Don’t worry: I know the Xerox PARC story well. I could even tell you about how Apple hired Xerox wünderkind Bruce Horn, who had been hired originally as a school kid for experiments with the Alto UI. My point was that if Apple could have claimed legally binding ownership over such a slew of GUI concepts as your argument demands, so too could and should have Xerox before them. The Amiga was as distinct from the Mac as the Mac was the Alto and Smalltalk.

I agree with @LuisDias on that point of detail. Although I suspect that innovations with the iPod and iPhone prove that Apple can be less sluggish than Microsoft’s proven record even when they’re starting years ahead of the competition. Conceding, naturally, that this is 2008, not 1988. It’s all ultimately a parlour game!

I’ve been reading RD for too long, and it’s an amazing site, congrats to the author. It was the “register” thingy on wordpress (I get the bends everytime a blog asks for “registering” just to leave two words, it’s an appalling feature of RD).

Apart from agreeing with the author, and I am a very lay person on this, I laughed a bit too hard at Realtosh’s idea that Apple would have “won the war” against IBM had Microsoft not been able to (legally) copycat Mac OS, and that it would have been such a swell sweet story, with perhaps flowers of the sixties falling over everyone’s desktop, and all the miracles prophetized by the second coming of JC, etcetera.

The crude reality is that if Apple had won the war, we would have lost it again. Apple would have become the dominant monopoly of Software, and I really, really doubt that Apple wouldn’t become as numb and as lazy as Microsoft has become. If Sculley had, in such a surreal timeline as that, still been able to fire Jobs, we would have been left not with a cheap array of lousy computers, but with a very expensive array of less-lousy computers, and my own generation wouldn’t have learned computers as young as we did, for my mother surely didn’t have the money to buy a Mac. I also don’t trust Sculley’s model of business, he probably was worse a jerk than Gates and Ballmer combined. It’s risky business to enter the world of “what if”!

Thing is, we are at 2008, and Apple’s “Survival Mode” of Business made it top-notch, high speed innovator of the first decade of 21st century. It’s all about evolution really. Death and Natural Selection.

In this case, I hope the next one to die to be MS, but I doubt it as well :)

“what would Xerox PARC have had to say about it?”

Apple had worked out a research sharing and licensing deal that involved a number of Xerox PARC researchers moving over to work at Apple.

Apple pioneered the graphical user interface. Had they protected their IP, the other companies would’ve been prevented from copying their innovation without asking permission and paying licensing fees.

Xerox had worked out some of the basic concepts. The interface work was done in conjunction with Apple and/or at Apple, with Apple engineers. The idea came from Xerox PARC, but was only fully developed at Apple.

To think that computers could’ve have been stable appliances for Internet browsing and software from a vibrant third party software development community.

Had Microsoft not gotten their monopoly, they would not have killed off the vibrant independent software community that had created many profitable companies.

Ever used an Amiga? They were smokin’. The GUI was second only to the Mac, but hardware acceleration was heavily at work throughout and they were priced just right.

It was only the IBM / MS magic of the overpriced, underperforming, positively barbaric DOS PC which killed the Amiga. An example of the software inflicted death spiral which only the Mac survived. All before the web of course…

I get what you’re saying though: if Apple had protected their design, things would have gone differently. Depends just how broad a swathe of concepts they could have owned. In many ways the Amiga was more independent than Windows ever was; that shameful clone! Besides: what would Xerox PARC have had to say about it?

(And no: I didn’t ever have an Amiga. But friends did and they rocked while they survived.)

well written. again.

@ John Muir

The NDA seems a lot like Microsoft DRM. It makes the jobs of honest developers more difficult, just like DRM makes the lives of the honest music-buying public more difficult.

At the same time, Microsoft has likely already reverse engineered the Mac OS, the iPhone OS and the iPhone SDK. The black hat hackers are freely sharing their tricks, if only clandestinely.

The only benefit from the NDA is that it keeps the black hatters from openly sharing secrets to try to hack the iPhone OS. The NDA keeps their efforts underground.

At the same time, it makes it hard for white hat developers to share their knowledge with each other for the mutual benefit of advancing the platform.

I would find it hard to believe that the whole NDA fiasco is about patents. However, Apple did get burned the first time around when the Mac OS was revolutionary.

@ everyone

Had Apple played their hand correctly with that advanced Mac technology, no other company would have ever been able to use the GUI interface of the Mac, or at least not before the patents would’ve run their full course. But that point, Mac would have become an installed standard for all fully functional computers.

Microsoft would’ve been a footnote in the history of computing. Microsoft would’ve only been a parasitic company that lived off the IBM ecosystem, that was superseded by the Mac juggernaut. Microsoft would’ve dropped off the face of the earth when IBM would’ve worked out a deal with Apple to use Mac OS in the IBM. Microsoft would’ve died off with the DOS clones that would no longer be compatible with IBM and Mac. Being unable to legally copy the Mac OS, nor its’ interface; the Microsoft clones would seem like archaic machines from the stone age.

IBM would have signed over a large percentage of their PC business revenue to Apple, probably making Apple the richest company in the computer industry.

Apple and IBM would’ve been the only 2 companies making computers. They would be making crazy money hand over fist. All computers would be as stable as any other appliance. No one would expect a computer to crash, any more than a refrigerator crashes which is never.

All computers would talk to each other (IBMs and Macs that is). Their would still be some DOS, Commodore, Tandy, and Amiga computers for the sake of competition, but combined they would sell in the single digits. They would not be considered full computers, but text-based computational toys.

Apple is now at the point that they can protect their iPhone, hardware and software, and their App Store and the SDK for making apps for their ecosystem. Apple can protect their intellectual property, or they can let everyone else steal the fruits of their hard work.

As everyone can see, not protecting their IP didn’t work out so well the first time. This time around, the paranoid behavior seems way out there. But given the gravity of the situation, a bit of paranoia might be exactly what’s called for.

As a light user of linux (long-time Unix and Mac) I have to disagree. I finally learned where everything was on Ubuntu (preference, applications menu, package installer, etc.) and then went to help a friend on something else (I don’t remember which but it was the ‘other’ manager) and it took forever and was very frustrating to do simple thing. Please don’t start telling me the answers as I did figure it all out but to the end user with no knowledge of the underlying system the two were very different and had ‘incompatible behaviors’.