Steve Jobs Thought He Owned Ideas

A biography of Steve Jobs will be out next week, and journalists with advance copies are punching out blog entries and news stories about some of the contents. In one newsworthy bit at Ars Technica, Ken Fisher reports that Steve Jobs said at a meeting with Eric Schmidt about Google's Android operating system for smart phones, "I want you to stop using our ideas in Android, that's all I want."

Well, now, we'd all like for our competitors to stop using our ideas, and leave us with a monopoly. But I think that would leave Apple with problems of its own, because a lot of the ideas used in their devices have been used by others, and invented or conceived of by others, even though those ideas may not have appeared in a smart phone. It is highly unlikely that the iphone component ideas were not thought of by someone, somewhere else. So to be fair Apple would have to stop using most of the ideas embedded in the iPhone.

For example, I am reminded of the hand-held computers used by the characters in Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's classic science fiction novel The Mote in God's Eye. If we were to use this principle of Job's, the their phone should be called the Niven-Pournelle phone, and Apple would be paying royalties.