Dear Tim Cook: Apple is not the world's tech inventor

Found on CNet News on Friday, 27 April 2012
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Jobs was outraged over Android's similarities to iOS. He branded HTC thieves and said he was "willing to go to thermonuclear war" against Google over what he called "grand theft Android." Now, CEO Tim Cook seems to have picked up Jobs' outraged-victim torch, saying in Apple's earnings call this week that the rest of the tech industry is drafting off Apple's innovations and failing to "invent their own stuff."

When Apple detailed the new features in the then-forthcoming iOS 5, the mobile OS was obviously playing catch-up with features inspired by (if not actually lifted from) other mobile platforms: pull-down notifications (Android), iMessage (BlackBerry Messenger), and on-screen notifications (Windows Mobile and others).

Yet there stands Cook, and Jobs before him, bristling with outrage over Android, full of fury and loss-aversion over the alleged rip-off of multi-touch and the iPhone interface. And yet both cheerfully ignore the fact that Apple's patented multi-touch technology was mostly acquired in 2005, in the form of a company called FingerWorks -- not invented at all.

Things always look different when someone else does them. For Cook the others are stealing, but when Apple does the same it's called innovation by inspiration.