The problem is that people are shooting the messenger and focus on a guy living by his words which is quite unusual.
The same happened here where most comments discuss stallman and not the actual matter of the post.
This is a nice list of sourced documentation about facebook dangers, I happen to maintain one myself for future reference and it is quite useful to have.
to actually focus on the linked article however - this isn't just an opinion but an actual reason why Facebook has lost its huge earlier momentum of use and user signups. though there's quite a big social network inertia, over time its going to be hard to justify the high-profit 'all your personal information is ours to sell and market' model.
That doesn't save time, it works directly against this by reducing it to a bunch of superficial funny bullets, it's an attack on preserving privacy, as usual. Let's talk about the article at least a little bit if we're going to talk.
Just wanting something that works is the same as having nothing to hide is the same as not understanding or caring about privacy.
He's pretty nuts. I met him when he spoke at my university a few years ago, the CS department invited him and had a reception with RMS for CS faculty and students only. At one point, a retired faculty member asked if he had any suggestions for convincing his bank to make their website Firefox-friendly since his wife didn't want to switch.
His suggestion was to lie to his wife and switch anyways...
Half the students at the speech got up and left (not kidding) when he put on a halo, proclaimed himself the Jesus Christ of Software and started auctioning off a stuffed gnu.
Add in his tirade about how evil the university IT department was for requiring authentication to access the network and you had a very pissed off administration the next day.
"Half the students at the speech got up and left (not kidding) when he put on a halo, proclaimed himself the Jesus Christ of Software and started auctioning off a stuffed gnu."
Wait, what?! I can only imagine that's like a car crash where you don't want to look, but you just can't tear yourself away from it.
It was bad. Literally no one responded to his auction, the room was dead silent. After a minute one guy offered ten bucks out of pity and that was the end of the auction.
I've seen a real nerd (the guy that got the big companies to do tcp/ip in Sweden, I'm not going to write Googleable names) do an ass of himself in a similar way.
I happen to know that he considered that "funny". I'm willing to suffer his sense of humour; he is a national treasure, imnsho. The same goes for rms, I guess.
Everyone everywhere buys stuff based on how it has been sold to them. Not the individual or company selling the thing, but more the way the story of the thing has been told. Call them "foolish buyers" if you want, but this is how the majority of people make decisions. I suspect Stallman protests it by increasing his extremism as a response to it. That causes many people to dismiss him. The end result is that it is a disservice to his causes.
Many people do lots of foolish things, but that doesn't justify doing foolish things. Making snap judgements about people based on irrelevant criteria has been a failing point of humanity since well before you and I were born; thankfully, we've come a long way in civil liberties and in making progress on abolishing slavery, women's suffrage, gay rights, etc. The problem there was clearly more widespread than here, but the symptom is the same -- humans aren't very good at being open minded.
Yes, I understand that it's a fault in humanity, that people's decision-making skills are compromised by completely irrelevant factors. I'm sure I'm just as guilty of it as anybody else.
The point, for what it's worth, wasn't to call the parent foolish, but to point out that disregarding a good idea because the messenger isn't your favorite is, plainly put, silly. As individuals, we should be mindful of the needlessly silly things that we do, and try to be better than that.
I get the feeling that you might be talking about Stallman's appearance, whereas I am talking about his behaviour. I think more people can see past appearance than can see past unsociable/rude behaviour. Pedantically insisting that people call Linux "GNU/Linux" for example. If you were running a business, you wouldn't do that to your customers, right?
add to the above quote that the guy literally sneezes and he is front-page on HN and some hundred thousand linux/OS related forums... Which means that he is the exact opposite of a nobody in the tech community and you have a good bargain reading what he says.
I don't mind Stallman, but to decry all boycotts and competition-of-personal-values is itself foolish. We should care about who gets our money and our attention.
I can see your point about vendor discretion, but that's not really the same thing. I try to avoid companies whose values do not align with my own wherever possible. In many cases, I even consider my opinions to be well founded, or even informed.
That said, I still understand them to be value judgements, and while I'm happy to discuss those values to whomever, it isn't my place to push my values onto another, and it would be silly of me to ignore the good aspects of somebody because they also possess aspects I consider to be negative.
Moreover though, it is foolish to discount good advice because you don't like the source. It is, I believe, the height of pettiness, and should be avoided at all costs by pragmatists.
I don't mean the projects. I mean the ideas he is trying to convince people of. Take for example his stance on DRM. What does success look like, or rather, what does it not look like? You might be able to argue moderate success in music (iTunes switching to DRM-free, but Spotify having DRM), yet in books the wide acceptance and love of Amazon's Kindle indicates a lost battle.
But you might also say the same about convenience. It doesn't make sense to completely ignore either of convenience or freedom in pursuit of the other. Most people are pragmatic about it. They compromise some freedom for convenience, and compromise some convenience for greater freedom.
Most reasonably informed people should agree that the [software] world is a better place because rms is in it. And not only for gcc, emacs, etc.
The rest is just a question of how many years before today he is, this time. (And yes, sometimes the world he is years before isn't our planet. But his hit statistics isn't bad.)
It is. His contributions have been immeasurable. He is a classic representation of how one's presentation doesn't equate to one's contribution. Something we all battle with at one time or another in the software industry. As rough around the edges as he can be his underlying message should be undoubtedly considered.
His views may be extreme, but they are extremely well thought out, well justified, and well argued (as long as you don't count user-friendly presentation and being nice to people as necessary requirements for arguing well). He's not wrong about what he says and believes, and he's extremely consistent about that, but his priorities are a lot different than most people's. And the world's a better place because of his influence on many less extreme people with different priorities. Plus he has a great sense of humor, if you don't let him get under your skin: http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/text/rms-vs-doctor.html
How precisely are his views extreme? The criticism of Stallmans opinions (as opposed to his behaviour which is another issue) I have seen unfortunately boil down to the fact that people can not even imagine sacrificing the smallest of their conveniences for any kind of moral reasons, and consider any suggestions of resigning from them "extreme". It's like the Louis CK sketch about the favourite thing, but with Facebook or whatever:
I no more have to subscribe to your morality as your ideology.
I'm not a bug Facebook user, but it has nothing to do with privacy. I've always known some random engineer at Facebook could read my posts, and assumed it was not a stretch for the government.
You prefer to give up conveniences because of fear of govt. I'm still much more afraid of the random engineer, but think the convenience is worth it (maybe).
Come to think of it, this is true of many causes. I recall the LGBT and atheism movements: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YxdM1WChHc (She says at some point that despite the infightings, radicals and moderates actually complement each other.)
There's something off about that cosy consensus view, quite apart from the fact that it is so open to manipulation. It's basically highly conservative and only accepts the status quo.
The reality is that what may have seemed a completely out there view can become the new normal within a surprisingly short time when the environment or culture changes. Apart from politics, you see this in everything from fashion to music, business etc. (e.g. predicting the death of print or record shops, or 'did I really think I looked good in that - what the hell was I thinking?')
I feel like he could reduce the crazy vibe by hiring a web designer to overhaul this page. Well-designed crazy usually looks a little more sane than poorly designed crazy.
In my opinion his page is quite well designed. It's easy to navigate, it's obvious whats navigation and whats content. The page is very readable, you see links easily. The page loads fast and is responsible in the sense that it usable on all devices and clients i tried (including my phone and w3m in a terminal).
I guess what you mean by "well-designed" is more colors and and images, but i prefer his page over those ajaxy blogspot-themes, which get completely unusable if you are on a phone-line-connection in a remote area, and a few other pages. And that even though i have nothing against good modern css in general :)
Needs more parallax. I feel like I'm reading or something: I get the annoying sensation of thinking. I want to feel like the internet is washing over me and flowing through me. That I am one with magic electrons and the thought-beams of narcissists and sycophants.
I don't know. Most of the stuff on the page is factually correct, although a number of entries are sensationalized. If it's crazy, I'd argue it's 2nd-amendment-advocate-crazy, not timecube-crazy.
It's a site designed on behalf of a man who, as I understand it, would rather use some complicated web scraping/emailing scheme to view websites than even touch a web browser.
It is probably exactly what he intends the web to be. Or at least his little corner of it.
You should have stopped there. Removing Cyanogenmod may not be it, but the rest of your post just opens it up for pointing out how Google is just like Microsoft.
> How many operating systems or web browsers did Microsoft open-source?
Red herring. Selling software and Operating Systems is Microsoft's core business, and you expect them to give it away? How much software that is the core of Google's business has Google given away? I see nothing of the search, advertising and distributed systems infrastructure being open sourced.
> How many forks of their software did Microsoft tolerate?
Hah, why don't we ask Acer that? The moment there's any leverage at all, Google will use it to squash forks. Conversely, has Microsoft ever tried to stop WINE or ReactOS? (Honest question, actually, I don't know.)
Now let's ask some more relevant questions:
1. How many times has Google been investigated and fined by the FTC and DOJ for illegal business practices?
2. How many times has Google been investigated by US and EU government agencies for privacy breaches?
3. How many times has Google been investigated for anti-competitive behavior in the US and the EU?
4. How many times has Google been accused (and sued) by smaller companies for unfair business practices?
5. How many times has Google been accused of intentionally providing poor support for a competitor's product?
6. How many times has Google been sued for infringing somebody else's IP?
7. Has Google been sued by Sun for "hijacking" Java?
8. Has Microsoft been made to pay damages for abusing standards-essential patents?
9. Has Microsoft been sued for colluding in anti-poaching agreements?
Some things Google has escaped (e.g. antitrust in the US), and some don't apply to Microsoft (abusing FRAND patents, anti-poaching collusion, illegal pharma ads), but most apply to both: investigations, settlements and fines in the US and EU for anticompetitive conduct, privacy breaches and illegal business practices; accusations of crippling competitors' products (Netscape etc. for Microsoft, competing service providers like Yelp, YouTube/Maps on Windows Phone for Google); accusations of stealing IP and unfair business practices (e.g. Apple's UI lawsuit and i4i for Microsoft, Author's Guild and SkyHook for Google); and so on.
Anecdotally, having been privy to some negotiations with Google in two separate companies, they very much throw their weight around.
> I wouldn't even bother responding to stuff like this, but it's getting upvoted on HN which is depressing.
As much as you'd not like to admit it as an employee -- and it may not be apparent to the rank and file from inside -- there are very clear parallels in how both companies behave. Google is certainly throwing their weight around these days, which is precisely why Microsoft was hated in the 90s.
> Google is certainly throwing their weight around these days, which is precisely why Microsoft was hated in the 90s.
Not really. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with "throwing your weight around," as you put it. For example, that's exactly what IBM was doing when they decimated SCO's absurd lawsuit.
Microsoft was hated because they aggressively pushed out competitors in dishonest ways, because they intentionally made it difficult to interoperate with their software through proprietary protocols and file formats, and because they attacked open source.
Some of your questions directly illustrate why "throwing your weight around" can be a good thing. Did Sun/Oracle accuse Google of "stealing" Java? Yes, but do you really want to live in a world where people can copyright APIs, thereby giving creators of popular APIs a large amount of control over everyone else? I surely don't (and I say this as someone who has dedicated literally years of my life into designing APIs) but Oracle and Microsoft would like that world.
I don't "expect" Microsoft to give away anything, but the fact that their business model depends on tightly controlling it makes them an inherently less open source-friendly company than Google.
> Microsoft was hated because they aggressively pushed out competitors in dishonest ways, because they intentionally made it difficult to interoperate with their software through proprietary protocols and file formats, and because they attacked open source.
To me that sounds a lot like "throwing their weight around" :-) As my post hoped to show, Google simply does it in different ways.
Well... if you believe Yelp, the SkyHook lawsuit and various antitrust complaints in the US and EU, "pushing out competitors in dishonest ways" is something Google is doing as well. And we all know how interoperable YouTube is with Windows Phone devices. And we saw how Google pressured OEMs into not supporting competing software (cf SkyHook, Acer).
So maybe not that different after all.
> Some of your questions directly illustrate why "throwing your weight around" can be a good thing.
No doubt Microsoft supporters will say the same thing about Microsoft's antics :-)
> Did Sun/Oracle accuse Google of "stealing" Java? Yes, but do you really want to live in a world where people can copyright APIs, thereby giving creators of popular APIs a large amount of control over everyone else?
Well, that's the purpose of IP, isn't it? If you create something popular that others find very useful, you deserve enough control to ensure proper compensation.
Otherwise you get what Google did to Sun. Sun sank millions in developing -- and billions in marketing -- Java to make it the dominant development language that it is and to create, out of nothing, a huge Java-savvy workforce. Google, to bring developers to their new platform, simply hijacked the ecosystem with nothing in return to Sun (now Oracle). Of course, Sun was very careless in its control of Java, but I think Google derived immense benefit from Sun's investment and is being extremely selfish in insisting on not respecting their rights.
> I surely don't (and I say this as someone who has dedicated literally years of my life into designing APIs) but Oracle and Microsoft would like that world.
I too have devoted years of my life designing APIs. I see little distinction in the creative effort that goes into either code or API, and I think both deserve equal protection.
In fact, personally, I see Google's world as worse than Oracle/Microsoft's world. Google's arguments in the Oracle case, taken to their logical conclusion, literally remove support for all copyright protection for software. Part of their argument is that APIs are not copyrightable because they're "functional". You know what else is functional? All the code in the world!
But then, Google's software remains locked away in data centers, away from the world's eyes, further protected by trade secret. Of course, it sees no value in other types of protection, only liabilities.
Me, I'd rather live in a world where valuable works cannot be taken without permission, especially since a lot of my work is exposed to the world. I've open sourced a lot of stuff too, but which of my work can be taken freely should always be my decision.
> I don't "expect" Microsoft to give away anything, but the fact that their business model depends on tightly controlling it makes them an inherently less open source-friendly company than Google.
There's nothing intrinsically wrong with being a "less open source-friendly company" either.
Also, by my dangerously semi-informed understanding, B&N's defense looked really weak (see previous comment on same topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6540902). I'd still like a real attorney to weigh in on my opinion, though.
So I really don't buy the "B&N scared Microsoft into bribing it" story. To me, it seems more like a "B&N tried a Hail Mary shot at getting an antitrust thing going against Microsoft, and when that failed miserably, they sold a cheap stake in their ebook business" story. Consider that ebook content is something Microsoft's ecosystem didn't (and still does not) have compared to Apple, Google and Amazon's ecosystems. Consider also that this ebook content comes without the lawsuits and publisher-wrangling the others had to go through.
So, $300M for a quick entry into a market where its competitors are incumbents seems like Microsoft got a pretty decent deal, and I think that patent lawsuit provided leverage.
Hmm, since we're on the topic, and IIRC you have experience in these matters, could you take a quick look at this comment of mine, and let me know if my take on it is inaccurate: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6540902
Essentially, I looked at B&N's reply to Microsoft's complaint and it looked really weak to me. I wanted to know if my evaluation is wrong.
As an aside, the whole thread above that comment is pretty similar to this subthread.
Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer. I only went about 98% of the way through law school (I decided I'd rather be a programmer who knew a fair amount of law than a lawyer who knew a lot about programming, and never got around to completing a paper for my last class). I did get a close look at the whole patent suit process later, when a patent that I am a co-inventor on ended up involved in a lawsuit (not of my choice or with my approval), so I got to be deposed a couple times, answer a lot of questions from lawyers, and spend a month living in an annoying hotel in Texas for the trial, and while there got to talk a lot with the lawyers. If an actual lawyer steps in here to answer, take whatever they say over whatever I say.
OK, now that the disclaimer is done (and is longer than my answer, which will probably make people doubt my claim to not be a lawyer!), it looks to me like your take is accurate. Their answer does not give much detail.
Your speculation in the last paragraph, that this is normal for answers to complaints, is also correct I believe. The complaint and answer are not where the parties start to argue the case. The complaint is to tell the court what wrong you think was done to you, and why you think the court has jurisdiction over the defendant and over the subject matter.
The answer is to tell the court which things in the complaint that you concede are true, which you claim are false, and which you cannot answer at this time because you do not have enough information.
Basically, the complaint and answer together let the court know what it is dealing with.
The meaty details start coming in when the suit gets to the stage where the parties are filing pre-trial motions for things like summary judgement on various parts of the complaint, and later when the trial actually gets underway.
Ahh, that is very helpful, thanks. So my evaluation of their answer was premature, but I guess no more premature than those who would take it as an indication that "B&N sure showed Microsoft".
The low end is being destroyed by "white box" Android phones from China. There is simply no way to compete with them on price since they do not have to develop software and sell nearly at cost. This will be the same with high end phones soon as improvements level off and it becomes commoditized. I think that mobile phone manufacturers will have poor to no margins quite soon. The only place to make money now is through the ecosystem.
I'm not sure that was bunk in Nokia's case. When they realized that Symbian had to go, they also realized that the vast bulk of the company was organized around that one OS. And if sources are to be believed, most of that deadweight was fiefdoms jealously guarded by entrenched groups, which meant they were not going to be conducive to "pivot" to a new direction. Now they had to shed that humongous deadweight and produce a competitive "modern" smartphone. I think it's entirely possible that in that situation whatever resources you have left, you may well have no choice but to bet the farm.
Nokia may have used Android to force Microsoft into a buyout, but I doubt they were going to seriously pursue it, for one big reason: that would have entailed compulsorily licensing Google Maps, which is a direct competitor to their own mapping division. You may think that doesn't sound so bad, but consider this:
1) It dilutes the billions they paid for Navteq.
2) As the SkyHook lawsuits have shown us(IIRC) Google demands all location data produced by Android devices to improve their own geo services. As such, Nokia would have ended up building devices that end up improving a competing service.
3) Considering the mapping division is one of only three divisions Nokia held on to, it's undoubtedly important to them long term. I am not sure, in their eyes, the pros of having an Android phone out there would have outweighed the cons of improving a competing mapping service.
Re Skyhook: Google has made no such demand on any OEM. Google demanded Moto not replace Google location services with Skyhook. Many Android phones have shipped with, e.g. Verizon's location services and maps.
Based on what has appeared in commerce, you can run, and preload if you are an OEM, any competing service on an Android device. But Google draws the line at denying Google data from their own apps. Seems reasonable.
> you can run, and preload if you are an OEM, any competing service on an Android device. Seems reasonable.
...that's only kind of true. OEM's who are members of the Open Handset Alliance are prohibited from producing devices which run forked versions of Android. This is why Amazon has so much trouble finding manufacturing partners to produce Kindle devices.
So OEMs can load competing services onto Google supported Android devices. They cannot produce devices which run flavors of Android not supported by Google. This seems less reasonable.
Google may have allowed Verizon and AT&T maps because, of course, they are the ultimate gatekeepers. But they still demand data for their own services and forbade SkyHook completely. The article lays it all out.
In light of that, your point agrees with mine: Google did not allow denying their apps with data, which sounds reasonable for Google. But for Nokia that would be selling phones that improved the service of a direct competitor. Google certainly forbade SkyHook from getting any data, so very likely Nokia faced the same problem, which would have meant they'd be giving Google data without being able to use it themselves.
I have read the available Skyhook litigation documents in detail, and I have worked with multiple location services APIs in Android and other mobile devices. I don't want to argue about every point in detail, but Google isn't demanding location data from other location/mapping/location-services stacks. If you really have you own whole location ecosystem, as Nokia does, Google won't go after you because you could make a good case that is, in fact, anti-competitive in an illegal kind of way. So I do not think "But for Nokia that would be selling phones that improved the service of a direct competitor." is correct. The Skyhook case is about changing the way the Android location APIs work, and those are NOT part of AOSP.
Bottom line, though, if you stepped outside of Google's constraints, like replacing the Android location service internals with Skyhook and keeping the data to yourself, Andy Rubin would personally leave a horse's head in your bed. The article says "Skyhook claims Google uses the threat of incompatibility to act anti-competitively." Which is the less nice way of saying if you don't follow Google's rules, whether or not they are spelled out in any contract, they will make it impossible for you to sell Android-based products with Google's ecosystem. Whether that is actually anti-competitive, is, of course, the subject of that litigation.
One thing Andy Rubin knew is that carriers can be dicks, and being a dick to carriers and their OEM partners, to the point of threatening with losing access to Android products is something he did not feel apologetic about. He learned that at Danger.
It's too bad Skyhook ended up in the middle of that. I have my own stories to tell about OEMs afraid to use interesting technologies because of the AFA, and the way Google used it. Some people think Google's behavior is similar to a case where a mainframe software maker got RICO'ed for bundling.
Many people are making the leap from "access to information" to "better lives" without proper explanation of how that would work. Sure, for us it's obvious, but we're not the demographic Gates is talking about. The poorest of the poor have drastically different problems, and it's not obvious to me that they're something information can solve. "Student researching school report" seems like a good example, but much of this demographic don't even have the opportunity to go to school. And considering a full 50% of India lives below the poverty line, that's a humongous demographic.
And whatever problems can be solved by information, the poor are already making do via cheap mobile phones and their own ad hoc social networks. Which is probably the only thing that's viable for them, considering many can't even read properly and so speech is the best form of communication for them.
You could say that Internet access will create new industries and opportunities and the economic benefits will "trickle down", but 1) the timeframes are much larger (as Gates says), and 2) in my limited experience, very little seems to trickle down below the lower middle class. In fact, in India, the lower classes decry the "IT outsourcing" revolution, because prices went up across the board because the middle class suddenly had more disposable income. This did create a bunch of new jobs in the service industry, but on the whole the price increase only made things worse for the very poor.
Funny you mention "not being able to go to school" as a problem that can't be solved by the internet, because with all the knowledge that's in there, someone with time and motivation can really get a lot of the benefits of a school. Knowledge is the power to stand on the shoulders of giants and optimise your way through a tough situation. At least that's one way it could work. This isn't just about school reports.
I also mention illiteracy. They lack even the basics to grasp any knowledge they could find online, or the capacity to imagine how they could use it, let alone being aware of what "online" is. My point is that their situation is so drastically alien to us, that ways we imagine they could leverage information simply does not apply to them.
For instance, the basics beyond food and shelter. Something we take for granted, like, say electricity, is not easily available to them. To get them Internet, you have to first get them power.
And then you have to convince them to let their kids peruse the Internet, because that's not going to earn money for their next meal, whereas going out and working in the fields or a construction site is.
The ironic thing is, many of them are aware that education is important, but in a very shallow way: to them, if it doesn't come with a degree attached, it's a complete waste of time. Not only is that mostly true for their situation, they lack the foundation to even imagine that they could actually apply the knowledge themselves to improve their own lives. Education is the ticket, but it's so much more complex than "here's the Internet, go learn."
It's hard to appreciate their situation until you spend enough time in the poorer parts of a third world country and see this day in and day out.
I'm on a mobile device, so I cannot research as much as I'd like, but this is just a patent application, not an issued patent, and more encouragingly, a quick glance at USPTO pair shows that is was abandoned in 2010. It was abandoned following a non-final rejection by the examiner.
Now it doesn't mean that it's dead for good, since abandoned applications can often be revived, but given that it's Microsoft, who has enough resources to pursue even trivial patents, and that it has been 3 years since it was abandoned, I'd be cautiously optimistic.
On the other hand, it has been referenced by a bunch of other patents, indicating they cover similar subject matter, so you should look into them too.
PS being open source won't save you from infringement.
Let me argue why I think this is patent is not too bad, and actually interesting in some ways not typically discussed.
First here's the broadest claim (formatted for readability):
A non-transitory computer-readable medium that stores instructions executable by one or more processors to perform a method for attracting users to a web page, comprising:
instructions for creating a special event logo by modifying a standard company logo for a special event, where the instructions for creating the special event logo includes instructions for modifying the standard company logo with one or more animated images;
instructions for associating a link or search results with the special event logo, the link identifying a document relating to the special event, the search results relating to the special event;
instructions for uploading the special event logo to the web page;
instructions for receiving a user selection of the special event logo; and instructions for providing the document relating to the special event or the search results relating to the special event based on the user selection.
It's certainly not revolutionary, but patents rarely are. It was filed in 2001 and finally issued in 2011, being rejected multiple times along the way. That may have been partly due to them trying to claim too much and partly the "reject by default" unofficial policy then-director Dudas had instituted within the USPTO during his reign. (Patent practitioners encouraged to chime in here.) Nevertheless, what has emerged is not really too bad (for a certain perspective of "bad") because it's a) pretty narrow, and thus, b) highly unlikely to infringe by mistake. As such, this is not a good example of the patent system being broken, even though at first glance it does not seem very novel.
But I could also make an argument for novelty! Google Doodles probably is pretty novel because Google was -- as far as I can tell -- the first company to systematically modify its logo this way. Sure, several brands modify their logos once in a while, e.g. during Christmas, but Google took it to a whole new level, and in doing so, cultivated a fun and carefree personality for their brand. There's an interview with an early Google employee where he says he was horrified by this practice because it went against everything he was taught in Brand Management 101. I know nothing about brand management, but if true, it makes a case for non-obviousness. Furthermore, this undoubtedly system fulfills the title of the patent, because many people, including myself, often visit the Google homepage just to check out the doodles. It's undeniably a beneficial feature for their business.
Unfortunately, "systematically modifying a company logo to create a fun-loving brand perception" is not what they patented. For various reasons, such as being a business method and a rather abstract concept, such a claim would be difficult to get through. (Yes, even in the USPTO.) Maybe they tried anyway, which may be why it took 10 years to issue. But what they actually got was the claim above, which is simply a collection of steps to change the company logo during special events and link it to search results that really only applies to web search engines. It says nothing of the execution and artistic chops required to pull it off properly. It says nothing about brand management and the unique brand perception it created. There are only certain things a patent can protect.
And I'm honestly not sure why Google worked so hard to protect this with a patent. There are easier ways to inflate a portfolio, and even if we assume it to be a "good" patent, it's worthless. Because after 10 years and tens of thousands of dollars put in, Google now has a patent that nobody else will infringe simply because it's something that probably only Google can pull off with their brand.
- He's crazy!
- But he's right!
- Right? He's just been stating the obvious all this time!
- NSA surveillance!
- Hadn't anyone heard about Echelon?
- He stands for freedom of users!
- But users don't care about those freedoms, they just want something that works!
- He's antisocial and extremely rude!
- Autism spectrum.
- But he's not diplomatic at all, we don't want him as a spokesperson for Open Source!
- It's GNU/Linux, not Linux.
- See? It's nitpicking things like GNU/Linux that make even open source enthusiasts hate him!
- Only the userland is GNU anyway.
- GPL!
- Emacs!
- GCC!
- HURD!
- Toejam.