APPLE MULTITOUCH PATENT ANDROID

In other words, what happened with mouse-based user interfaces could now happen in the arena of multitouch user interfaces.

APPLE MULTITOUCH PATENT ANDROID

This sense of entitlement is interdependent with many people's fear that history might repeat itself and just like 'Wintel' (Windows PCs with Intel CPUs) once marginalized the Mac to the extent that Microsoft had to give Apple a $150 million 'shot in the arm' (though Apple had an advanced graphical user interface before Microsoft did), Android devices might marginalize the iPhone and the iPad. I would agree on this one philosophically, but Apple never claimed any violations of trade secrets. A secondary consideration is that Google's then-CEO Eric Schmidt stayed on Apple's board of directors for way too long. There's a sense of entitlement in the Apple camp and it is centered around the notion that Apple, because it reinvented the smartphone (I agree) and built the first popular tablet in history (I agree, too), has exclusionary rights that give it serious leverage over Google and its hardware partners (on this one I disagree for non-philosophical reasons after watching Apple's lawsuits for several years). For more detail, I recommend the two posts I linked to further above, which these reflections here are just meant to complement. I did want to add a few general thoughts. And I can see that those who would like Apple to 'destroy' (as Steve Jobs put it) Android in court (for which Apple's own customers would also pay the price) increasingly realize that Apple does not appear to be, if the results of more than four years of litigation are any indication, a nuclear world power.

I sense that a growing number of Android fans understand that I am one of them (and an Android app developer as well), but that I separate my platform preferences from my intellectual property and antitrust analysis. My blog posts yesterday about the limitations of Apple's ability to lay exclusive claim to modern-day computing technologies - '10 European judges found Apple had not invented slide-to-unlock (star patent at Samsung trial)' and 'In 49 months of holy war, Apple has not proved that it owns any feature other than rubber-banding' - have already been read widely and they have sparked some debate.Īll in all, I'm very happy about the reactions I received (and 10% of moronic emails don't matter).

Apple multitouch patent