though, any replicant would have not expanded anything. There was really a shot at trying a lot of new ways to interact with mobile devices and very little made it to market in the quest to follow the other guy.
  - masklinn 15y ago
    > There was really a shot at trying a lot of new ways to interact with mobile devices and very little made it to market in the quest to follow the other guy. I'm glad Microsoft at least is going that way. Palm tried it as well (and as far as I'm concerned WebOS still has the nicest notification system) although they failed for other reasons.
chugger 15y ago
Google has a long history of thievery and/or patent infringement starting with Adwords (originally from ideaLab/Bill Gross).

Shenglong 15y ago

Alternate Title: The reason why 17 USC 102(b) exists. http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/102.html http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/102.html

steve8918 15y ago

Again, not to belabor a point but in a previous HN post, I noted that Microsoft Surface was likely an earlier prototype with multi-touch, as well as demos of a working "Pinch-to-zoom" back in 2006. I have no clue if and when iPhone already had this feature in a prototype, but Microsoft was definitely demoing this pre-iPhone. http://channel9.msdn.com/blogs/laurafoy/a-peek-inside-microsoft-research-reveals-tom-cruises-technology-today http://channel9.msdn.com/blogs/laurafoy/a-peek-inside-micros... So the funny thing about the article is that it states as fact that Google copied Apple's pinch-to-zoom (but that it was a good thing), when in fact the case could be made that Apple copied Microsoft's pinch-to-zoom (I'm not sure if they did or not).

robin_reala 15y ago
Apple bought FingerWorks along with their associated multitouch patents in 2005: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FingerWorks http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FingerWorks
alok-g 15y ago
See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-touch http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-touch Excerpts: A breakthrough occurred in 1991, when Pierre Wellner published a paper on his multi-touch “Digital Desk”, which supported multi-finger and pinching motions. ... however both the function and the term predate the announcement or patent requests, except for such area of application as capacitive mobile screens, which did not exist before Fingerworks/Apple's technology
- tensor 15y ago
  It's even worse, the pinch gesture goes back to 1983. [1] [1] http://www.billbuxton.com/multitouchOverview.html http://www.billbuxton.com/multitouchOverview.html
recoiledsnake 15y ago
Click here to see pinch to zoom in action in 2006. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKh1Rv0PlOQ&feature=player_detailpage#t=174s http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKh1Rv0PlOQ&feature=playe...

folkster 15y ago

It's a sad fact that Google became more of a follower than innovator recently. I can't remember of a successful innovative product by Google in the past few years, but we all know Google deals after Groupon, Google plus after Facebook and Android after IOS.

cbs 15y ago
>It's a sad fact that Google became more of a follower than innovator recently. Haven't they always been a do x good company? Web search and email were around for years before google showed up.
- eridius 15y ago
  Google disrupted the search market. Sure, the basic idea of searching the web wasn't new, but Google did it so much better than anyone else. Since then, they haven't done anything at all disruptive. They've just been copying other people's products and hoping their huge size will let them win.
  - kgen 15y ago
    Gmail was pretty disruptive, not to mention Chrome which reignited the browser wars in a way that Firefox never really did...

saturdaysaint 15y ago

I respect what Apple's done with the iPhone a lot more than I respect Google's contributions, but I don't see what Apple gains (beyond a little bit of marginal profit from slowing down Android adoption with lawsuits) from this holy war. In my mind, they've profited in exact proportion to how much they innovated in the phone market - Android just means that they'll have to keep innovating if they want to keep profiting. Ultimately, I think Job's emotional reaction is one common to forward thinking people. Andrew Masson has been similarly disgusted with Groupon clones. PG hasn't exactly been sanguine about the YCominator knockoffs. The copycat competitors contribute in many ways, but I think that great minds can only respect people who bring truly new ideas to the table, not those that find a niche or an edge in the marketplace after riding in their wake.

alttag 15y ago
Part of having a differentiated product is avoiding market confusion. While there is certainly some back-and-forth between Google and Apple, are there those here that don't think Samsung may have gone too far in mimicking so much about the iPhone/iPad experience? (From using Apple's icons in their sales displays to photoshopping iPhone screenshots for their phone, along with similar packaging and unboxing, ... the list goes on.) Yes, some sharing is good for consumers, but at some point the knockoffs need to be called on it. The whole discussion boils down to where that line is.
- eridius 15y ago
  There was an article recently about how, in a courtroom, a judge held up an iPad and a Samsung tablet and asked the Samsung lawyers to identify which was their tablet, and they couldn't. I think that's a clear indication that Samsung hurtled over the line. (I'd provide a link but I'm on a flaky connection right now. It was on reddit, and probably on HN as well).

msg 15y ago

If you sit experts in separate rooms and give them the same problems, often they will converge to the same solution. Whether that is due to physical limitations, mathematical or statistical considerations, the current state of the market, what have you. There are a lot of narrow physical constraints operating in this market: the size of the human hand, the size of a fingertip, the range of human vision, the distance from the eye to the screen in terms of arm's length. There are other technology givens like the resolution of a screen that fits in the hand and the precision of touch technology. There are cultural givens to pull something apart to stretch it or push it together to make it smaller, or to advance a view by turning a page. The more you think about these problems, the more you realize how narrow the space for innovation was in them, and in fact how many of Apple's innovations were anticipated by the market. Apple got there first with the whole package and reaped the benefits in mindshare. But they shouldn't be able to seek rent on a solution that experts would create in a vacuum.

chugger 15y ago
that's like saying the Beatles are shit and anyone could've written all the songs in Sgt. Pepper.
Anechoic 15y ago
>If you sit experts in separate rooms and give them the same problems, often they will converge to the same solution. As a universal truth, I don't buy this. This is partially based on my own engineering experience, but in terms of the smartphone market I see WP7 (and to a lesser extent Palm) and see touch phone experiences that are significantly different than what Apple developed/evolved with iOS (although it is true that some of the implementation details like pinch-to-zoom are present there as well, but other details are different). There is no universal axiom that says that a smartphone experience has to look like an iPhone. I think everyone would be better off if Google took more of an independent route rather than just building an experience using bits and pieces of iOS and WP7.
- msg 15y ago
  I'm an engineer as well. I would say that in interfaces especially, we converge toward best practices globally. Your customer is not happy to have to learn a hundred interfaces or switch interfaces when they get a new device or program. For instance, the VCR. Or Windows version bumps. Or the Ribbon. They prefer one interface to rule them all, like Logitech Harmony remotes, the browser, the command line, Emacs. The current market provides some evidence. http://searchengineland.com/comscore-android-nears-50-us-smartphone-market-share-95768 http://searchengineland.com/comscore-android-nears-50-us-sma... 70% of the smartphone market is in iOS and Android, two very similar smartphone experiences. RIM's distinctive experience is at 20% and falling fast (it was at 27% in March). WP7 is an also ran at 5%. Symbian is at 2%. Palm is not in the chart. If you believe those numbers, the contest is all but over. Every non-iOS non-Android experience is failing in the market. It may not be just because of their designs, but I think you have to believe on other grounds that UX/design is the major selling point for all smartphones. The second contender might be applications, and iOS and Android are the leaders there too, by a wide margin over the field. I think Google decided to beat Apple at its own game. Whatever you believe about how they used Apple's patented material (or not) or how valid the patents are (or not), clearly at some point a decision was made to compete with Apple not just on features, but also in UI polish and look and feel. And somebody probably looked at Apple and said, how can we top that? When they couldn't, they kept it as similar as possible for a variety of reasons: the patents were too broad to be enforceable, they could justify deriving the same concepts in a vacuum because they come from well known UX principles that predate the patents, the design elements were universals that all phones should have, they should lower switching costs from iOS to Android. I agree with you that Google could have gone its own way when designing a phone experience. But I don't know that that would have been a path to success. You would only have to believe the preceding paragraph to imagine that a think-different UX could have been worse for consumers.