Apple vs. Goog\b\b\b\b HTC
Earlier today I read the Engadget article on Apple suing HTC, the handset manufacturer making Google’s Nexus One. I had no idea what an enormous crapstorm this thing would open up. Here’s just one place well worth checking out: a student at Maryland pointed me to a really well thought-out, intelligent discussion going on at Hacker News.
My thoughts …
Swiping to unlock and other similar patented items are all “obvious” design decisions. All great design is obvious because great design produces things that are appropriate. Moreover, because great design is so obvious, it must be easy to design great things; the world must be full of great designs.
Right?
Um, no. The truth is that great design is not easy, and it stands out so prominently because the world is not full of great designs. Things like swiping to unlock are “obvious” only in retrospect. All great design is obvious — in retrospect — because great design produces things that are appropriate. But it is hard to do (Paul Graham, instigator of the HN discussion linked above, has several essays on precisely this topic). Moreover, because it is hard to do, great designers are rewarded with some degree of protection for making the details of their innovations public (thus the legal terminology that patents “teach” a particular topic). I don’t see why we should expect great designers to give up control of their ideas, willingly or otherwise, simply because those ideas are particularly good. Much of the logic in the public backlash to Apple’s suit amounts to “the iPhone had such a marvelously simple UI that everyone copied it, and because it became pervasive (by virtue of the copying), we want it to remain pervasive (because, you know, then we’d have to buy an iPhone if we wanted that UI), via Apple giving up the right to protect their IP.”
I just don’t buy that. Just because something is good doesn’t mean it belongs to the public domain.
People are asking “why now? why not earlier?” According to Engadget, Gizmodo & other news sites, the brief is some 700 pages long. I’m sure Apple started working on this the day the Nexus One details started surfacing and it became clear it was effectively an iPhone clone. 700 pages of legalese takes a long time to pull together.
People are also asking “why aren’t they suing Google?” They can’t sue Google (Lord knows they want to: remember that Schmidt sat in Apple’s huddles for years, listening to the plays, learning the playbook by heart, soaking up all insider info he could) because Google is intentionally disabling contested technology in Android — they evidently know quite well what patent infringement means and are running the other way. Google is instead relying upon their handset manufacturer/s to enable the contested technology before shipping the product and thus take the bullet on Google’s behalf. I wonder why nobody is criticizing Google for using HTC as a “human” shield?
At any rate, the debate is clearly going to take on a life of its own.
