Innovation?

[KnightWRX]

A Unix based OS is hardly innovative. Microsoft actually has purchased and developed their own proprietary OS codebase. Apple relies on Unix which has been around for what 50-60 years? If anything this shows that Apple is more about chic design and less about technology as just about any tech they have is purchased from other companies and then popped into their products.

Wow, you obviously have no clue about what is and what isn't Unix. First, Unix has been around since 1969, making it 42 years old. It itself is an evolution of Multics, a prior operating system that existed in the 60s.

Now, when talking about Unix, we have to know what we're actually talking about :

- The SUS (Single Unix Specification) which is a standard that you need to adhere to to call your OS Unix. The current version of the SUS is named Unix '03 and this is the one Apple adheres to. It's a set of APIs and functions that an OS needs to provide in order to provide compatibility with software written for Unix. This includes but is not limited to POSIX.

- The SysV Unix codebase, which is the "official" tree that is descended from Bell Labs in 1969 is a starting code base that you can use to build your Unix like OS. The big iron Unix systems all use some part of it (Solaris, HP-UX, AIX). There's also some SCO Unix for Intel chips that use it. You can license the copyrights from Novell through SCO (or whoever they sold the licensing business to) for this code base. It is tainted with BSD code these days.

- The BSD Unix codebase. Essentially a fork of the main SysV Unix codebase that is quite unrecognizable from its elder brother, even though these days the lines are blurred as some BSD code found its way into SysV Unix.

These basically cover the "copyrights" and "trademarks" to what is an official Unix system. Now, what is it exactly you fault Apple with using ? Apple purchased their Unix system from NeXT (a company launched by Steve Jobs. Many would argue that it is actually the other way around, that NeXT purchased the Apple brand and what we have today are NeXT computers). It is compromised of the following pieces :

- A fork of the Mach kernel, which while it implements Unix APIs for conformance to the SUS, does not share any code with BSD or SysV Unix. It was written by the nice people at Carnegie Mellon university and NeXT used it as a base for what is now known as XNU/Darwin. While you could claim this as something of a proof Apple failed to innovate with their OS, you have to now that OS kernels are hardly innovative in a consumer sense. Linux, Windows NT, Mach, the BSD kernel, Hurd, they are all pretty much the same : a driver API, process scheduler and memory manager. Sure there's a few gems in there like LVM, system encryption and different very performance oriented scheduling algorithms, but you have to be a CS geek to enjoy that level of innovation. There's not much value for Apple to "roll their own" really, even though with all the work that went into XNU/Darwin, they essentially did.

- The Openstep APIs, which are themselves the open specification version of the NeXTSTEP APIs. These are original NeXT stuff, written in Objective-C which is a licensed languaged from StepStone. This is basically Cocoa. All original NeXT code "acquired" by Apple when they "purchased" NeXT. There's a pretty innovative themselves and have been acclaimed industry wide as a very good software development platform. You can say there's a lot of innovation here and it's all "in-house" code, no Unix code/technologies here.

- Quartz, the display server. This is entirely in-house, closed source code. It is not based on any Unix technologies either (Unix doesn't really have a graphics engine/set of APIs, relying rather on X11, which is an MIT developped technology and standard that has quite a few commercial and open source implementations, of which Apple ships X.org's). Rather, Quartz is based on NeXT technology again, which was basically a way to render GUIs using Postscript (Display Postscript). Quartz is a "Display PDF" technology, making it a more advanced version of the NeXT stuff.

So where exactly did Apple get the "Unix" stuff you say they rely on ? What parts of the system is this uninnovative stuff you claim ? Well, we have to go into the command line interface tools to find that out and what we do find is a very limited set of userland tools from the BSD project, essentially, the file utils (ls, cp, mv, rm). Apple also uses GNU's tools (these are not based on the Unix code base at all, GNU is all original code from the FSF) for their command line interface where the BSD versions are lacking (this includes grep and bash amongst others). Are you saying Apple needs to rewrite all of these from scratch ? What would be innovative about an Apple version of ls ? Or grep ? That sounds like a very bad case of "NIH" syndrome.

So it seems to me that Apple used NeXT's stuff for the biggest portion of OS X, none of which relies on Unix code per say, but adheres to the SUS (which is something you can do with 100% original code) nonetheless. This is what is meant when we say "Mac OS X is Unix", it means that it is a SUS compliant operating system, not that it is actually a SysV or BSD rip-off. You need to understand this stuff before you try to bash OS X's "lack of innovation".

Not to mention it seems you are completely ignorant of Windows' history to claim that Windows is 100% original and innovative while OS X is not, but let's leave that for another time, this post is long enough already.

 

[fewlio]

Gates bought DOS from some other guy...win ran on top of it w/ added 32 bit extensions. Then Gates bought and Microsoft further developed NT and windows is now based on proprietary NT technology.

OSX is a glorified user interface for BSD, something akin to Gnome and KDE for Linux.

 

[mrsir2009]

Get a life dude. So you're saying Apple has the be the first to do everything in order to be innovative? They pretty much made what the tablet market is today, and they have absolutely revolutionized the phone. If you can't at least agree a little bit than you are just an ignorant hater

Btw, when was the last time Microsoft came out with anything exciting?

Vista. But it was exciting for the wrong reasons.

 

[fewlio]

Vista. But it was exciting for the wrong reasons.

Windows 7 is about the same thing as Service Pack 2 was for Win XP. Win XP had serious issues upon initial release...most OS's do.

Microsoft allowed Vista to become a PR disaster and a damaged brand name and had to change the name to something new, basically. That's why they didn't just do a service pack to patch up Vista to Win 7 status.

I think Ballmer has to be blamed for this...post 2005 Gates is pretty much involved with charities and other thing.

I run Win 7 and it's a good OS. But MS has dominated desktops and notebooks for a long time so that's not very exciting. I suppose the success of xbox360 and the attempt at win 7 phone is the most exciting thing going at MS these days.

 

[Rodimus Prime]

Gates bought DOS from some other guy...win ran on top of it w/ added 32 bit extensions. Then Gates bought and Microsoft further developed NT and windows is now based on proprietary NT technology.

OSX is a glorified user interface for BSD, something akin to Gnome for Linux.

come on I am hard on Apple for a lot of things but this is boarder line on Trolling. You have a pretty big lack of understanding of how things work.

Proprietary does not make something better.

 

[sjinsjca]

Apple copied the idea for a GUI from Xerox, then cried like babies when Microsoft did the same thing to them.

Y'all can stop reading right there.

What they "copied" was duly licensed. Xerox made quite a lot of money off Apple.

"Apple bought access to the PARC by means of a stock deal that seemed lucrative to the Xerox managers on the East Coast: They might buy 100,000 Apple stocks for one million dollars."

But haters will hate. It's what they do. Sucks to be them.

 

[roadbloc]

Gates bought DOS from some other guy...win ran on top of it w/ added 32 bit extensions. Then Gates bought and Microsoft further developed NT and windows is now based on proprietary NT technology.

OSX is a glorified user interface for BSD, something akin to Gnome for Linux.

If you seriously believe this, I'd suggest you just stop using computers altogether.

 

[KnightWRX]

OSX is a glorified user interface for BSD, something akin to Gnome for Linux.

Wow, you actually skipped over my entire post...

Again, OS X is not even running on top of BSD and Quartz is not akin to Gnome at all (Gnome is a desktop environnement, Quartz is a display server).

I think your posts should all be reported now, it's against the rules to troll the forums and it's plainly obvious now. I already debunked all the points you just made.

 

[fewlio]

Apple is a company like others. They buy, license, or copy the ideas of others. Not particularly innovative, but a good hardware maker and marketer primarily. Not really a technology company. They are a consumer of technology, they buy stuff from others and put it together. Closest company to what apple does is probably Dell.

Has IBM developed CPUs, original OS, original tech? Yes. Has Motorola? Yes. Has HP? Yes (they have been involved in a lot of tech sectors outside consumer level for decades). It's easy to make the argument that all of these companies have been more innovative than Apple.

 

[kdarling]

What they "copied" was duly licensed.

Xerox did NOT license their ideas to Apple.

Jobs offered Xerox an investment in Apple, with the seemingly innocent condition that Jobs and crew get a tour of PARC in return.

Xerox made quite a lot of money off Apple.

I must be one of the few people who have ever taken the time to check this claim out instead of just repeating it.

Xerox paid $1.5 million for that 100,000 shares of Apple stock in August 1979. It split, and they sold 800,000 shares in Oct 1981 for $6,776,000, for a meager profit of ~$5.2 million.

Xerox sold 25,000 of their 1981 Star graphical microcomputers at around $50,000 for a typical office set of two with a server and printer, for a total of at least $600 million, profit unknown, but undoubtedly much more than what they got from the Apple stock.

So Xerox would've (and did) make far more money selling their own UI ideas.

 

[steadysignal]

I don't remember my old Palm smartphone ever looking like an iPhone, This thread is about as innovative as boiling an egg

now now... that's "hard shell reproductive body"

 

[*LTD*]

now now... that's "hard shell reproductive body"

I think that's already patented. Chickens should be worried.

 

[Liquorpuki]

If you're using companies like IBM and Xerox as your benchmark, there's no comparison. You're never gonna be able to say Apple invented the ____, like you can say Bell Labs invented the transistor.

But as a consumer, there's no other electronics company I watch more. I'm not a scientist so I don't really care if X company invented Y technology if they can't package it into a product that's useful to me (IE Xerox and PARC). That's is what Apple is good at it. They might not be responsible for inventing core technologies, but they come up with a ton of supplementary innovations that make their consumer products way better than competitors' and they transform markets in the process.

 

[*LTD*]

Wow, you obviously have no clue about what is and what isn't Unix. First, Unix has been around since 1969, making it 42 years old. It itself is an evolution of Multics, a prior operating system that existed in the 60s.

Now, when talking about Unix, we have to know what we're actually talking about :

- The SUS (Single Unix Specification) which is a standard that you need to adhere to to call your OS Unix. The current version of the SUS is named Unix '03 and this is the one Apple adheres to. It's a set of APIs and functions that an OS needs to provide in order to provide compatibility with software written for Unix. This includes but is not limited to POSIX.

- The SysV Unix codebase, which is the "official" tree that is descended from Bell Labs in 1969 is a starting code base that you can use to build your Unix like OS. The big iron Unix systems all use some part of it (Solaris, HP-UX, AIX). There's also some SCO Unix for Intel chips that use it. You can license the copyrights from Novell through SCO (or whoever they sold the licensing business to) for this code base. It is tainted with BSD code these days.

- The BSD Unix codebase. Essentially a fork of the main SysV Unix codebase that is quite unrecognizable from its elder brother, even though these days the lines are blurred as some BSD code found its way into SysV Unix.

These basically cover the "copyrights" and "trademarks" to what is an official Unix system. Now, what is it exactly you fault Apple with using ? Apple purchased their Unix system from NeXT (a company launched by Steve Jobs. Many would argue that it is actually the other way around, that NeXT purchased the Apple brand and what we have today are NeXT computers). It is compromised of the following pieces :

- A fork of the Mach kernel, which while it implements Unix APIs for conformance to the SUS, does not share any code with BSD or SysV Unix. It was written by the nice people at Carnegie Mellon university and NeXT used it as a base for what is now known as XNU/Darwin. While you could claim this as something of a proof Apple failed to innovate with their OS, you have to now that OS kernels are hardly innovative in a consumer sense. Linux, Windows NT, Mach, the BSD kernel, Hurd, they are all pretty much the same : a driver API, process scheduler and memory manager. Sure there's a few gems in there like LVM, system encryption and different very performance oriented scheduling algorithms, but you have to be a CS geek to enjoy that level of innovation. There's not much value for Apple to "roll their own" really, even though with all the work that went into XNU/Darwin, they essentially did.

- The Openstep APIs, which are themselves the open specification version of the NeXTSTEP APIs. These are original NeXT stuff, written in Objective-C which is a licensed languaged from StepStone. This is basically Cocoa. All original NeXT code "acquired" by Apple when they "purchased" NeXT. There's a pretty innovative themselves and have been acclaimed industry wide as a very good software development platform. You can say there's a lot of innovation here and it's all "in-house" code, no Unix code/technologies here.

- Quartz, the display server. This is entirely in-house, closed source code. It is not based on any Unix technologies either (Unix doesn't really have a graphics engine/set of APIs, relying rather on X11, which is an MIT developped technology and standard that has quite a few commercial and open source implementations, of which Apple ships X.org's). Rather, Quartz is based on NeXT technology again, which was basically a way to render GUIs using Postscript (Display Postscript). Quartz is a "Display PDF" technology, making it a more advanced version of the NeXT stuff.

So where exactly did Apple get the "Unix" stuff you say they rely on ? What parts of the system is this uninnovative stuff you claim ? Well, we have to go into the command line interface tools to find that out and what we do find is a very limited set of userland tools from the BSD project, essentially, the file utils (ls, cp, mv, rm). Apple also uses GNU's tools (these are not based on the Unix code base at all, GNU is all original code from the FSF) for their command line interface where the BSD versions are lacking (this includes grep and bash amongst others). Are you saying Apple needs to rewrite all of these from scratch ? What would be innovative about an Apple version of ls ? Or grep ? That sounds like a very bad case of "NIH" syndrome.

So it seems to me that Apple used NeXT's stuff for the biggest portion of OS X, none of which relies on Unix code per say, but adheres to the SUS (which is something you can do with 100% original code) nonetheless. This is what is meant when we say "Mac OS X is Unix", it means that it is a SUS compliant operating system, not that it is actually a SysV or BSD rip-off. You need to understand this stuff before you try to bash OS X's "lack of innovation".

Not to mention it seems you are completely ignorant of Windows' history to claim that Windows is 100% original and innovative while OS X is not, but let's leave that for another time, this post is long enough already.

Lovely, lovely post. Thank you.

 

[sjinsjca]

Xerox did NOT license their ideas to Apple. Jobs offered Xerox an investment in Apple, with the seemingly innocent condition that Jobs and crew get a tour of PARC in return.

Neither of us is privy to the exact terms of the agreement. Per Wikipedia,

"Adoption by Apple [of the Xerox GUI idea]: The first successful commercial GUI product was the Apple Macintosh, which was heavily inspired by PARC's work; Xerox was allowed to buy pre-IPO stock from Apple, in exchange for engineer visits and an understanding that Apple would create a GUI product."


I called that "understanding" a "license," which the OED defines as: to permit the use of something or to allow an activity to take place

IANAL, so perhaps there's a better name for the sort of permission that Apple received in exchange for the stock options.

On the other hand, I'd wager my phrasing is closer to what happened than your depiction of Steve Jobs skulking around Parc like a high-tech Hamburglar, looking for ideas to rip off.

I must be one of the few people who have ever taken the time to check this claim out instead of just repeating it.

Xerox paid $1.5 million for that 100,000 shares of Apple stock in August 1979. It split, and they sold 800,000 shares in Oct 1981 for $6,776,000, for a meager profit of ~$5.2 million.

It seems we have another linguistic disconnect over the term "meager." I would not regard a 5X return on investment in two years as "meager." If you have a few such investment opportunities you want to get rid of, just let me know!

Xerox sold 25,000 of their 1981 Star graphical microcomputers at around $50,000 for a typical office set of two with a server and printer, for a total of at least $600 million, profit unknown, but undoubtedly much more than what they got from the Apple stock. So Xerox would've (and did) make far more money selling their own UI ideas.

So why was the Star/Alto not a success? ...Be careful how you answer, as this question circles back in a key way to the question of "innovation" that the thread started with.

 

[fewlio]

Neither of us is privy to the exact terms of the agreement. Per Wikipedia,

"Adoption by Apple [of the Xerox GUI idea]: The first successful commercial GUI product was the Apple Macintosh, which was heavily inspired by PARC's work; Xerox was allowed to buy pre-IPO stock from Apple, in exchange for engineer visits and an understanding that Apple would create a GUI product."


I called that "understanding" a "license," which the OED defines as: to permit the use of something or to allow an activity to take place

IANAL, so perhaps there's a better name for the sort of permission that Apple received in exchange for the stock options.

On the other hand, I'd wager my phrasing is closer to what happened than your depiction of Steve Jobs skulking around Parc like a high-tech Hamburglar, looking for ideas to rip off.




It seems we have another linguistic disconnect over the term "meager." I would not regard a 5X return on investment in two years as "meager." If you have a few such investment opportunities you want to get rid of, just let me know!




So why was the Star/Alto not a success? ...Be careful how you answer, as this question circles back in a key way to the question of "innovation" that the thread started with.

It wasn't a success because the managers at Xerox didn't see what Jobs and Gates did, and they didn't market it to the mainstream the way Jobs and Gates did. It had nothing to do with lack of innovation and everything to do with bad leadership. We can say Xerox was the most innovative user interface developer of the late 70s/early 80s but was hampered by poor management.

 

[sjinsjca]

It wasn't a success because the managers at Xerox didn't see what Jobs and Gates did, and they didn't market it to the mainstream the way Jobs and Gates did. It had nothing to do with lack of innovation and everything to do with bad leadership. We can say Xerox was the most innovative user interface developer of the late 70s/early 80s but was hampered by poor management.

I'd call that answer correct but insufficient.

Scroll back up a bit, and you'll see another fact about Xerox's implementations: a stratospheric price.

Designing a mouse in the 1980s that would sell for double digits took a whole hell of a lot of innovation.

If you study the history of innovation, you'll find that the vast, vast majority of breakthroughs are not new ideas, but ideas borrowed from elsewhere... perhaps from some far-flung field, and perhaps mashed-together with other learnings in a novel way. Economically speaking, the keys to meaningful innovation are implementation, recombination, network-building and leadership. Examples abound:

• Thomas Edison didn't invent the lightbulb, but he made it practical.
  
• Henry Ford didn't invent the assembly line-- he got the idea from a slaughterhouse.
  
• And Steve Jobs didn't invent the mouse or the graphical user interface, but he and his team figured out how to engineer, manufacture and market them affordably and match them to the needs of everyday people. (Then Bill Gates came and borrowed that).

And so on. The notion of the prototypical mad scientist with a light-bulb going off in his head is rare in practice and too often fruitless. Meanwhile, Steve Jobs' ability to build and motivate teams which span disciplines and cross-pollinate from other fields are too rarely acknowledged, and they're absolutely key to his success. They're mirrored in Steve the Human, who in his 2005 Stanford commencement speech spotlighted Calligraphy above all the courses he'd taken in college.

I highly recommend Andrew Hargadon's book, How Breakthroughs Happen: The Surprising Truth About How Companies Innovate, which expands upon this.

 

[kdarling]

"Xerox was allowed to buy pre-IPO stock from Apple, in exchange for engineer visits and an understanding that Apple would create a GUI product." - Wikipedia

We'd have to look up to see who wrote that Wiki entry, because in fact there has never been any indication (or claim by Jobs, for that matter) that Xerox licensed anything to Apple in exchange for the stock option. Every single personal history, from PARC or Apple, agrees that Xerox simply agreed to give a demo.

Even the very next sentence in that Wikipedia reference talks about Xerox later suing Apple. If Apple was licensed to use Xerox IP, then Xerox would not have filed a lawsuit claiming that Apple had stolen copyrighted ideas from PARC.

It seems we have another linguistic disconnect over the term "meager." I would not regard a 5X return on investment in two years as "meager."

In comparison to the amount of money that Apple (and others) would make off GUIs, a few million dollars was tiny.

So why was the Star/Alto not a success? ...Be careful how you answer, as this question circles back in a key way to the question of "innovation" that the thread started with.

We might was well ask why the Apple Lisa wasn't a success.

Personally, I don't hold to the idea that Apple totally stole PARC's GUI from the two visits. Much of the PARC information was already available.

It's pretty well established that the main reason for the second visit was not just to get more info, but mostly to convince the software illiterate Jobs that the Mac team should be allowed to continue work on a GUI of some sort.

 

[Liquorpuki]

It wasn't a success because the managers at Xerox didn't see what Jobs and Gates did, and they didn't market it to the mainstream the way Jobs and Gates did. It had nothing to do with lack of innovation and everything to do with bad leadership. We can say Xerox was the most innovative user interface developer of the late 70s/early 80s but was hampered by poor management.

So I guess the lesson here is unless you're trying to win a Nobel prize, innovation is overrated

 

[NT1440]

I haven't been there but I'm sure it's mostly design patents (industrial design) and not much to do with new technologies developed in house.

Why don't you actually read before spouting your nonsense? Apple has patents on crazy things you wouldn't even believe. Screens made of pixels that each act as an image sensor is just one of the examples I can pull from my head.

 

[fewlio]

Why don't you actually read before spouting your nonsense? Apple has patents on crazy things you wouldn't even believe. Screens made of pixels that each act as an image sensor is just one of the examples I can pull from my head.

I can draw pictures and imagine things I would like computers to do, then describe it in text and submit it as a patent. It doesn't mean I have any clue how to make it a reality, and in most cases, apple doesn't, either. They are waiting years or decades for others to hopeflly come up with technology that makes their fantasies a reality. Most of those ideas never materialize for lack of tech or practicality.

 

[kdarling]

Apple has patents on crazy things you wouldn't even believe. Screens made of pixels that each act as an image sensor is just one of the examples I can pull from my head.

Clarification: that Apple patent was about image sensors interspersed between screen pixels.

Interestingly, Samsung has shown off such an LCD panel.

Scanning barcodes is one application. The more interesting idea to me was using the tiny cameras to track multiple fingers or pen movements without needing an active capacitive or resistive touchscreen layer.

 

[AustinZ]

Seriously, though, why the **** do I care if Apple doesn't run the equivalent of Bell Labs/Lucent Technologies/whatever it's called now? Is it a crime if Apple doesn't pour millions of dollars a year into basic physics research? Companies source technology wherever they can find it- from in-house research, from buying other companies, or from licensing agreements. But new technology alone is not congruent with 'innovation'.

Any honest person will admit that Apple didn't invent the concept of the MP3 player, the touch-screen smartphone, or any of the other products which have made it successful. But what Apple did invent was an MP3 player that people wanted to buy, a touch-screen smartphone that made surfing the Web from a mobile device enjoyable for the first time, etc.

Sure, some of the things which Apple advertises are not technically impressive. One of the listed Lion features is the ability to choose a solid color for your desktop wallpaper (really, Apple?). But just because Apple chooses to emphasize certain features which might not be technically inclined does not take away from the real, tangible areas in which it's made breakthroughs.

Saying that only completely new technical advances count as 'innovation' is about as narrow-minded as the view this XKCD comic is lampooning. Every electronic devices engineer is only "building upon" the work of William Shockley after all. Every computer architect is only "building upon" the work of Charles Babbage. And every programmer and computer scientist is only "building upon" the work of Alan Turing, Ada Lovelace, etc. Right?

 

[KnightWRX]

Why don't you actually read before spouting your nonsense?

The fact that he keeps repeating "OS X is just Unix" after I explained to him just how little he understood of what that meant should have clued you in to his intentions with this thread.

Hint : Here's here to generate pages. Pages and pages of repeating ad nauseum the same things we have debunked. He probably lives under a bridge and is especially vulnerable to fire.

He's not going to read our posts and admit he's wrong and try to learn something. He's going to do on and on and on until people just decide to ignore him. Which could take quite a while.

 

[*LTD*]

Apple copied the idea for a GUI from Xerox, then cried like babies when Microsoft did the same thing to them.

Magnetic power connectors have been around forever. I have one on my ancient french fry cooker and my hot water boiler. It's a safety issue so no tripping on cords and sending hot liquids and oils all over the place. NOT an innovation!

A Unix based OS is hardly innovative. Microsoft actually has purchased and developed their own proprietary OS codebase. Apple relies on Unix which has been around for what 50-60 years? If anything this shows that Apple is more about chic design and less about technology as just about any tech they have is purchased from other companies and then popped into their products.

iPhone/iPod touch/iPad are not particularly innovative. Palm did just about everything only slower and with lesser screens and graphics. Apple popularized these devices but did not innovate. And do not start preaching to me about the Newton because I don't want to hear anything about that non-device.

I'm not saying Apple is bad...but the innovation is NOT there. They are one hardware maker among many and deserve loyalty contingent on continuing quality. This is written as a wake up call to the kool-aid drinkers and not as a flame or troll post. Basically Apple makes nice hardware that lacks in priceformance. The consumer electronics line being the exception as I don't think their iPods, tablets and phones are priced a whole lot higher than their competition.

At this point none of this makes any difference.

Consumers keep buying Apple gear and keep wanting more and more. Apple gear leads the industry and lights the way forward.

Chalk that up to whatever you like. Fine, don't call it "innovation." Call it something else. "Cheeseburgers." Or "mushrooms." Whatever.

The label is irrelevant. They still are what they are.