The responsibility of innovation
So recently Rob, our Managing Director, has acquired an iPad 2. Despite his previous suggestions that he thought it was too much of a toy, he still relishes in showing off its abilities to me, an Apple sceptic and an Android enthusiast.
A large basis of this banter revolves around the fact that there is no Android contender to the iPad on sale in Australia. I agree. I’m not an Android fanboy. I agree that Android 3 Honeycomb feels like an incomplete, rushed experience. In fairness, it WAS actually a rushed, incomplete OS. Google were required to release their tablet OS in sync with Motorola’s Xoom tablet. The fact that Google has not released the source of Honeycomb supports the fact that they weren’t happy with it. They were required to fork their code to support the tablet and they have only recently (with the release of Android 4, Ice Cream Sandwich), been able to merge the code back to one OS for both phone and tablet.
All in all, it annoys this statement ‘there’s no Android equivalent to the iPad’. There is! The Samsung Galaxy 10.1. Where is it you ask? It’s wrapped up in law suits with Apple regarding its release in multiple countries, including Australia. Only Apple has the financial might to cause such a situation.
So this is where I introduce the notion of ‘the responsibility of innovation’. I’m not going to get stuck into the theory of innovation; Google can help you search for a better description than I can write. What I’m interested in is the responsibility to release innovation to society. Not to selfishly keep it confined to the financial advancements of a single company.
What annoys me the most about Apple suing Samsung over the Galaxy Tab, is not the fact they did it. If Apple has become that petty, that’s their problem. It’s the fact that it is being blocked.
What if IBM had managed to block Phoenix from releasing its reverse-engineered BIOS? Where would our industry be now?
Although I don’t own an Apple product, there’s no way I can say that they innovate the way we use technology, but they are succumbing to corporate greed. They are not completing the cycle of innovation; they are not wholly releasing their innovations to society.
It saddens me to think that Apple have become the exact conglomerate entity that they were initially trying to separate themselves from by ‘thinking differently’.
If ‘think different’ is ‘monopolise a market’, then Apple has failed to innovate.
It’s already been done...
