[potatolicious]

UI and UX are innovations. The silly notion that only hard, technical inventions with academic papers attached are innovative is the reason why Apple has eaten everyone's lunch up till now.

"Fit and finish" is as innovative as a new algorithm, it's shocking how much of the industry still treats it as a footnote and a detail, despite the entire history of the tech world since iPhone 1 would indicate.

[w1ntermute]

> The silly notion that only hard, technical inventions with academic papers attached are innovative is the reason why Apple has eaten everyone's lunch up till now.

No, the reason why Apple has eaten's everyone's lunch up till now is because they're interested in being profitable, not innovative. The GP is correct in stating that Apple isn't innovative - they just take other people's innovations and monetize them by polishing things up and running effective ad campaigns to gain marketshare among the masses. And there's nothing at all wrong with that - if your primary interest is making money.

[potatolicious]

> "take other people's innovations and monetize them by polishing things up"

The devil is in the polishing up, evidently.

Your post is almost scarily indicative of the industry attitude that has allowed Apple to take over to the degree they have. Only hard, technical inventions are given any respect, and when we talk about UX we call it "polishing up", almost spitting those words out of our mouths in condescension.

Are you seriously going to hold up a clickwheel and say it wasn't innovative? Or the iPhone? Or the iPad? The fact that these products look and behave almost nothing like their progenitor technologies doesn't indicate innovation to you?

It really disturbs me how little respect us geeks have for the people who consume our products. When the general public votes with their wallet in a landslide victory for Apple, we blame them for being easily manipulable by slick ad campaigns and shiny baubles. The notion that Apple has actually satisfied a long-standing demand is somehow not allowed to enter this discourse.

[_delirium]

I do think what Apple does is important, but I don't think profits are really distributed in proportion to contribution, because the final product is an accumulation of work done by different people and companies, but there's no real accounting mechanism to distribute the profits accordingly (patents are a largely failed attempt at one).

The best place to be in business for profitability is to do that last 10-20% that produces a finished product, and Apple is great at that. The worst place is to do the first 50%, basic science which may enable great stuff in 20 or 40 years, but won't do much for your profits today. Hence why much of Silicon Valley is based around mining uncommercialized academic and research-lab work for raw material that can be turned, with additional work, into successful products. I don't think that means the raw material wasn't necessary or important (sometimes even key) to those products, though, so just looking at profits doesn't tell you the story.

[001sky]

The last 20% of the work takes 80% of the Effort

--The 80/20 rule [Old saying]

Monetization does seem to be maximized at a bottleneck or stumbling block. Like bridge tolls. Or that final thing that makes the whole worth more than the sum of its parts. Apple does seem to do both.

[_delirium]

I would say that closeness in time to commercialization is more important than bottlenecks per se: doing research that will enable great products in 20 years is rarely lucrative, because it's difficult to capture any of that future value (especially if it's further out than the length of patents, and often even if it's within that length).

So it's smarter (if you want to make a profit) to let someone else do that, e.g. someone who's paid as a researcher and isn't trying to turn a profit, and instead look for things that are 1-3 years out. You even see it within academia; applied math pays a lot more than pure math, for example, even though both are quite important to mathematical progress.

[001sky]

An interesting example of your case: the Art dealer. Despite doing none of the work of art, they collect 50% of the sale. I think the missing link here is that the effort involve in innovation is S-shaped. [1] Like in your idea of original research, The original idea or creative spark, overcoming inertia. etc. Next, there is a lot of stuff to do to get it roughed out, but many competent people that would not have the genius to originate the idea, can/do help move it along. But then their is finishing and integration, and again for this you need a master (eg, steve jobs). Likewise, with a business. In business, the last step is sometimes looking like the art dealer. A bottleneck? Yes. But being an art-dealer is still a bit of work. They have to make it marketable. They have to market it. There is a needle in a haystack problem. There is knowing about the haystack (rolodex), doing the legwork to meet clients. Then running the shows, exhibiting, writing about the "value" and context of the work. Etc. The pay (like you say) is higher than what seems reasonable. (Although, perhaps not as easy as it seems.)

[1] http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/88/Log...

[cliang]

> "Are you seriously going to hold up a clickwheel and say it wasn't innovative?"

No one's saying that. All that is said is it's not entirely Apple's doing. In this case it was Synaptics.

[upinsmoke]

They helped with the touch wheel, not the mechanical wheel from 1st gen iPod.

[gergles]

And that wheel isn't the "click wheel" which is the touchpad-surface for scrolling and the physical buttons for clicking. The first gen iPod had a mehanical scroll wheel and separate mechanical buttons.

[recoiledsnake]

I wholeheartedly agree that Apple's innovative in getting technology to actually work in a user friendly way and combining them with excellent design but is that process patent worthy is the real question at hand.

For example, how different is the homescreen of the iPhone from this? http://images.yourdictionary.com/images/computer/_PROGMAN.GI... Compared to that, Windows Phone with Metro is much more innovative.

Another problem is that many people attribute things to being invented by Apple because they first hear of it from Apple(and because they don't use non Apple products). For example, I remember when Apple introduced hybrid graphics with a way to switch between the integrated Intel gpu and a discrete Nvidia/ATI GPU. Sony had that working before Apple, but a LOT of folks thought it was Apple that innovated it. Perhaps Apple added more polish to it, but they certainly were wrong.

Polishing and going the last mile is very tough(see OEMs with half baked software and hardware) but does it deserve patent protection? Apple innovated and got awarded with becoming the most valuable company in the world with more than 100 billion dollars in the bank with which they can invest further in innovation instead of indulging in petty patent extortion over petty things like the bounceback effect or linking phone numbers in emails to the dialer.

[czr80]

Design is not how it looks, design is how it works. When you truly internalise that you'll see why that screenshot is irrelevant.

[recoiledsnake]

Design is both how it looks and how it works. If you take the Desktop WIMP UI, and try to come up with a way to redesign it work with only touch instead of mouse and keyboard, you'd roughly be already halfway to the iOS homescreen in terms of design. Instead of clicking on a icon, you touch it and the app opens, swipe to see multiple homescreens since desktop space is limited on a phone, add in a dock at the bottom. Contrast that with Metro. So that screenshot is NOT irrelevant.

[walterkim]

> No, the reason why Apple has eaten's everyone's lunch up till now is because they're interested in being profitable, not innovative. The GP is correct in stating that Apple isn't innovative

This is decidedly backwards. From the start, Apple's focus was creating great products (by their definition of great product), and only later did they learn how to maximize their profit from them. There's a pretty good and influential taxonomy of "value disciplines": product leadership, operational excellence, and customer intimacy. Historically, Apple was good at the first and not so great at the other two. Since Jobs' return, they've really ramped up on all three.

A classic way in which companies undermine themselves is by pursuing profit through cost-cutting rather than improving product/service quality. I don't have any hard data on this, but I suspect that's what happens to intiially innovative tech companies that have non-engineer/designer business types that take over.

[gnaffle]

So other companies are more interested in being innovative than profitable and have decided to not spend as much as Apple on marketing (and polish), and that's the reason why Apple is succeeding?

[lttlrck]

quite...

[mej10]

You make being as profitable as Apple sound so easy.

[mbesto]

> they're interested in being profitable, not innovative

I'm confused. Any rational business is concerned with making money. Profit growth is a symptom of innovation.

> No, the reason why Apple has eaten's everyone's lunch up till now is because they're interested in being profitable

And Microsoft and IBM were not interested in being profitable?!?!

[marbletiles]

Crumbs, if only Dell and Microsoft had been interested in being profitable, just think!

[webwright]

Ugh, by this logic the first person to use drop-down menus should be the only person to use it (without licensing) for 20 years. Or a hover-event on a link. Or a hyperlink. Or real-time form validation. Or neverending scrolling instead of pagination. Or facebook style side menus on mobile devices.

Certainly there is UI innovation, and certainly it can move mountains-- I think arguing that fact is a straw man-- no one is saying that you can't be innovative with UI. We're just saying that most/all of it isn't worthy of patent protection.

[potatolicious]

I think much of our community actually does argue that you can't be innovative with UI (see wintermute's post above).

In any case, the notion that UX is important and innovative in no way justifies the gross abuse of IP law we've seen up till now from everyone involved.

Which leads to...

> "We're just saying that most/all of it isn't worthy of patent protection."

There's a false separation here. IMO almost nothing we do in the software industry is worthy of patent protection, UI-related or otherwise. To point at UI patents and scream foul, while giving a free pass to "real" patents (ones with academic papers behind them) seems misguided.

[erikpukinskis]

> UI and UX are innovations

As a UX designer, the idea that UX can be patented terrifies me.

It's like patenting a specific color of paint. shudders

[fpgeek]

Don't companies trademark specific colors all the time (or at least try to prevent those colors from being used in anyone else's corporate logo)?

[chipotle_coyote]

No, or at least I believe it's more complicated than that. A logo's trademark may encompass the colors used, but that's not a legal maneuver which prevents those colors from being used anywhere else. The point of the trademark is to be able to stop competitors from making "confusingly similar" trademarks for their products or companies. I can make a cola, and I'm certainly not enjoined from using red and white in the colors on my can. If, however, I make a red can and put "Boba Cola" on it in white letters with roughly the same typography as Coca-Cola uses, I'm cruisin' for a bruisin', legally speaking.