This is also an argument against a strictly enforced and restrictive patent system. If inventors are incapable of turning their inventions into viable products, then the broader economy and public interest may actually be best served by allowing others to make use of those inventions without punitive licensing terms. I'm not anti-patent, but it seems to me the current patent system is far from optimal.
It's not basic research then which is what most people understand under 'research'.
Steve Jobs adopted Mach when he started NeXT because it was available and good at the time. If it hadn't existed, he would have gone off in another direction. If C, hadn't existed he wouldn't have used something else. People on HN always bring these up but they fail to realize that Steve would have simple done something else.
> The WSJ reported that between 2004 and 2007, Nokia outspent Apple on R&D by a factor of 9 ($22.2 billion vs. $2.5 billion).
It's worth noting that Apple's $2.5 billion had a pretty big impact. Mobile computing as we now enjoy it was arguably ushered in by Apple. Focused contribution is still valuable.
While I know that the economy isn't zero-sum, the pie can grow bigger, etc, it also does happen that a very successful company can weaken or kill its competition, or at least force them to focus more on the short term themselves, so in way, they might be.
Bell Labs' saying "no bucks no Buck Rogers" sounds great, but how did they implement that idea?
Jobs' statements about scarring, animals, and macrocosms do not convince me he's right about focusing on customer's problems, even if his approach at the time worked out well.
EDIT: Jobs disappointed at least two actual NeXT users I knew who really liked the NeXT.
http://www.opensource.apple.com/
Can't argue Apple's contributions rise to the level of Bell Labs (that's the gold standard of research groups). But WebKit, for example, certainly has been leveraged to great effect outside of Apple.
You're completetely wrong. Steve would have simply come up with another solution, or used a different technology. The original Mac wasn't C or Unix based.
(The old post for reference: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7304693 )
By opening a statement with "Wrong. Absolutely wrong" or "You're completely wrong" you are being unnecessarily argumentative and confrontational. That's really not a positive opening for a discussion.
Look at one of the cited examples:
> AT&T had Bell Labs, created Unix, and never made a successful product out of that work.
Which, sure, OK. But on the other hand, ask yourself where Apple (since we're talking about them here) would be today if Bell Labs had never existed. Bell Labs invented UNIX; no UNIX means no BSD, which means no NeXTSTEP, which means no OS X. Bell Labs invented C; no C means no Objective-C. Bell Labs invented the freaking transistor, without which the idea of a "personal computer" would have been utterly ridiculous. These are all fundamental inventions that made entire generations of tech businesses possible.
So one way to look at it is Gruber's way, that skipping out on R&D means that Apple is "focused." Another way to look at it would be that Apple is a freeloader. That they cheerfully take useful things that are only available to them due to the generosity of others to build products on, without seeing a need to ever be the generous ones themselves -- to replenish the commons that made their own fortune possible.
That's probably good business, at least in the near term. If there's a pile of gold sitting out in the town square, you'd be a fool not to grab as much of it as you could for yourself. But unless someone's throwing new gold onto that pile, eventually it's going to run out. And if you've used the gold to set yourself up as a goldsmith, that's going to be a pretty bleak day for you. You know?