Steve Jobs is dead, and like every other time a person of
renown dies their biography has stampeded onto the market. The above is one of
the key quotes that I found in the highlights because it addresses the ideas of
the iPhone and Android conflict. The titled statement is from Steve Jobs,
according to his biographer, but we have to take this one apart a bit. Clearly
it isn’t the same product as the tech specs between the phones are different.
Additionally the software in its entirety isn’t stolen either because they both
function in slightly different ways.
What did android steal from the iPhone?
We’ll take care of the obvious stuff here – They share a similar
design concept. There are many arguments that could be made for how certain
elements are subtly different, or that others were improved upon drastically
but when it comes down to it they do look similar – in both the software and
the hardware.
Imagine that you have an iPhone and you show it to an
elderly person whose idea of a complex phone is something that can send
messages. So in essence someone that doesn’t have a great idea of technology.
You are allowed 30 seconds to tell them about it and it’s features. Now imagine
it’s a week later and that you have an Android and you show it to the same
elderly person. You are given 30 seconds to explain it to them and tell them
about its features. They wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between them.
So there is a lot of fuss on the part of Apple that Google
is stealing the ideas behind the development of their smartphones and the fear
can be argued either way as to whether it is justifiable or if it isn’t. You
can say the same thing for tablet PC’s and you’d be correct there, with Apple
filing copyright infringement documents to prevent the sale of any of their
competitors devices on the grounds that they are too similar in appearance.
But why does this matter? We can argue that it isn’t about
the money. Jobs himself has been quoted as saying
“I don't want your money. If you
offer me $5 billion, I won't want it. I've got plenty of money. I want you to
stop using our ideas in Android, that's all I want.”
And until contrarily shown we can agree that this must be
accurate.
What else? From here everything is speculation and I have
one theory– The thing that Jobs was afraid of being stolen was credit for the
revolution
At the news of the death of Steve Jobs, the media ran with
many different headlines as you may recall, but pretty much all of them had a
variation of “Death of the man who revolutionised the world with the iPod” –
and I’ll probably be blasted for making this accusation against a recently
departed individual but I think that’s exactly what he wanted everyone to do –
to credit him and ONLY him with these inventions that changed the world.
I’d also ask you who invented the light bulb? If you stated
it was Edison then you’d be wrong. There were many other inventors before
Edison, the most well known being Swan, whose light bulbs were used to provide
light to England’s streets but even his version was a revision of a less famous
inventors idea. But to keep a long story short the reasons that Edison became
accredited with the invention was that his version was more popular and used
almost everywhere in place of the Swan light bulb. It just became an assumption
that since it was the only player in the market it had to be the first.
Apple has also played this card before. When they released
the iPod, the device that revolutionised the mp3 players of the time, there
already existed another device that did pretty much the exact same thing – The Zen Creative. Again, this is another thing
where history only remembered the victor of that war with most people
attributing the technology to Apple and the iPod.
 |
| Visual comparison between the original Zen and iPod |
It is the turnabout of this matter that Apple now fears, as
the Android looks like it may very well overtake the iPhone in terms of people
using it. Jobs stated that it wasn’t about the money and in part he’s right,
it’s about making sure that Apple got the footnote as being the revolutionary
smartphone. That this would have allowed them to leverage their market presence
as the leaders in innovation for the next i-whatever wouldn’t have hurt the
bottom line either, but I suspect it was mostly a battle of egos to be
remembered as the creative genius behind the smart phone.
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