Apple: Microsoft's Friend or Foe?

[ManicDevlin]

http://www.newsfactor.com/perl/story/19730.html

 

[sheepguy42]

This issue has come up before. Something the article does not mention, but which has been mentioned here, is the way Apple keeps eliminating the 'need' for Office with free iApps. Examples include the way iCal, Mail, and Address Book offer the most important features of Entourage; Quicktime competes directly with Windows Media Player; AppleWorks offers a usable alternative to Word/Excel/PowerPoint; iChat uses AIM's network instead of MSN's. If Apple supplied a free, non-MS browser with OS X then Office would not be needed outside of, well, offices.

 

[vanguard]

My company recently offerered a course on patents. The idea was to help us engineers know what kind of things we can patent and how it helps the company.

As an example he showed us a 1984 Apple patent on the pull down menu. It turns out that sometime in the mid-nineties Apple and their lawyers went to msft and said that if they don't continue to support their platform they'll shut down msft.

According to the law, they could have. However, I suspect everybody knows it would have been hard to actually do. Instead, they gave msft a license to their patents and in exchange they received support for their platform. It kept Apple in business (according my company's lawyers).

Anyway, patents last 20 years. I wonder if msft will drop all support in 2004?

Vanguard

 

[heathpitts]

I thought patents lasted only 17 years.


Heath Pitts
www.heathpitts.com
heath@heathpitts.com

 

[vanguard]

Originally posted by heathpitts
I thought patents lasted only 17 years.


Heath Pitts
www.heathpitts.com
heath@heathpitts.com

http://law.freeadvice.com/intellectual_property/patent_law/patent_duration.htm

 

[Tigger]

Originally posted by vanguard
My company recently offerered a course on patents. The idea was to help us engineers know what kind of things we can patent and how it helps the company.

As an example he showed us a 1984 Apple patent on the pull down menu. It turns out that sometime in the mid-nineties Apple and their lawyers went to msft and said that if they don't continue to support their platform they'll shut down msft.

I can't believe this is true.
Wouldn't Apple and its lawyers have been all over the Linux guys back then Linux was new?

 

[heathpitts]

must have changed it in 1995 since I was taught in college.

http://www.bountyquest.com/patent/patentfacts.htm



Heath Pitts

 

[Vyper]

Hmm.. if this works out Microsoft may well be screwed

Nah, that'd never happen.

 

[ksv]

The solution is simple

 

[kommakazi]

Apple should have done it. They wussed out. Damn them. WE could be living in a MS-free world right now.
Though I find it funny that Apple got the patent on pull-down menus when they just ripped it from Xerox...