Damn, I’m so fucking tired of hearing from the moronic tech geek IT community every time Apple rolls out something that they didn’t invent it.
First of all, who gives a shit. Apple (generally) isn’t in the invention business.
What Apple does is takes a look at the market, sees what’s out there and determines what they can vastly improve from its origins. Very smart, by the way.
The first in a market is usually the first loser. Apple cannily avoids this mistake and usually turns out products that are 5x better for less than 1.25x the price.
The tech idiot community always has this attitude that if Apple didn’t invent something, it didn’t have anything at all to do with it.
Improving something vastly and/or making it where it doesn’t require a PhD in computer science to use counts for nothing, apparently.
I do think it’s good to bring down the big tech inventors mythology. When someone recognizes that success wouldn’t have been possible without a great deal of public investment, their interest in corporations and rich people paying reasonable taxes increases.
That’s definitely not the point most of the people you’re talking about are trying to make, but recognizing that it takes a lot of people a long time and a lot of unprofitable work to get to a place where an Apple or Google is possible is a first step.
Agreed — I can’t remember whether it was something I linked to on my other blog or just read, but someone pointed out that everything Apple, Google, Intel and so many other companies have achieves has been built on the back of “unprofitable” government-initiated and funded research done during the 1950s-1970s.
Most people have no idea of this because of the mythos built around tech companies, not knowing the basic research was not — and never would’ve been done — by them.