Mac developer Wil Shipley is none too pleased with Apple’s lawsuit against HTC:
Can you name a company you admire that spends its time enforcing patents, instead of innovating? Remember the pirate flag you flew over Apple’s headquarters when you were building the Mac? Is Apple part of the Navy now?
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I always thought of you [Apple] as a guy who’d say, “Well, copy me if you can, because you’re copying what I did years ago, and what I’m working on now is EVEN cooler!” I like it when competitors copy me because it means they aren’t about to leapfrog me: they’ll always be playing catch-up.
Jobs himself has said that Apple in the late 80’s and early 90’s was so preoccupied with Microsoft stealing their stuff (and the accompanying litigation) that they lost track of what was driving them in the first place. It’s still unclear why Apple suddenly decided to go after HTC, but hopefully we won’t see history repeat itself.
March 3rd, 2010 at 12:22 pm
Apple warned when the iPhone was first announced that they would proactively defend their patents. They should actively defend and sue infringers.
March 3rd, 2010 at 12:56 pm
If Apple spent all of it time innovating and didn’t spend anytime enforcing the patents that protect that innovation, it would lose the values of the billions of dollars that it spent creating those innovations, as other used them for free, and it would soon fail as business, so there would be any more innovations from Apple.