eve@ssc-bee.UUCP (Michael Eve) (10/18/85)
In all the discussion of visual copyrights, nobody has brought up the plague of spreadsheets. Many of them were clearly Visicalc clones, yet I didn't hear about a wave of lawsuits against competitors. If Apple's case against DRI is so good, I would think the case for Visicalc against its competitors is even better. The reason I bring this up, is that I think the Apple lawsuits (legally justified or not) are bad for the consumer. The spreadsheets now are vastly superior to the original visicalc. I doubt this would have happened if Visicalc could have suppressed competition. Similarly, I think other companies will approve on the Apple desktop metaphor (just as Apple improved on Xerox) while others will merely attempt to copy the most obvious visual features with inferior, underlying implementations. -- Mike Eve Boeing Aerospace, Seattle ...uw-beaver!ssc-vax!ssc-bee!eve
preece@ccvaxa.UUCP (10/21/85)
> If Apple's case against DRI is so good, I would think the case for > Visicalc against its competitors is even better. > The reason I bring this up, is that I think the Apple lawsuits (legally > justified or not) are bad for the consumer. The spreadsheets now are > vastly superior to the original visicalc. I doubt this would have > happened if Visicalc could have suppressed competition. /* Written > 4:28 pm Oct 17, 1985 by eve@ssc-bee.UUCP in ccvaxa:net.micro.atari */ ---------- Apples versus oranges. Visicalc's claim might be better (depends on a lot of things: whether they tried to protect it (by registration or copyright notice), whether it was protectable (it looks a lot like a non-automated spreadsheet), how close the clones were (same keystrokes? same interface actions?)) or it might not. The important question isn't whether they had a better claim but whether they pursued it. Copyrights are not enforced by any agency, they're enforced by the holder. I think Apple would have been a lot better off NOT pursuing the GEM similarities (suppose they had told DRI, "You can go ahead as-is, but you have to say 'Desktop interface copyright Apple Computers.' at the bottom of the screen"?). If we had a real standard for a visual interface we would all be a lot better off. There would be a big market in porting it to other environments. It would gain in respectability. Instead everybody has to try to be enough different that they don't look, at a casual glance, like a Mac (or, presumably, anybody else). That's a waste of effort. Differentiate by features, not by feel. Apple also ignores another possibility. DRI may spend some time thinking about the interface and come up with enough improvement that in a couple of years Apple has to license features from DRI. After all, DRI is selling across markets and is much better positioned to become a standard. Consider the relative number of PC-clones and of Macintoshes. One would think that Apple's best shot at penetrating the business market might have been to get DRI to license the exact Mac interface. Then in six months, with a significant number of PCs running GEM, the Apple marketing people could have come to corporate accounts saying "Look, your people already know how to use our interface. Why not slip our 68000 behind it -- smaller footprint, higher resolution screen, and a cheap network for department-wide laser sharing." -- scott preece gould/csd - urbana ihnp4!uiucdcs!ccvaxa!preece