Comment by breck
5 years ago
I have to say hard disagree, even though I am one of the ones having the problems with Apple Card.
The M1's and Airpods lineup are absolutely magical. The Apple Watch still sux IMO, but the way they quickly pivoted toward health surprised me and makes me think they get it.
I think Apple's products are better than ever, on the whole.
I don't think we should "break up" Big Tech just because they are successful. That being said, I do think we need to #AbolishImaginaryProperty laws (#EndCopyrights and #EndPatents), and that will make things much better for everyone (minus some lazy shareholders). Those laws are atrocious in every domain, from bigtech to big pharma, and need to go.
> The M1's and Airpods lineup are absolutely magical.
Read again, I said as much & agree so much that it’s actually a fundamental part of my characterization of Apple.
> I think Apple’s products are better than ever, on the whole
I had to type this quote because my iPad won’t let me copy and paste anymore on this page for some reason. (I didn’t make this up)
> I don’t think we should...
Well, I’m only speaking from my years of experience as both a product executive at Google and Apple and a successful entrepreneur, which is perhaps the exact skeleton key that fits this particular lock. Your idea would not fix my Apple product issues, because they really don’t rely nearly as much on IP protection as they do trade secrets, security through obscurity, and (legal disclaimer: in my subjective opinion only) anti-competitive practices.
But it would greatly hurt some other big companies (not really Apple, Google, Amazon, ...) and small tech companies alike.
You know, I used to think as you do on that topic, but not once I truly understood the ins and outs via relevant experience. Patent trolls suck, but IP law ain’t the biggest problem in tech by a country mile.
> ain’t the biggest problem in tech by a country mile.
Well as someone who has worked on this issue for 17+ years, and also a successful entrepreneur and product builder at a few of the big dogs, I'm a hard disagree.
ImaginaryProperty laws are the root of all the biggest evil problems in tech. They corrupt everything at the core and a reckoning is coming.
I really think #EndPatents is a very software oriented view of tech. In the physical engineering space patents are the only thing that allows a small company to actually design, manufacture and sell a product before a larger company can just squash them.
I know that getting investment as a small company in the hardware space would be near impossible without patents, because any investor without a brain would see that the giant in your industry could decide to take your idea, design it faster, manufacture it cheaper and sell it to a wider audience in a fraction of the time.
Very true, but #EndSoftwarePatents can and should be a thing.
I actually take a position that some software maybe should be patentable, but that it's such a tiny percentage of what actually GETS patented that it's likely better to simply prohibit/invalidate all software patents than to allow only certain software patents. The backlog of hundreds of thousands of obviously-bad software patents wouldn't really be able to be individually reviewed by the experts that should be able to invalidate them, and software has copyright and trade secret protections available. That should be good enough for 99.9% of circumstances.
The patent office has clearly proven that they can't be trusted to discern "novelty" in software development, and I don't see that changing any time soon, so time to prohibit the system from applying to software at all. At present it's 100% prohibiting the small inventors from innovating (or allowing a few patent trolls to extorts those who succeed) and 0% allowing small innovators from profiting from their products.
"I didn't read your comment, but you're wrong"