artifacts of patents and licensing

A friend wrote with a pointer to a piece on how the Apple/Samsung verdict harms consumers.

 

Ah intellectual property ..  

 

I was compelled to reply and perhaps it is worth sharing even though Om said far too much will be written on the subject.

 

I think this is just the nature of how patents and licensing work when a technology is perturbed - something we've had since the time of Watt and have seen repeated over and over. In the end it is probably good, although locally good and bad products will be impacted - some positively and some negatively. Google was way to caviler artificially reducing the mfg cost of its operating system to zero. There were and are numerous patent violations - not much has been written, but I'm told Microsoft makes $8 to $15 on most of the Android phones sold in the US, Europe and Japan. There will be a lot of court action for a few years, but ultimately there will be licensing on the sticky points all around. The marginal mfgs will drop out and new players will have to either have their own innovation (I hate that word - way too fluffy) or be large enough to pay for licensing.

It would be nice if all were robust, but that isn't going to happen with the current system.¹  Individual patents come into play, but  licensing agreements at this level usually involve portfolios and you have to have relevant portfolios to have any standing.  Google had almost none and the purchase of Motorola was probably driven by a desire for an instant portfolio so they could play the game.  Unfortunately for them it appears as though Motorola's portfolio is not terribly relevant and they may have wasted billions of dollars.

I would be surprised if Apple ends up with more than 15% of the market in 5 years (and that would be 15 percent of a billion phones per year or more - still an incredible business if there are any margins). I also believe that Microsoft is the potential big winner in this round. Their OS may be cheaper than Android with its licensing fees and uncertainty and the UI is both clean and novel (Apple and Microsoft, despite the hard words, have elaborate cross licensing agreements and an agreement not to use each other's UI features - both have very competent UI and UX teams - something Google lacks)

Now the bar is raised for what innovation has to be and there will be companies other than Apple doing the original work that appeals to end users.

For me the importance brilliance of the iPhone is it broke the carrier's stranglehold on tech, design and how people used these portable computing devices. Nokia could have built something as good or better, but companies like AT&T and Verizon were their customers and not the end user. They basically wouldn't let Nokia, which had its own stranglehold on much of the mobile market, be creative.²  We would still be in 2006 with only marginal change if the iPhone didn't happen.  

It is extremely important to note that when the iPhone was introduced it was roundly criticized for only having a single button and no hardware keyboard. Most of the tech  pundits as well as its competition predicted it would fail.  A few years later everyone says the design was obvious...  funny how that happens, eh?³

In order to do well Apple needs to figure out how to destroy the iPhone rather than allow the competition to do it. That will be very hard work.

I don't worry much about the impact as people change their phones every few years. What bothers me is the stagnation at the carrier level and the very high degree of lockin on things like spectrum (an artificial concept dictated by tech established by 1930 and reinforced by policy) and enormously high infrastructure costs. Much better things could have happened... We pay far too much for far too few bits per second and are forced to deal with congestion and scarcity that are not dictated by the underlying physics...

 

I'm convinced there will be good competition and real progress, but it is important to remember that this has played out many times before.  The trials will take a few years and produce a lot of smoke - the important things to watch are the licensing agreements and how they shift the game as well as new ideas that happen to be outside the scope of current patents.

 

I'm not happy with the patent system, but it does create a stable framework and can encourage competition.  If you are interested in this sort of thing I recommend reading the history of intellectual property disputes.  The development of the airplane and what happened to the Wright brothers is particularly interesting.  That is a cautionary tale Steve Jobs stressed with associates.

 

It is clear that anyone who wishes to play in this space at a deep level needs to combine social and technical clue.  That is a major change for this industry.  And a final note: while this may seem messy it doesn't hold a candle to the train wreck that is copyright.

__________

¹ There are two major types of patents that are relevant - design patents and utility patents.  We tend to think of utility patents, but the design of something is also protectable under the system.  Many elements that feed into user experience happen to be design patents, which is almost virgin territory for the tech world.  

² Decoupled customers and end users can be a real problem.  It may be this is ultimately an issue for companies like Google and Facebook and gives an opening to a very clever challenger.  It is certainly a huge issue in American politics.

³ This is historically true for some of the largest ideas and best design.  Often we don't stumble into the really great solutions but, because they are great, they seem completely obvious once we see them. Something like the iPhone's UI and UX is subtle and extremely complex - very difficult to get right.  Most of those elements are missed with quick high level dismissal of how original it seems.  You might say the same thing about something like special relativity, which is based on simple geometryand can be taught to a smart 14 year old.

 ___________

Recipe Corner 

 

Well - this is too simple to be a recipe, but it is trivial and turned out very well.   One of my standard breakfasts involves a bowl of steel-cut oatmeal.  I mix various things in and this morning found a winner.  

Cut a plantain into half inch rounds, drizzle with olive oil, sprinkle on some sea salt (non-iodized as heat will be used), some brown sugar and some pumpkin pie spice.  Spread it on a baking sheet and roast it in a 450° F oven for about 25 or 30 minutes turning them roughly half way through.    It really smells good!  Mix it in with a your oatmeal - I topped with some crushed pecans, cinnamon and blueberries and a bit of maple syrup. And had it with milk.  

Wow it was good!

And also food related.  A youtube video on a clever technique for separating egg whites and yolks.  This sort of thing has been done approximately forever in introductory physics demonstrations, but it is still deeply cool.