Apple patent attack: the multi-touch gesture dictionary
2nd August 2007
Engadget. The problem with this approach, of course, is that it discourages people from doing it your way. If they don’t do it your way, then your way doesn’t become the standard; either everybody develops his own way, in which case there is no standard, or people do it somebody else’s way (somebody else who wasn’t quite as discouraging), and you’re stuck being the odd one out. One would think that the history of personal computers is sufficiently littered with the corpses of companies and products who tried to keep a stranglehold on their “intellectual property” and as a result got left at the station when the train got underway.
Jerry Pournelle is fond of telling a story about going to a computer convention (COMDEX or something similar) back when Microsoft and IBM were just getting into the graphical user interface business. He first went to the IBM booth and told them he was considering developing products for OS/2, what could they do for him? They demonstrated a set of tools that would cost him somewhere on the close order of a couple thousand dollars. He mentioned that that was quite a bit of money, and they responded that these were very valuable tools. He then went over to the Microsoft booth and made the same pitch with respect to Windows. They gave him a bag and told him to hold it open, and he could barely stagger away with the development tools they loaded him down with.
And we all know who won that fight, right?
Anyway, I think this a very shortsighted move on Apple’s part — assuming, of course, that they don’t do something unexpected, like licensing the patented stuff for free use by anybody who wants to. Steve Jobs often does unexpected things, but when it comes to narrowing his market share, he’s pretty consistent. So I expect this to bite them on the butt at some future time.