Yes, it can be this, or it might be as well exactly what the press releases says. In other words, Apple is to arrogant to pay licensing fees for what other are already paying.
"Nokia has already successfully entered into license agreements including these patents with approximately 40 companies, including virtually all the leading mobile device vendors, allowing the industry to benefit from Nokia's innovation."
So no need to forget about it :), if our fate does not put us on the path to a big sugar mountain, I am sure there are other smaller sugar hills that we can find on our own :)
The article in my opinion does not say much, but the following paragraph caught my attention:
>>"In the end, the best way to test whether you have a ‘must have’ product is to threaten to take the prototype away from your early users," says Rakowski. "If they don’t riot, start again."<<
Is this really doable? How can you threaten to take the prototype away?
I would say even more, every product has to be first a "nice to have" and hopefully for you to become later a "must have". Nowadays in our society we already can live a very comfortable life, there is no real "must have".
I support my point here saying that we already have a product that saves you money, but not a single person that I have talked about it was impressed by this feature alone. Instead the other way round if they like the product and I tell them about the cost saving it is a serious factor for them to decide to adopt it.
The two things I would learn from this story are: 1) to be prepared for the success. As someone said, be prepared for the time when all your ten thousand customers tell their, maybe, thirty friends about how good is your service. 2) Find always the good side of bad things. For example a competitor can simply emphasize your strong points and (as you said here) increase the market as a whole.
I guess this is why we like this story even if we do not really believe it.
The title of the article is "Rational Irrationality" and not letting the system to crash now, seems to me (and to many others) very irrational.
"too big to fail" syntagm does not look good either to the author of the article, in the end he says:
"As memories of September, 2008, fade, many will say that the Great Crunch wasn’t so bad, after all, and skip over the vast government intervention that prevented a much, much worse outcome. Incentives for excessive risk-taking will revive, and so will the lobbying power of banks and other financial firms." ... "The next time the structure starts to lurch and sway, it could all fall down."
Bailing out big companies is not capitalism as we learned about it. And the bottom line is it hasn't crashed now, the governments did not let it crash. Whether this is good or bad, I guess we will see in the future.
The main point to argue here is that in this case the patents do not protect an invention they protect a "reasoning process", a concept (or several). In mathematics once you know and understand the solution, even for the most complicated problem, the solution becomes obvious. (The same happens with any cognitive process.)
If for example one of the days I teach my students the mathematics behind MPEG and if I am a good teacher, then the very next moment the MPEG algorithm is obvious to them.
On the other hand the implementation of an algorithm can be complex and laborious and it is worth being protected, but this is done by copyright. (Nobody should be allowed to copy-paste code unless the author permits it.)
But I must admit that I somehow understand your point here. Let's say that someone discovers such a smart concept that is worth being awarded with a temporary monopoly, even if we protect a cognitive process. But in this case he already has the monopoly! The only thing he has to do is not to disclose the idea to others. (The algorithm is a trade secret in this case.) Eventually the secrete will be revealed, maybe by reverse engineering, but the company in discussion already has profited on its temporary monopoly. (This is natural protection for software if I can say that. Not the same case for a device invented in 18th, at that time all you had to do was to open its box and copy the mechanism inside it. Here patents are fully justified.)
Trying to find out what is the exact patent protection period I have found what Jim Warren said on "Public Hearing on Use of the Patent System to Protect Software Related Inventions" Wednesday, January 26, 1994 San Jose Convention Center, and this is exactly my point:
"(6) Reduce the protection period.
Issue a finding that 17-year software protection patents are
clearly unreasonable where, in an industry where significant
innovation can often be created in months, most innovation
has minimal costs relative to traditional inventions,
manufacturing and distribution is trivial, products can be
shipped within weeks of being finalized, great profits can be
attained in less than a year, the life of a product typically is
only a few years, and all of the growth of the industry, from
inception to Diamond vs. Diehr in 1981, was barely three
times the 17-year monopoly period.
Shorten the one-time protection period to no more than,
say, two years. Sui generis is justified."
To conclude my long post, sorry for that :), I must say we are developing products that make use of audio/video compression techniques and I needed to develop and implement several such algorithms and I can say for sure that software patents were not at all helpful for me, on the contrary, they only gave us head aches.
I am just curious if there is anyone here able to point a single useful outcome of software patents. I am a software engineer and I can not find any good in software patents. Copyright laws and trade secrete are enough to protect our work.
You should know that a startup does not mean you do all the time only the things you like. Besides writing code (which is the best part :) ) sometimes you need to do customer support, boring paper-work, leave the best party to restart your servers, even clean your office by yourself. And may other things I can not remember right know...
My advice (well, others said this before, but my experience confirmed it) is to build your first product the way you like it. If you are happy with the product and you really enjoy using it then you already have one customer :). And I am ready to bet others will come.
On the other hand trying to fulfill every customer wish and implement all features users suggest is not every time a good idea. Usually it leads to an over complex product that is not well adapted to "young markets" of "untrained" customers. Is like trying to sell them a dvr enabled TV set when they just learn how to change channels.
When your competitor has raised $8M in funding and you barely have $50k you get the feeling that it is not a fair competition. (And it can not be fair, no matter what you say...). But when your product gets better reviews, you suddenly become more optimistic.;)
Leave personal feelings and your ego aside, if you do that the other might do the same and you might reach an agreement.