Steve Jobs threatened to sue, says former Sun CEO Schwartz
No one’s ever happy to see marketplace battles transported into the courtroom. Still, there’s plenty of backstory here and quite a bit of it’s unflattering for Jonathan Schwartz, the last man to helm the one-time tech powerhouse.
Steve Jobs is known as an unyielding perfectionist that gets his way. Here’s the odd case where the Apple CEO threatened the nuclear option and then was forced to back off.
Former Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz writes in a blog post that Steve Jobs threatened to sue his company back in 2003. The bone of contention was Sun’s Project Looking Glass, which the Apple boss said was “stepping all over Apple’s IP” and that if Sun commercialized it, “I’ll just sue you.”
Sun countered by bringing up how similar Apple’s Keynote presentation software was to Concurrence. Further, Schwartz also pointed out that Apple’s then recently minted Mac OS X stepped on intellectual property in Sun’s own Unix operating system, which had years of standing and a huge portfolio of patents to back it up.
“Steve was silent,” Schwartz said.
That’s not something you don’t hear every day — the Apple CEO being rendered speechless.
Lessons learned
Thereupon, Schwartz goes on to bring up the issue of Apple’s patent lawsuit against Taiwanese smartphone maker HTC, and by implication, Google, which the former Sun CEO says, “…seems like an act of desperation, relying on the courts instead of the marketplace.”
Dastardly, maybe. But I don’t think desperate captures Apple’s motivations.
When Microsoft copied the look and feel of the original Mac OS back in the day, Apple waited far, far too long — essentially giving up its intellectual property — before it chose to litigate. That is, the last time Apple waited to act, the marketplace rewarded theft and left the company on the verge of bankruptcy.
This time, rather than wait for a flood of cheap, “good enough” knock offs, Apple’s going on the offensive early in the game. I’m not suggesting Cupertino’s correct in this approach, just that now’s the time to act if they hope to prevail.
Trampling out the vintage
Also, who would be surprised if Schwartz had a technology industry tell-all book on the market some time soon? Further, it was Schwartz who negotiated Sun’s acquisition by Oracle, which can be viewed both as the best deal available to shareholders at the time and the company’s final capitulation in a war they had lost long, long ago.
A book, sour grapes or something else? Whatever the case, da Nile is still a river in Egypt and there’s probably more to the back story than Schwartz is letting on…
What’s your take?
via News.com
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