Has Amazon's enforcing of their one click patent really affected them negatively? Certainly their customers have no idea about the whole ordeal. Have great hackers refused to work there because of it? Would some percentage of hackers refusing to work at a big company like Amazon really make a difference to them? Somehow I doubt it...
I think the same is true of this HTC suit. I'm not sure why everyone is making such a huge deal out of it. The patents probably won't hold up in court, or some of them will and HTC will have to pay Apple N million dollars (like Adobe vs. Macromedia). Everyone will forget about the suit within the year. The only affected people (as one of the Tim Bray quotes suggests) will be the lawyers, who collect their entropy-like tax.
Why would Apple do it if it's truly pointless, you ask? Well, Gruber has a few solid bits of speculation in his penultimate paragraph, any of which might be true, but only Apple knows the real reason.
This is an apples to oranges comparison though because Amazon and Apple do very different things. The thing is that unlike Amazon, Apple is primarily selling a platform. To some real extent, hackers are their competitive edge. (This is somewhat true of Amazon now that they're in cloud services I suppose, but that's still a negligible part of their overall business and has been great PR for them in the hacker community.)
The iPhone before the App Store was either a middling failure or a middling success, depending on your viewpoint, but it certainly wasn't a slam dunk. It was on track to undersell the 10 million projected handsets by the end of the calendar year (about 18 months after launch) even after severe price cuts. See this chart for unit counts: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:IPhone_sales_per_quarter_s...
The green bar marks where apps came in. The app store is most, if not all, of what made it the slam dunk it is today. It's hard to argue that people cared that much about 3G back then, especially AT&T customers.
So alienate the people who make the apps, and you lose a lot of the reason for customers to purchase an iPhone. Hence I'd argue that Apple's image among developers is a lot more important to their success than Amazon's.
It's hard to argue that people cared that much about 3G back then, especially AT&T customers.
Many them weren't AT&T customers. That green bar also coincides with the release of the iPhone in 22 countries (as opposed to only 6 for the original model), expanding by another 48 by the end of the year.
It may not have affected Amazon negatively, but it has affected Barnes and Noble customers negatively. They haven't been able to do one-click shopping for over a decade. (I'm assuming B&N are still unable to implement 1-click under the settlement.)
Certainly it's not something that's on a lot of people's minds, but I think it's a mistake to say only the lawyers will be affected.
There are certain levels that people require to not work for a company and though this action may only stray away a few extremists from wanting to work as the amount of ill actions perceived by the public increases the amount of people willing to let those actions slide will steadily decrease.
I think the same is true of this HTC suit. I'm not sure why everyone is making such a huge deal out of it. The patents probably won't hold up in court, or some of them will and HTC will have to pay Apple N million dollars (like Adobe vs. Macromedia). Everyone will forget about the suit within the year. The only affected people (as one of the Tim Bray quotes suggests) will be the lawyers, who collect their entropy-like tax.
Why would Apple do it if it's truly pointless, you ask? Well, Gruber has a few solid bits of speculation in his penultimate paragraph, any of which might be true, but only Apple knows the real reason.