Ex-Sun Chief Dishes Dirt On Gates, Jobs 241
alphadogg writes "Former CEO of Sun Microsystems Jonathan Schwartz has taken to his personal blog, provocatively titled 'What I couldn't say ...,' to dish some industry dirt and tell his side of the story about the demise of Sun. He has already hinted at plans to write a book, and a new post suggests a tell-all tome could indeed be in the offing. 'I feel for Google — Steve Jobs threatened to sue me, too,' Schwartz writes, apparently referring to Apple's patent lawsuit against HTC, which makes Google's Nexus One smartphone. As for Bill Gates, Schwartz says he was threatening regarding Sun's efforts in the office software space."
I wonder (Score:5, Funny)
If his blog is running on a Sun box.
Re:I wonder (Score:5, Interesting)
Ironic, if perhaps appropriate, that the technology behind is current blog is (among other reasons) the reason that his current occupation is "blogger"...
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Re:I wonder (Score:5, Interesting)
Apparently not: http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph?site=jonathanischwartz.wordpress.com [netcraft.com]
Re:I wonder (Score:4, Funny)
Wait... you mean netcraft does not confirm it?
Re:I wonder (Score:5, Funny)
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http://code.sixapart.com/trac/TheSchwartz [sixapart.com]
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Good stuff (Score:4, Funny)
Hopefully it'll be good stuff, like him only tipping 6% or never washing his hands when he took a whizz (because it comes out the end, not the sides). Hopefully they'll include the time he slapped Steve Ballmer upside the head for not siding with him over Vista's design.
But unfortunately it'll probably just be some boring anti-trust nonsense.
Book about Microsoft (Score:5, Interesting)
The book was written by Jennifer Edstrom, the daughter of Pam Edstrom, manager of Microsoft's P.R. agency, Waggener Edstrom, and a former Microsoft manager. The Amazon.com review says the book "... presents a harsher and messier history, sharply questioning Microsoft's ethics and corporate wisdom..."
The book seems authoritative; the authors certainly had inside access to the facts. It's certainly unusual that the daughter of one of the heads of Microsoft's P.R. agency would write a book discussing Microsoft's abusiveness in detail.
Re:Book about Microsoft (Score:4, Insightful)
The Amazon.com review says the book "... presents a harsher and messier history, sharply questioning Microsoft's ethics and corporate wisdom..."
From the same Amazon review:
"Both stand open to the charge of having an ax to grind, and the reader senses a lot of personal animosity at work."
The book seems authoritative; the authors certainly had inside access to the facts.
Emphasis on "seems." The Amazon reviewer you quoted further mentions that some of the information was already available, and that "... most of the new information presented has the ring, at least, of probability."
Not a strong endorsement of this book as "the reality of Microsoft." Probably an interesting and amusing read, but one that needs to be taken with a grain of salt.
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Well, if the TFA is any preview, there isn't going to be anything in there that's going to be much of a surprise.
In other words, it'll be the same Schwartz we came to know and love at Sun - all hat and no cattle.
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I don't think there's going to be any good stuff...
From TFA,
Jobs: If we moved forward to commercialize it, "I'll just sue you."
Schwartz: And that was the last I heard on the topic. Although we ended up abandoning Looking Glass
As in life, bluster and threat are commonplace in business
It seems unfair to call it "bluster and threat" when the reason that Jobs didn't go through with his promised action was that there was no need to...
This reads like a lot of bull to me.
Re:Good stuff (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Good stuff (Score:4, Insightful)
Or! We could require that people in service industries be paid a reasonable, livable wage, and not be forced to rely on the vagaries of my poor math skills.
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or never washing his hands when he took a whizz
An Irishman and an Englishman are walking out of a public rest room. The Englishman says "Sir, in England we wash our hands after we urinate."
The Irishman says "Yeah? Well in Ireland we don't piss on our fingers!"
Personally, I won't put my dick anywhere I won't put my tongue, I can't say the same about my hands. My dick's far cleaner than my hands at any given time. I'll wash my hands BEFORE I piss. Let me guess -- your mother (or some other female) taught you
Valuable Java Patents (Score:5, Funny)
I wonder which Java patents Schwartz was referring to, Checked Exceptions or Type Erasure?
Re:Valuable Java Patents (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm sure most of the patents are in the virutal machine technology like HotSpot and various APIs that are used on the Java platform (like how he mentions Kodak suing over RMI in the article).
Java has checked and unchecked exceptions (Exception vs RuntimeException), so the developer gets to choose how strict to be with parts of their API. Type Erasure can be annoying but it's fairly clever for maintaining backwards compatibility and the end results are much faster than "true generics" found in other platforms.
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Unfortunately, the developer doesn't get to choose which parts of Java API uses checked or unchecked exceptions.
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Coder Protip: If you're using an API you don't like, use a different one.
And with Java you're lucky, because the development community is so massive, there's at least a couple of implementations.
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Apparently the "Pros" like to lock themselves into non-standard libraries that may disappear.
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I just assumed it was the patent about compiling everything into fake instructions for a slow virtual machine.
The only thing that's changed since the early 90s is the "slow" part.
Re:Valuable Java Patents (Score:4, Informative)
Java and the JVM's advantages aren't really over C but over statically compiled OO languages like C++.
When you write an app in C++ and use a lot of OO techniques, it causes your application to perform all kinds of lookups and lots of indirection at runtime while resolving virtual calls, etc. Because it's compiled statically, you're always going to pay a huge cost if your application is complex and there's no way to fix it because the application's memory image is... static.
However with Java and other similar technologies like .NET, which can alter and optimize the application at runtime, these types of OO-based indirections can be nearly eliminated if they're part of a bottleneck. The virtual machine can literally devirtualize virtual functions on the fly.
Since C is a much simpler language (good for systems development), these indirections don't exist and a well written C app will probably always be faster than it's Java (or C++) equivalent. It will just be harder to maintain as it grows more complex.
Sun's handling of Java: Reason for Sun's failure? (Score:2)
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Right, they totally failed.
That's why Java went into a tail spin and became the most widely used language in the world: http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html [tiobe.com]
Damn management failures, making the product so successful!
What are your reasons? (Score:2)
Anyway, it is a fact that Sun has been a relative failure. The issue doesn't go away if you don't like my opinion. What are your ideas about Sun's failure?
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You JVM advocates always throw out that "faster than C" line. I know, I know, you can prove it, too, using one of your many highly-controlled microbenchmarks that have absolutely no relevance in the real world.
I don't think anyone truly knowledgeable about the subject is going to argue that. Java wasn't designed to be a better C, it was designed to be a better C++. And in many ways it truly is, see my post above.
I know, I know, bytecode and JIT compilation allows for CPU-specific optimizations to be done. That's great, except that even the best JVMs today don't do that.
Actually, today *any* semi decent virtual machine will be peforming these optimizations. That's why you see all the benchmarks showing Sun's HotSpot jvm performing so competitively with statically compiled code, even outperforming it in various situations. The cool thing about virtual machines isn't that
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You mean FORTH?
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Correction:
You FORTH mean?
That about sorry.
Sun had 20 years, and still lost the OS battle.... (Score:2, Insightful)
...which means that any dirt dished will seem like sour grapes, and be ignored - so I guess at least he'll be consistent
Re:Sun had 20 years, and still lost the OS battle. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Sun had 20 years, and still lost the OS battle. (Score:4, Insightful)
It is to Bill Gates. And that makes it a battle for everyone.
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http://www.centos.org/ [centos.org]
"Red Hat has milked the support model about as far as it can go."
Which explains, of course, their continuous growth over the past 7 years, their profitable spread into the middleware market with JBoss, and their acquisition of dozens of smaller open source companies. Yes, the model is really starting to show cracks.
"This is why, if they wished, IBM or Apple could buy Red Hat with sp
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Actually, Red Hat's user base is growing, at least in terms of customers and support contracts.
"So I guess firewalls, spam, etc. which combined would destroy Win95 would do so simply because 95 was rubbish to begin with?"
Yes, that is exactly correct. Windows 95 was an improvement over 3.1, but that is not saying much and it certainly does not mean that it is "good software." On the other hand, there are places still running programs written 20 years ago, which have only
I appreciate the insight from Schwartz but ... (Score:5, Interesting)
It's interesting what Schwartz has to say about how things work "on the inside". Companies bluffing and calling each other's bluff. Showing up and going "I'm watching you". His description makes it sound a bit like Jobs & Gates hadn't really thought their cunning plan all the way through, which I would think is unlikely. I'd have guessed they were just testing Sun's resolve, finding out how Sun evaluated their own patent portfolio, investigating whether these projects (Looking Glass and OpenOffice) were just a tech demo or were something that Sun wanted to stand by and protect. What his blog post didn't mention was on how many occasions Sun did the same thing to another company, big or small. It would be laudable if they refused to do that but it would also mean they were deliberately pulling their punches, so it would be a bit surprising from a large corporation.
NetApp sued sun over patents ZFS arguably violated: http://www.sun.com/lawsuit/zfs/ [sun.com]. But NetApp alleged that Sun had first demanded patent royalties from NetApp and that they were acting in response to that: http://blogs.netapp.com/dave/2007/09/sun-patent-team.html [netapp.com]
Who knows where the truth lies over the ZFS case but it does open the prospect that Sun wasn't sitting passively by and getting threatened by other companies. On the other hand, there could be more to this story than meets the eye (e.g. the kind of high level meetings Schwartz refers to, preceeding the legal letters) in which case it might not be anything like so simple. We've not generally seen Sun visibly holding back (or trying to) the marketplace using patents as much as, say, MS or Apple might have done. But it doesn't mean that given their investment in patents they didn't try to use them.
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I'd like to clarify that when I said "
NetApp sued sun over patents ZFS arguably violated
" what I meant was "argued by NetApp". I've not looked through the patents so I haven't got a position on whether ZFS violates them, or whether they're sane, or whether they're invalidated by prior art. I understand that NetApp's copy-on-write WAFL filesystem does predate ZFS, so it wouldn't be entirely surprising if NetApp did hold related patents.
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> what I meant was "argued by NetApp".
Are you looking for the word "allegedly"?
Grow Up@ (Score:4, Interesting)
"Steve, I was just watching your last presentation, and Keynote looks identical to Concurrence – do you own that IP?" Concurrence was a presentation product built by Lighthouse Design, a company I'd help to found and which Sun acquired in 1996. Lighthouse built applications for NeXTSTEP, the Unix based operating system whose core would become the foundation for all Mac products after Apple acquired NeXT in 1996. Steve had used Concurrence for years, and as Apple built their own presentation tool, it was obvious where they'd found inspiration. "And last I checked, MacOS is now built on Unix. I think Sun has a few OS patents, too." Steve was silent.
I personally think it all of this suing is petty and dumb. This reminds me of when I was about 10 and when my little cousin would always say "I'll sue you" whenever he didn't get his way. Personally I think all these CEO's need to grow up and realize all they are doing is hampering technology and the advancement of the human race.
Apple is famous for that sort of thing (Score:5, Insightful)
Apple once sued Microsoft on the theory that Windows infringed on the "look and feel" of Mac OS, so it's not at all surprising they would threaten to do the same to Sun over the look and feel of Looking Glass. It's just Apple being Apple, and Jobs being a dick, as usual.
Apple's litigious nature is one of the reasons I tend to avoid Apple products (I do have an iPod, but that's all).
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Apple once sued Microsoft on the theory that Windows infringed on the "look and feel" of Mac OS, so it's not at all surprising they would threaten to do the same to Sun over the look and feel of Looking Glass. It's just Apple being Apple, and Jobs being a dick, as usual.
Apple may be litigious, but your example isn't very apt. Many things involving "look and feel" including trademarks and logos are protected. As far as I know, there was no precedent concerning the protection of graphical user interfaces to any significant extent, so it made good sense for Apple to try it. You've obviously got strong opinions of Apple and Steve Jobs, so I can see how you might have missed this. Forming suspicion and opinions can sometimes lead to pushing objectivity out the door.
Re:Apple is famous for that sort of thing (Score:4, Funny)
Apple's litigious nature is one of the reasons I tend to avoid Apple products (I do have an iPod, but that's all).
Good man! I've been boycotting Apple for years too. I only have an iPod, an iPhone, a MacBook Pro, and a Mac Mini (but that's all).
Obviously just the start of the story (Score:2, Interesting)
Glad to hear that he sees this as the major post-leaving issue to raise. I think that's pretty significant in itself.
Hopefully this brief blog entry is just a teaser. It really is hard to draw a clear line between trolls [swpat.org], inter-company attacks [swpat.org], tax seekers [swpat.org].
Oh this should get good (Score:2)
MS apologists and Apple fanboys teaming up together... now if only he said something nasty about linux, the rage would be complete.
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Re:Gates and Jobs.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually Sun already was on the ground when Schwarz took over....
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>Why should anyone care what he has to say about people who did what he couldn't?
Because people need to see how horribly broken the patent system is and he has an insider's view of how they are actually used (protecting big business and pushing out small competitors) compared to how people tend to think they are used (protecting the small competitor).
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Why should anyone care what he has to say about people who did what he couldn't?
... because success in business is the be-all and end-all of human value?
For one thing, success in business has a lot to do with luck and the situation you're dropped into. It's well known that Gates lucked into a deal with IBM, without which Microsoft would not be in the position it's in now. Granted, he made some savvy decisions along the way, but Microsoft's success isn't all his doing.
But besides all that, even if we assume that Jobs and Gates are the most brilliant minds in business today, that doe
Re:Gates and Jobs.. (Score:5, Insightful)
They sued MS for infringing on Java, won $20 million and then sued again which ended with a settlement out of court for $2 billion.
Are you referring to the famous suit where Sun sued Microsoft for violating the very clear licensing terms for Java because they created a similar-but-not-quite-compatible implementation of Java, thus diluting the Java brand and threatening to fracture the market?
If so, how on earth is that even *remotely* similar to patent trolling?
Re:Gates and Jobs.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Sun sued Microsoft for breach of contract. Microsoft distributed a version of Java that was not compatible with Sun's in violation of an agreement between the two companies.
It's not even close to the same as a patent lawsuit. Companies should be forced to keep contracts that they agree to.
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Hmmmmm. It appears I was 26 minutes late to the party. Good on ya, Abcd1234.
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Uh, I meant 23 minutes. Damn my (lack of) math skills.
Litigation is simply just another P&L, come on (Score:2)
Having worked at numerous high tech companies and been on both sides of the litigation fence you come to realize, it is simply part of your business. Plain and simple. There are some rules like:
1) Never sue someone who doesn't have money unless they are a blatant rip off stealing your business.
2) You wait until they are making money. Then you walk in with your 3 foot stack of patents and say "We believe you are infringing all of these patents, pay up and cross license or we will file suit on each and eve
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No, I don't "..obviously do" I never said it was either decent nor acceptable but it is how business is done. To not recognize the fact is to be incredibly stupid.
I don't behave that way nor condone it but I also realized quite early on that not being in a position of power to stop it I may as well stand on the beach and ask the tide to not come in. You want to go fight windmills, knock yourself out.
Always Park Here (Score:2)
Am I stupid or is the sign in the article telling people to always park in front of the entrance?
It essentially says to never never never never park there and isn't a quadruple negative a positive? Furthermore if you never never do something then you always do it so it seems he permanently wants somebody blocking his door.
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Yeah right.
Just like a double positive is always positive.
Oracle is irritating (Score:3, Informative)
Does anyone else find the Oracle branding all over the Sun pages disturbing? They are also cancelling the Sun training programs, saying that you will have to sign up for Oracle Academy - at many times the price. In a nutshell, Oracle is acting as though Sun will be entirely dismantled, and cease to exist as an entity.
It may be time to move away from Java...
Re:Oracle is irritating (Score:4, Informative)
Steve invented music player, graphical computer (Score:3, Funny)
I'd buy his book. (Score:2)
I like the guy. I also liked Sun.
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Considering what happened to Sun under his tenure, aren't those two mutually exclusive?
Great Artists Copy (Score:2)
Regarding Apple's lawsuit, I saw a clip of another interesting CEO and his take on stealing Apple's patented inventions.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CW0DUg63lqU [youtube.com]
Re:So he was the CEO of a huge multinational compa (Score:4, Insightful)
A CEO of a company cannot go about leaking any information that could damage the company unless he ok with all the shareholders suing him.
And a CEO does not necessarily own the company he runs, meaning he can(and would) be replaced.
Re:So he was the CEO of a huge multinational compa (Score:4, Insightful)
These threats, and counter threats, happen all the time. He says so himself in the article, which is why they needed a good base of patents.
Not exactly damaging to the company.
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Isn't that also why no one is held accountable for a company's actions?
We should probably get around to changing that one of these days. -SOMEONE- has to be in charge in order to take the responsibility.
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A CEO does not leak information, they is the Chief Executive Officer, what they say goes until the board or shareholders, vote out the CEO decisions. What ever the CEO say as the CEO is a public announcement not a leak.
To ensure clarity any and all employees are honour bound to release any and all information that would be of public interest, with regard to fair and honest business practices as well as details affecting health and safety of staff and the public.
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My comment was a reply to a comment asking why he could not reveal this information back when he was still a CEO.
I was only trying to say that CEO's are not able to do whatever they want (even if they do have a huge amount of authority in the company).
Don't shit where you eat (Score:5, Insightful)
CEOs especially have to be careful. They don't want to piss off their biggest customers. Nor do they want to say anything that might negatively affect their stock price. And that could be anything, especially whinging on about Gates or Jobs.
Shooting your mouth off about everyone in the business is not a good way to win friends and influence people.
Re:Don't shit where you eat (Score:4, Funny)
Has anyone told Darl McBride this?
Re:Don't shit where you eat (Score:5, Informative)
There is a reason that guys like Larry Ellison, Scott McNealy, Lou Gerstner, Philippe Kahn, and others were vocal but reserved regarding Microsoft's _business_ practices and methods. These were the few who had the balls to speak up and has the skills to stay on the side of the line which prevented them from getting thrown out for saying too much and looking too unprofessional. Hundreds and probably thousands of others just swallowed their pride and let Microsoft dictate what they could and could not do in their business. For instance, HP and Intel executives kept their mouths shut even though Microsoft was telling Intel to stay out of the software business and shut down their work on both Java and recently Linux. HP was threatened over and over and at one point a phone call the night before the largest computer show in the world was about to open resulted in HP instructing people to work overnight to remove HP computers from the showroom floor because Microsoft did not approve of the software they were running.
Schwartz may have not had the balls to speak up when he was running the show but he most likely has decided he does not want to keep quiet any longer regarding how these industry bullies tried to direct the products he and his former company produced. Good for him and I hope he lets em rip. We already know that court documents showing these things does not make for interesting news nor educate people of the ways some companies have slowed the tech sector over the last 20 years. Maybe a juicy book will make some waves and proves educational to those who remain clueless of what's really been going on behind the scenes.
LoB
Re:So he was the CEO of a huge multinational compa (Score:5, Interesting)
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(hey, I wonder why Disney and Pixar team up so often?)
You've got your order of execution backwards. Jobs didn't hold huge shares of Disney until after Disney bought into Pixar.
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Yes. Jobs bought Pixar from Lucasfilms
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Did he buy it from Lucasfilms? From what I remember from The Pixar Story (2007) (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1059955/). Lucasfilms employed Ed Catmull who created the Pixar technology. Lucas got what he needed from it and told him that he couldn't invest any more into the technology and that he was free to take it and continue his work. (really amazing he did that). Ed then had the fortune of meeting John Lasseter and they in turn had the fortune of proposing the technology and their ideas to Steve J
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Yes, Steve Jobs bought it from Lucasfilms in 1986. From here [yoz.com]:
Lasseter had been working for Lucasfilm for three years when company owner George Lucas decided to divest the computer division and concentrate solely on filmmaking. It was then that Jobs stepped in and bought the division to form Pixar. For the US$10 million (£6.3 million) sale price, Jobs got a core group of about 45 talented Lucasfilm people, including Lasseter's cadre of animators and technical virtuosos, as well as the rights to some of the Lucas technology.
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hey, I wonder why Disney and Pixar team up so often?
Because Disney owns Pixar?
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I repeat your comment which some bozo stupidly modded down.
"Disney bought Pixar in 2006 (which is also how Jobs ended up on the Disney board)."
Going for fanboy of the day are we? (Score:5, Insightful)
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custom chips? no the iphone uses standard stuff - top of the line, maye, but readily available.
candybar keyboard less design with only one big screen? nothing new there.
probably the only stuff truly patentable on the iphone is the jack connecting the headphones.
so yes apple is trolling, in any sense of the term.
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Re:Going for fanboy of the day are we? (Score:4, Insightful)
I would expect Apple to do what most companies do---use their patent portfolios defensively. Apple doesn't though, they use it as a weapon. There's nothing that says that Apple is obligated to enforce patents, doing so is within their rights but it doesn't make them ethical. What goes around comes around. Nothing I like more than seeing patent scumbags get what they have coming and that includes Apple.
Curiously, everything you described that "suggests" that Apple was being magnanimous could also be said of Microsoft. They are a large company with a substantial investment in IP and Bill Gates was most surely just giving Sun a heads up on their Office infringement, right?
Re:Threat or Warning (Score:5, Insightful)
"I love how people are eager to describe it as "Steve threatening to sue" when I see it as Steve showing an industry colleague the respect they deserve and picking up the phone himself to make a personal, direct call to provide advance warning and give the other company the chance to remedy the problem before the lawyers are unleashed."
Yes I always appreciated the bully saying "Give me your lunch money, nerd" before actually punching me in the face and then taking my lunch money. The robber who said "Hand over your wallet" is such a friend.
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It is far more likely that Apple knew they wouldn't win a lawsuit and hoped to scare a victory out of them instead. No one likes to be sued. It's bad for your reputation.
Re:Threat or Warning (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't think you understand how big an undertaking litigation is. Steve made that call because he hoped to prevent a competitor from releasing a product he was nervous about. Respect had absolutely nothing to do with it. Even if he thought he would win (and Steve is neither a lawyer nor a GUI developer so he has no special insight into whether he would), lawsuits are expensive.
Now, I know that flies in the face of the oh-so-cool "Apple is teh evil!" that is all the rage lately but, seriously, can we get some perspective. Steve himself made a call. He didn't pawn it off on an underling. He showed his industry colleague the respect they deserve by making the call himself. He gave advance warning. He let the other company decide whether to take their chances or change their plans. He gave them the power to determine their fate. Sounds pretty respectful to me.
I find it fascinating that you and people like you will not be swayed by three decades of firsthand accounts as to how Jobs treats people, not only competitors but employees and business partners. Why are you so desperate to paint Jobs as anything other than a narcissist? I can understand you love Apple, but why do you extend that love to the CEO too? Can't you really like a movie without also idolizing the president of the production company? My response was simple. "Steve, I was just watching your last presentation, and Keynote looks identical to Concurrence - do you own that IP?" Concurrence was a presentation product built by Lighthouse Design, a company I'd help to found and which Sun acquired in 1996. Lighthouse built applications for NeXTSTEP, the Unix based operating system whose core would become the foundation for all Mac products after Apple acquired NeXT in 1996. Steve had used Concurrence for years, and as Apple built their own presentation tool, it was obvious where they'd found inspiration. "And last I checked, MacOS is now built on Unix. I think Sun has a few OS patents, too." Steve was silent.
business is brutal (Score:3, Interesting)
How quaint. The rest of us find it fascinating how you, and people like you, want somehow to believe that these other industry players are simply very nice guys, hanging out together, sailing, watching the Super Bowl, and just utterly dismayed as to how the mean old Steve
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Nice, but I never said that. I have no doubt that Schwarz, like Jobs, and like many, many CEOs is likely a jerk.
Another, and likely more valid, perspective on this bit of industry history is that Mc
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I am not anti-patent. I hold a patent in fact but it is a hardware patent.
Software like stories, music, and math really should not be patentable.
I can understand Apple getting software patents just as Sun, IBM, and other companies do and as was explained in the blog they make a great defense. When any software company goes after another company with patents they are being a patent troll and are being evil.
Microsoft going after Tom Tom and Amazon with Linux patents == evil.
Apple going after HTC == evil.
In bo
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Hmm, Score:3 Funny. I don't know if you meant that as humorous or not. I chuckled a bit that's for sure. Hey but as long as we're talking about vague logic, how about them Apple patents!
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I may not be a Mensa member but I think I may be smart enough to describe that as "Steve threatening to sue...."
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I see it as Steve showing an industry colleague the respect they deserve and picking up the phone himself to make a personal, direct call to provide advance warning and give the other company the chance to remedy the problem before the lawyers are unleashed.
Picking up the phone is a hell of a lot cheaper than unleashing lawyers, so I think your "what a nice guy" is a bit unwarranted.
Seriously, I know it's cool to hate on Apple lately
Not Apple Hate, but hatred of the way rich people behave these days. Mayb
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Apple use off the shelf components, stuff that real innovative companies design and manufacturer to enable companies like apple to make their shiny toys.
I bet you also said Apple is evil for using proprietary parts.
BTW, what are your thoughts on the A4?
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Apple is evil not because it re-sells consumer parts (screens, CPU's, HDD's) but because it re-sells consumer parts under false pretences. Namely that these are superior to the the same off the shelf components (complete with rigged benchmarks) and are advertised as "Apple(TM)" components not Intel or Samsung. Also requiring the graphics cards to run special firmware to prevent an identical, cheaper Leadtek graphics card from being used is pretty damn evil.
Dell and
Re:What do you expect? (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, what do you expect from a competitor?
To release a better, or cheaper product.