Yes, it can be this, or it might be as well exactly what the press releases says. In other words, Apple is to arrogant to pay licensing fees for what other are already paying.
"Nokia has already successfully entered into license agreements including these patents with approximately 40 companies, including virtually all the leading mobile device vendors, allowing the industry to benefit from Nokia's innovation."
So no need to forget about it :), if our fate does not put us on the path to a big sugar mountain, I am sure there are other smaller sugar hills that we can find on our own :)
The article in my opinion does not say much, but the following paragraph caught my attention:
>>"In the end, the best way to test whether you have a ‘must have’ product is to threaten to take the prototype away from your early users," says Rakowski. "If they don’t riot, start again."<<
Is this really doable? How can you threaten to take the prototype away?
I would say even more, every product has to be first a "nice to have" and hopefully for you to become later a "must have". Nowadays in our society we already can live a very comfortable life, there is no real "must have".
I support my point here saying that we already have a product that saves you money, but not a single person that I have talked about it was impressed by this feature alone. Instead the other way round if they like the product and I tell them about the cost saving it is a serious factor for them to decide to adopt it.
The two things I would learn from this story are: 1) to be prepared for the success. As someone said, be prepared for the time when all your ten thousand customers tell their, maybe, thirty friends about how good is your service. 2) Find always the good side of bad things. For example a competitor can simply emphasize your strong points and (as you said here) increase the market as a whole.
I guess this is why we like this story even if we do not really believe it.
The title of the article is "Rational Irrationality" and not letting the system to crash now, seems to me (and to many others) very irrational.
"too big to fail" syntagm does not look good either to the author of the article, in the end he says:
"As memories of September, 2008, fade, many will say that the Great Crunch wasn’t so bad, after all, and skip over the vast government intervention that prevented a much, much worse outcome. Incentives for excessive risk-taking will revive, and so will the lobbying power of banks and other financial firms." ... "The next time the structure starts to lurch and sway, it could all fall down."
Bailing out big companies is not capitalism as we learned about it. And the bottom line is it hasn't crashed now, the governments did not let it crash. Whether this is good or bad, I guess we will see in the future.
I am just curious if there is anyone here able to point a single useful outcome of software patents. I am a software engineer and I can not find any good in software patents. Copyright laws and trade secrete are enough to protect our work.
The value is that it helps you cement the value of your business with potential investors and the bank, it establishes credibility when marketing yourself to customers.
I'm fundamentally opposed to them, but the reality is that they exist. Because of this, I found myself organising patent protection for our software.
If they are abolished, I'll be upset about my £8k investment - but more happy that sanity has prevailed.
The value is that it helps you cement the value of your business with potential investors and the bank, it establishes credibility when marketing yourself to customers.
In other words: a legal cudgel, often useful to business people and often useful to startups. I'm sure the economy does not benefit from the ensuing posturing and cudgeling, but I can see why someone would see having one in their self interest.
I think you could cut out a lot of software patent trolling if you required a working device to be submitted. With the widespread availability of small, cheap, microprocessors, this wouldn't be an insurmountable requirement for individuals. Also, it would make silly software patents like "One-Click" less straightforward to apply for. (Amazon: this box implements the "One-Click" functionality. Reviewer: how can I make it work? Amazon: well, it has to be plugged into our test data-center.)
Many software patents I've read seem totally invalid. But there are a few I think may be reasonable. For example, many audio/video codecs like the ones in the MPEG standards are developed by companies who make money through patent licensing. And for the most the ideas in these patents are far from "obvious."
You could argue about whether these patents are good or bad for society, but at least in these cases the patent system is operating as designed: allowing companies to profit from novel research through a temporary monopoly on the results.
These two lines of pseudocode are patented. In reality, they usually are implemented in just about two lines. There's nothing non-obvious about it; if you take 15 minutes and go test the only two possible median prediction methods, this one comes up as the best.
And yet it's patented. And most video coding software patents are just like this one: stupid.
If you want even more ridiculous ones, just go look at motion search patents; they've basically patented everything under the sun.
Patents should be on implementations, not ideas. Algorithms are ideas, not implementations. People didn't do this decades ago; the inventor of Quicksort didn't rush out to patent it. But today, any time anyone comes up with an algorithm, they instantly patent it, because the system is broken.
I think DEC did have a patent on link lists in the 80s ;) - but still, your point remains. It wasn't the inventor that did it either (just someone having a laugh).
The main point to argue here is that in this case the patents do not protect an invention they protect a "reasoning process", a concept (or several). In mathematics once you know and understand the solution, even for the most complicated problem, the solution becomes obvious. (The same happens with any cognitive process.)
If for example one of the days I teach my students the mathematics behind MPEG and if I am a good teacher, then the very next moment the MPEG algorithm is obvious to them.
On the other hand the implementation of an algorithm can be complex and laborious and it is worth being protected, but this is done by copyright. (Nobody should be allowed to copy-paste code unless the author permits it.)
But I must admit that I somehow understand your point here. Let's say that someone discovers such a smart concept that is worth being awarded with a temporary monopoly, even if we protect a cognitive process. But in this case he already has the monopoly! The only thing he has to do is not to disclose the idea to others. (The algorithm is a trade secret in this case.) Eventually the secrete will be revealed, maybe by reverse engineering, but the company in discussion already has profited on its temporary monopoly. (This is natural protection for software if I can say that. Not the same case for a device invented in 18th, at that time all you had to do was to open its box and copy the mechanism inside it. Here patents are fully justified.)
Trying to find out what is the exact patent protection period I have found what Jim Warren said on "Public Hearing on Use of the Patent System to Protect Software Related Inventions" Wednesday, January 26, 1994 San Jose Convention Center, and this is exactly my point:
"(6) Reduce the protection period.
Issue a finding that 17-year software protection patents are
clearly unreasonable where, in an industry where significant
innovation can often be created in months, most innovation
has minimal costs relative to traditional inventions,
manufacturing and distribution is trivial, products can be
shipped within weeks of being finalized, great profits can be
attained in less than a year, the life of a product typically is
only a few years, and all of the growth of the industry, from
inception to Diamond vs. Diehr in 1981, was barely three
times the 17-year monopoly period.
Shorten the one-time protection period to no more than,
say, two years. Sui generis is justified."
To conclude my long post, sorry for that :), I must say we are developing products that make use of audio/video compression techniques and I needed to develop and implement several such algorithms and I can say for sure that software patents were not at all helpful for me, on the contrary, they only gave us head aches.
A good example would be Skype, who have defeated reverse engineering of their protocol, and benefitted from that temporary monopoly. (I'm using "defeated" in rather broad terms, since the protocol was eventually reverse engineered).
You should know that a startup does not mean you do all the time only the things you like. Besides writing code (which is the best part :) ) sometimes you need to do customer support, boring paper-work, leave the best party to restart your servers, even clean your office by yourself. And may other things I can not remember right know...
This isn't the first project I've done. I did a project while I was learning the language and honestly I just wanted to go to sleep every night at 3am. It wasn't the fun that even got me through coding the damn thing. Fun isn't necessarily the reason I push myself through the work. So I more than know there are tough challenges and unpleasent experiences to come. It's really the satisfaction everytime I overcome a challenge and the results that lure me to the end.
My advice (well, others said this before, but my experience confirmed it) is to build your first product the way you like it. If you are happy with the product and you really enjoy using it then you already have one customer :). And I am ready to bet others will come.
On the other hand trying to fulfill every customer wish and implement all features users suggest is not every time a good idea. Usually it leads to an over complex product that is not well adapted to "young markets" of "untrained" customers. Is like trying to sell them a dvr enabled TV set when they just learn how to change channels.
Leave personal feelings and your ego aside, if you do that the other might do the same and you might reach an agreement.