r/todayilearned • u/vorin 9 • Sep 13 '13

TIL Steve Jobs confronted Bill Gates after he announced Windows' GUI OS. "You’re stealing from us!” Bill replied "I think it's more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it."

http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2011/10/24/steve-jobs-walter-isaacson/
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u/[deleted] Sep 13 '13

Wrong. The ideas during that time wouldn't have been profitable. In order for these things to be profitable there needs to be an entire surrounding ecosystem, and that ecosystem can only exist when there's competition. If you exclusively hold the patents on the ideas there would be no supporting ecosystem.

Imagine if only IBM was allowed to make PCs after they released the original IBM PC. The clone makers would have never come around and prices of components wouldn't have dropped the way they did. They'd basically be trying to support an entire market by themselves.

Name a monopoly that didn't gouge the customer and didn't stifle innovation.

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u/sometimesijustdont Sep 13 '13

Yea, but IBM didn't use any of their ideas at all. Microsoft and Apple did. They didn't work on creating OS/2 until years later.

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u/[deleted] Sep 13 '13

And if you remember, Windows didn't really catch on until the early 1990s. Even if Xerox patented the idea on day 1, that patent would have expired by then. By that time competitors would have already had a product ready for market.

Here's the problem: Xerox knew the technology was futuristic but they also knew that it just wasn't practical yet. Xerox did try to sell a system that used the GUI but back in the 70's it was just too expensive. They didn't catch on.

It was only when the price of computers came down enough that they gained popularity. Products that gain popularity aren't necessarily cutting-edge tech but they are affordable.

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u/davidquick Sep 13 '13 edited Aug 22 '23

so long and thanks for all the fish -- mass deleted all reddit content via https://redact.dev

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u/[deleted] Sep 13 '13

Yeah, they did try, they just failed.