Love & Theft

Some of you have emailed and asked me about what I think about M$ (microsoft's) stealing the patent for the iPod from Apple, so here's my take.

The iPod has one, maybe two Christmases left in it and it'll be a dead product. Phones and other digital devices are going to supplant it or there may be something completely new. Either way, This is a legal fight that will FAR outlast these devices and I can't see M$ putting that much money into the patent request and the ensuing legal battles for, at the most, 8 quarters worth of revenue. What this is about is slowing down apple innovation.

The computer industry hit a slump when the internet bubble burst. At that point Apple made the decision to "innovate it's way out of the slump." And out came products like GarageBand, iTunes, Pages and, of course the ipod itself. Those products have kept apple profitable and grown their market share when the rest of the industry is in a slump. Microsoft DESPERATELY wants to stop the Apple braintrust, or at least, handicap it. So they do what they've always done.

Lie, Cheat and Steal... or rather "acquire" technology.

People forget that the namesakes which fuel M$ continual earnings year after year are all acquired products... Word, Excel and Powerpoint were all acquired products. Dos was acquired. Windows was stolen... and not very well I might add. In fact, I can't think of one single thing that originated with microsoft... Somebody email me and tell me if i'm wrong...

Well, Good luck to them and I wish them well, but Apple not only has better karma, they have better products because that's where they spend their money and most of their energies.

Given that M$ is a Lie, Cheat, St.... er... Acquire company, if I were Bill Gates, here's what I'd do. I'd port the windows GUI to Linux and produce my own distribution of Linux. It would be 100 times more stable than any other version of windows and it would instantly be the dominant distribution in the linux market. Also with a strong unix-based kernel underneath the os, they wouldn't have near the security breaches they're now experiencing. They could then hire Linux Torvolds and claim that linux was actually a Microsoft technology.

But still wouldn't hold a candle to OS X.

Oh, and Bill, that light at the end of the tunnel... that's actually an oncoming train called "Mac OS X for Intel". Fear it.