As my closer friends know, I’m not an Apple fan. I think that Apple is a really arrogant company and I think that they are handling their competition incorrectly. It reminds me of how Microsoft was operating many years ago, though Apple seems to get away with it while Microsoft receives a lot of discredit for everything they do.
Apple
Apple was always a niche market in my eyes. That changed around the time the iPhone was released. People loved it and to be honest, I liked the idea. What I didn’t like about it was how many restrictions were placed on what you could do with it. Some of the restrictions (like not allowing third-party web browsers until 2009) were just absurd. Also the price-quality was way off, you needed a special subscription with your mobile provider and you had to pay more for the device. While at that time I just didn’t want it, I actually started to hate Apple after the first time they sued Samsung.
Galaxy S lawsuit
Apple claimed that Samsung stole the look of the iPhone. This, however, was debatable. The Samsung F700 had the same look and it was announced just a month later. A month isn’t enough time to completely redesign a phone. Especially when you don’t know if it will be worth it.
Now I have to say, the phones look very similar and I just can’t say Samsung stole the look.
Now, how does Apple think Samsung should fix it? Simple!
- Front Surface that isn’t black.
- Overall shape that isn’t rectangular, or doesn’t have rounded corners.
- Display screens that aren’t centered on the front face and have substantial lateral borders.
- Non-horizontal speaker slots.
- Front surfaces with substantial adornment.
- No front bezel at all.
Samsung’s tablets:
- Overall shape that isn’t rectangular, or doesn’t have rounded corners.
- Thick frames rather than a thin rim around the front surface.
- Front surface that isn’t entirely flat.
- Profiles that aren’t thin.
- Cluttered appearance.
Slide-to-unlock
Another thing that I can’t understand is why Apple got the slide-to-unlock patent. There was actually a phone that did this before Apple, it was the Neonode N1m which was released 2 years prior to the iPhone.
[youtube_sc url=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tj-KS2kfIr0″ theme=”light” autohide=”1″]
Apple vs. the World
Apple really started suing a lot of makers. HTC, Samsung and many others were the target.
Microsoft
Microsoft has done a lot of suing in the past and did some nasty tricks. A Microsoft Exec put it nicely:
O’Brien says that Microsoft has changed so much that this mistrust is based on misconception.
“I’ve seen two dynamics going on,” he told Business Insider. “One is a negative perception of the company based on biases from a previous life/experience.” The second is “just a lack of awareness of what we are doing in the platform that is interesting to a bunch of developers out there trying to build apps and make money.”
He adds: “A lot of developers weren’t even around during those days. They weren’t out of grade school when a lot of biases were being formed.”
Microsoft has also adopted many non-microsoft technologies in, for example, Azure including:
- Java development tools including Eclipse.
- The open source NoSQL database MongoDB.
- The open source search engine Solr/Lucene.
- The open-source analytics project Hadoop.
Also Microsoft supports jQuery, it even funds it.
Now I don’t say that Microsoft isn’t a mean company at times, I just think that they are way better than Apple at the moment. They still have their tricks such as the following:
[youtube_sc url=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TDbrX5U75dk” theme=”light”]
[youtube_sc url=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k4EbCkotKPU” theme=”light”]
It makes me wonder, why oh why can Apple do nothing wrong and why does Microsoft do “everything” wrong?
