<story><title>If Android is a &quot;stolen product,&quot; then so was the iPhone</title><url>http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2012/02/if-android-is-a-stolen-product-then-so-was-the-iphone.ars</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>wvenable</author><text>&amp;#62; Nobody was making products that resembled the iPhone before Apple&lt;p&gt;That&apos;s blatantly false.  Every smartphone I owned going back to 2003 resembled the iPhone.  Smartphones of the day either resembled the iPhone or they resembled the blackberry but both designs were out there in number.  After the iPhone was released almost everyone dropped their blackberry-like designs (except for RIM).&lt;p&gt;Apple&apos;s innovation was the capacitive multi-touch screen and finger-friendly interface.  I&apos;m not even sure that&apos;s a revolution just an evolution of existing designs.</text></item><item><author>zefhous</author><text>&amp;#62; Jobs called Android a &quot;stolen product,&quot; but theft can be a tricky concept when talking about innovation.&lt;p&gt;This article is heartily missing the point.&lt;p&gt;Android &lt;i&gt;is&lt;/i&gt; basically a stolen product. It&apos;s a direct successor and competitor to the iPhone, and the direction of Android in it&apos;s current form has been and is extremely influenced by what Apple has been doing.&lt;p&gt;Sure, the iPhone is a bunch of &quot;stolen&quot; technologies and ideas, but Apple brought them together to make something great in a way that had never been done before. What Apple did took vision, discipline, and execution. &lt;i&gt;That&lt;/i&gt; is what Apple brought to the table, and that is what innovation is.&lt;p&gt;Nobody was making products that resembled the iPhone before Apple, but now everyone is trying.&lt;p&gt;We don&apos;t need to get all emotional about this. This doesn&apos;t have anything to do with the quality of the products, it&apos;s just the history about how this stuff came about. You are still free to like Android or WebOS or iOS or whatever you want. It&apos;s fine. Just recognize innovation for what it is.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jrockway</author><text>Indeed.  Remember the Palm Pilot?  Those things eventually ended up quite advanced; I remember buying one in Japan in 2002 with a camera, keyboard, swiveling screen, and so on.  The only difference was that it didn&apos;t have a 3G radio.&lt;p&gt;Ah, here we are: &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Sony-CLIE-PEG-NZ90.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Sony-CLIE-PEG-NZ90.jpg&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;The iPhone is a fine product.  The ground it broke was making people want a PDA, not actually inventing the PDA.</text></comment>
<story><title>If Android is a &quot;stolen product,&quot; then so was the iPhone</title><url>http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2012/02/if-android-is-a-stolen-product-then-so-was-the-iphone.ars</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>wvenable</author><text>&amp;#62; Nobody was making products that resembled the iPhone before Apple&lt;p&gt;That&apos;s blatantly false.  Every smartphone I owned going back to 2003 resembled the iPhone.  Smartphones of the day either resembled the iPhone or they resembled the blackberry but both designs were out there in number.  After the iPhone was released almost everyone dropped their blackberry-like designs (except for RIM).&lt;p&gt;Apple&apos;s innovation was the capacitive multi-touch screen and finger-friendly interface.  I&apos;m not even sure that&apos;s a revolution just an evolution of existing designs.</text></item><item><author>zefhous</author><text>&amp;#62; Jobs called Android a &quot;stolen product,&quot; but theft can be a tricky concept when talking about innovation.&lt;p&gt;This article is heartily missing the point.&lt;p&gt;Android &lt;i&gt;is&lt;/i&gt; basically a stolen product. It&apos;s a direct successor and competitor to the iPhone, and the direction of Android in it&apos;s current form has been and is extremely influenced by what Apple has been doing.&lt;p&gt;Sure, the iPhone is a bunch of &quot;stolen&quot; technologies and ideas, but Apple brought them together to make something great in a way that had never been done before. What Apple did took vision, discipline, and execution. &lt;i&gt;That&lt;/i&gt; is what Apple brought to the table, and that is what innovation is.&lt;p&gt;Nobody was making products that resembled the iPhone before Apple, but now everyone is trying.&lt;p&gt;We don&apos;t need to get all emotional about this. This doesn&apos;t have anything to do with the quality of the products, it&apos;s just the history about how this stuff came about. You are still free to like Android or WebOS or iOS or whatever you want. It&apos;s fine. Just recognize innovation for what it is.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nwjsmith</author><text>&amp;#62; That&apos;s blatantly false. Every smartphone I owned going back to 2003 resembled the iPhone.&lt;p&gt;Which phones?</text></comment>