RIM brushes off HP fondleslab innuendo
When marketing monkeys attack
You might be sick of the pundits falling all over themselves to pour love on the iPad. You may be sick of the Apple fondleslab. But at least you can recognize one when you see one.
The same can't be said for tablets from other big name outfits. Apparently, competitors have reached the breaking points of their creative imaginations as they try to out-Apple Apple.
HP claims that Research in Motion (RIM) is copying HP's webOS-enabled TouchPad with its Blackberry PlayBook, a device based on an operating system from QNX Software, bought by RIM in April last year.
Neither the webOS-based TouchPad or the PlayBook have shipped, but both companies have been bigging-up their slabs.
RIM chief executive Jim Baisille recently told the gargantuan Mobile Word Congress that RIM would "shame" Apple's iPad, the progenitor of all things slate-like. He did so without actually using the "A" word.
But Laptop reports that RIM's senior vice president for business and platform marketing Jeff McDowell has laid out a strong defense of the PlayBook following a dig by a fellow product-marketing monkey at HP.
HP TouchPad director of product marketing Jon Oakes apparently said: "From what we’ve seen in the market, there are some uncanny similarities. It’s a fast innovation cycle and a fast imitation cycle in this market, so we just know that we have the creative engine here to continue to build on what we have, and we’ll keep innovating, we’ll keep honing and those guys hopefully will continue to see the value in it and keep following us by about a year."
With his response, McDowell takes the long way around the computer-as-car metaphor to explain away the attack:
I feel that we set out from the ground up to define a user experience that we felt would delight our customers, and we landed in a place that may look like other competitive devices. But there was no intention and no preconceived notion that this is what we want to end up looking like. In fact, I think QNX had that design lined up before we even started working with them.
You know, cars over time end up looking a lot alike because you put them through a wind tunnel, and when you’re trying to come up with the best coefficient to drag ratio, there’s one optimized shape that gets the best wind resistance, right? Well, when you’re trying to optimize user experience that juggles multitasking, multiple apps open at once, and on a small screen, you’re going to get people landing on similar kinds of designs.
Maybe the competition really is out of ideas – that is, except for the ones that they're stealing from Apple. ®
COMMENTS
Jobs attended several ...
Xerox Parc courses/seminars and copied some of the things he saw.
Apple was previously in use when he pinched that too, as was the name tablet. Jobs only buys or pays for things he can't get free. Thunderbolt is, as someone pointed out, in use by several computer related companies.
Jobs isn't a saint or a god - as he might learn sooner than later. He is simply a clever but crass business man.
Serial thievery? BTW, how can you copy something that isn't released?
So everyone has no ideas except for the ones that they're stealing from Apple? And just where the hell did Apple get them from? So many of the patent filings with Jobs name on them are prior art. Starting with company name and the IP theft from Xerox. Apple couldn't even copy a rice cooker connector without it burning up!
Still, with the new U.S. legislation coming down around patents maybe some of these claims will fall by the wayside.
And how does RIM get to copy HP when HP's pad is so far off? Perhaps if HP spent less time knocking personalities, starting with Hurd, and concentrated on the tasks at hand they would have a better product.
"And how does RIM get to copy HP when HP's pad is so far off?"
Beta hardware released to blabby early evaluators. Reading the tech press. Looking at patents then changing them slightly so not to infringe. Or they could just take the simple way out - read the glossy marketing releases that HP produced for the device months ago.
There are few secrets in the hardware world. Apple manage the secrecy side of stuff reasonably well, but even they have to pre-release information to third parties to enable all the fluffy crap that goes around the product to be ready in time for release.
Microsoft
I think Microsoft was the first company I had heard of that went out and actually bought the IP from a movie (Minority Report's surface computing that turned into "Microsoft Surface" for those of you guessing). Granted, Minority Report producers found existing research tech to use rather than throwing in something that only works in CGI or in the imaginary-land of stage props....
Prior art does exist before all of them.
They will find Scifi has a lot of prior art long before all these tablet maker companies ever tried to make a tablet. Scifi like Star Trek has shown tablet like devices for decades. Star Trek crew would pass tablet devices to each other all the time in the show. Even the Star Trek consoles on desks and even walls are touch screens and they are not the only ones. The original Tron film had a touch screen desk in it. There are many examples in Scifi of tablets devices with touch screen controls and not just hand held devices, they are even built into the buildings, but still showing the same kinds of design concepts used in today's tablets.
