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redspear on 22 May 2008
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old_gamer said:
redspear said:
gengka said:
the same old microsoft. they dived into OS developing because of Mac OS, Internet Explorer because of Netscape, XBOX because of Playstation, and the latest: Mii because of Wii.. LMAO..

Uhmm a few things MS is older then Apple and had been making OS for a longer time than apple.

 

Apple released the second GUI which they copied from Xerox(Mainly the Lisa is a clone of the STAR). MS copied from Xerox as well. Xerox couldn't patent a lot of things for their PARC system because of monopoly status in the 70's.

I am not going to deend MS here but you know this whole MS copied apple thing is bogus. It was even admitted in court that apple, IBM with the OS/2 and MS all copied Xerox(and did a hack job of it at that).


 Apple paid to use Xerox stuff: Jobs and several other Apple employees including Jef Raskin visited Xerox PARC in December 1979 to see the Alto computer. Xerox granted Apple engineers three days of access to the PARC facilities in return for selling them US$1 million in pre-IPO Apple stock (approximately US$18 million net)

What did Microsoft give to Xerox?

 


Yup Steve Jobs did visit Palo Alto Research thanks mostly to his partnership with Jeff Raskin(who hates Steve Jobs but was good freinds with Wozniak) in exchange for some stock. The point of the visit depending on who talk to chnages dramaticaly from the idea of licensing PARC to the sharing of ideas to actually selling the ideas to Apple. However Xerox did sue Apple in the late 80's for copyright infringement for 100 million. The lawsuit was bought about since Apple had sued MS and IBM and had applied a 'double standard' that XEROX was not happy about. Xerox felt it owned the rights to several key points on the dashboard that all ofthe other operating systems had used. The XEROX lawsuit was thrown out initially for being filed to long after implementation of the questionable infringement but won an appeal.

In my work I have met several members of the original PARC team(many do expert witness testimony for patent cases). Some of them had even worked for Apple in the early 90's. Others wouldn't work for them. Many are angry since they felt that XEROX didn't do enough to capitilize their product or to defend theit own IP. They pretty much all say that Apple stole their ideas illegally. Even the ones who worked for apple say that but they don't hate apple because they blame XEROX the most.

However it is generally unfair to blame XEROX because in the 70's XEROX was under anti trust laws that prohibited how much and what they could patent much like MS of the 90's XEROX was huge in the 70's. Much of their work was not protected because of goverment limitations so that anybody could essentialy copy them.  XEROX was able to patent and copyright certain key elements that would make an exact copy almost impossible and anycopy a limited experience. Apple went ahead and had copied the most while IBM and MS had actually made their OSs around these limitations.

I am not even going to get into the Lotus lawsuits that went after pretty much everybody in the 80's. Lotus 123 was a huge program back then. MS IBM andapple all infringed upon their properties as well.

 

So yes Apple did steal from XEROX. However it doesn't mean you can't enjoy their products just it doesn't mean that people can't enjoy MS products whether tehy are copied or not. Besides Apple is also copying the Wiimote as well as you can see in their patent application filed in Nov of 2006 for a pointing device that uses a bar with two infrared lights to determine where to place the cursor on the screen for their apple TV or other consumer electronic device.