Herman, Louis, Blinx, Michael; you folks put up some great posts.

The problem with the patent system is that it is currently protecting a lot of processes and ideas that don’t really fit with its original purpose. It has required increasingly deep understanding of a wide variety of fields to make those distinctions properly, and the patent office has largely punted.

That’s why the iPhone is years ahead of the LG Prada, and why Windows will always feel like an inferior version of the Mac OS.

It’s easy to dismiss an innovation. All you have to say is that someone else thought of it first while ignoring the effort necessary to make an idea practical. The desktop on Xerox’s Star looked nothing like or worked like the Macintosh. The Xerox “mouse” looked like a trackball. The Mac’s desktop was much better and more practical than the Star’s. And the Mac cost $2,500 while the Star was $15,000.

Besides, Xerox got its idea for the Star from Bart Engelhard’s seminal work in the fifties and sixties. Apple only got a one day show and tell for its million dollars in stock. It got no hardware designs or software. Apple had to go and innovate its own way of doing things and Apple’s way was often better. The point is that it is damned hard to get things right so that they are useful in ways that no one else dreamed of. The Macintosh did that. Apple continues to do that.

The iPhone will do that, too. Why? Because it’s nothing like the other smart phones. It’s a computer more powerful than most from five to ten years ago. It has a shortened version of Mac OSX 10.5 in it. There is little that the iPhones won’t be able to do, eventually. Mostly, the iPhone will expose how rotten the current Smartphones are. And it will do it in a way that seems intuitive. People will ask, “This seems so easy. Why didn’t phones work like this before?” A lot of hard work and thinking are necessary to make things appear easy.

Great design, good looks, near perfect execution, ease of use and fine craftsmanship are nothing new, but they are damned rare.

Bravo, Apple, you did it again.

If it were easy to do what Apple did, then why weren’t the Smartphones designed like this, years ago?

You really need to do some research, not just repeat FUD. If the Mac interface was a simple rip-off of Xerox Park’s ideas, then why would anyone get credit for airplane flight or why not have DaVince get credit for the helicopter after all he drew a crude drawing like one.

This brain off pablum no doubt excites the anti-innovation, anti-patent and anti-Apple zealots but truthiness does not make truth unless your a moron like Bush.

You stated that “Apple was able to commercialize its technologies into a sleek mass market product and non-patenting firms were not.” I assumed you were suggesting that Apple’s patents allowed Apple to commercialize its iPhone, and would not have been able to do so otherwise. If that’s not what you were suggesting, then what was your point?

Whether Apple will be more likely to invest in the diffusion process because of the exclusivity enabled by its patents is something we can witness in real-time, if Tim continues on his Apple binge.

Its difficult to pin-point direct causality in innovation. Granted, the American capital market/VC system, education system, specialty research centers and patent system contribute to innovation. But none of these alone would facilitate innovation.

I was not claiming that Apple would not have created the iPhone without patents. Rather, I was commenting on how your post suggested that Apple has successfully commercialized a set of technologies in which it holds patents. I was just saying its hard to read how you were making the argument that patents were not important to Apple.

PS- I would argue that patents will enable Apple to improve on the iPhone. Lets wait and see.

Invention, by itself is not as important as innovation. F. Scott Kieff, in the paper you talked about earlier, argued that society will benefit more from the commercialization of inventions (which turns them into innovations) than by inventions themselves, because of: 1) positive externalities resulting from the diffusion, refinment process, 2) consumer access to new technologies.

I would not downplay invention as being necessarily easy either. Note that the creation of early Internet technologies took place only with billions of dollars in DARPA funding, and entailed several decades of improvements until DARPA enlisted private firms to help refine the technologies.

PS- I don’t see how your post relates to patents. For instance, one can take either your post or Masnick’s post, and use them to support the role of patents; since Apple was able to commercialize its technologies into a sleek mass market product and non-patenting firms were not.