Anyone following me on Google+, Facebook or Twitter may have seen me posting quite a lot about the many Intellectual Property cases currently strangling the mobile computing market. A lot of them involve Apple, but it’s not an attack on them. They just happen to be in the dominant mobile position now that Microsoft was in 10 years ago on the desktop, and so they’ve got the most to lose.
Last decade, the stories were of Microsoft using Windows to cripple competing office suites and promote its own, and the big move to unify the desktop, server and mobile Windows experience with XP and .net, and giving us IE6 and anti-trust cases. Now, we have Apple unifying desktop and mobile, and pushing others away with policies on in-app purchases and legal battles blocking competition in the marketplace.
I like competition. Competition makes phones faster, batteries last longer, and keeps everyone on their toes. Without it, innovation stagnates.
I am not a lawyer, so I don’t understand why a sketch that looks like a sat nav can be used by Apple to stop tablets from competitors being sold. It’s not like the Chinese rip-off that fooled even the employees at the fake Apple stores.
There is something rotten in the world of technology. It’s about patents, copyright and other protection, but whereas it works for Dyson, to protect his cyclone, whilst allowing competition from other bagless systems, the same protections are smothering the computing and smartphone market, distracting all companies into defending themselves against others, instead of differentiation through innovation. I don’t to work in an industry that’s moving through quicksand, dragging platforms, tools and devices back. We’re already held back enough trying to build for incompatible browsers without having to rewrite for new platforms just because the ui of one has protected interactions (think touch screen versions of Amazon’s pervasive One-Click patent). Higher costs for developers, higher costs and frustration for end users and the vendors fighting amongst themselves won’t benefit, ripping chunks out of each other and alienating the rest of us.
Samson needs to come and cut some crown jewels in half.
I’ll describe my experience of the new OS in a later post – this one’s really about the update process. Unfortunately it reminds my of Linux updates around 10 years ago, but if Ubuntu and others can fix that, I’m sure Google and HTC can fix theirs.
