Just like Microsoft, Apple's evolution from smart tech company to global uber-brand contains the seeds of its own destruction
Apple came close to destroying its business in the late 1980s by pursuing a suit against
Microsoft
claiming that Windows infringed the look and feel of the Mac desktop
metaphor. Apple focused its hopes and business future on this lawsuit,
while its market share dwindled. Rather than competing, it litigated.
And lost.
Last week, it
litigated against Samsung over its iPhone design and won.
The
first justifiable conclusion might be that big companies get their way.
The second might reasonably be that Apple doesn't change much: its
business model remains aggressive self-righteousness. The third is what
everybody knows: patent rules and philosophy are all screwed up.
As
for the first point, Apple is not just a big company, but the biggest.
And it is not just the biggest American company, but the
most
American company. It has entered a rarefied brand status in which it is
now almost synonymous with American virtue: American as Apple. Its good
design sense has become a major point of American pride, if not
nationalism.
The brand is a national asset. Apple is AT&T in its
pre-break-up from; it's GM, in its
what's-good-for-General-Motors-is-good-for-the-country stage; it's
United Fruit when it made
US foreign policy; it's Microsoft when desktop
computing was transforming the world.
Commercial omnipotence
This is about as close to
commercial omnipotence as it gets. Its unassailability, its right to be
preternaturally aggressive, is built into its share price. We believe in
Apple. So let us briefly consider the chance for a Korean company
defending itself against (or, perish the thought, challenging) the
greatest American company of the age in the eyes of an American jury.
And
then, there's the self-righteousness. Apple is one of the most
aggressive intellectual property litigators of all time. Its major moves
have not been about protecting precise technical innovations, but about
claiming the much softer zone of look and feel.
It sues for brand
rather than engineering. It has pioneered a new modern sensibility:
taste is what's most valuable; identity is king. It's sued about the
lower case "i"; it's sued about the word "pod"; it's sued
New York City
over the "big Apple"; it's sued over using the words "app store".
This
fierce defensiveness might be rightly understood in a psychological
sense: Apple itself is based on stolen iconography. There was first the
Beatle's Apple and there was
Xerox PARC's desktop design.
Apple's
self-righteousness masks its guilt. (It may be sheepish, too, about
being more of a marketing organization than a technology company.)
What's more, it knows better than anybody that if you relax your
vigilance, somebody can easily walk off with what you've done – and
improve it.
And then, in the algebra of
Samsung's loss and Apple's victory, there's patent hell. Or absurdity.
System of litigation
Patents
are, arguably, no longer a system of protection; they are a system of
litigation. Great numbers of patents are now filed, in an over-burdened
system, to protect not innovations but the right to litigate over
innovations. Indeed, any patent of value will ultimately be litigated.
What's
more, as the system has become ever more over-taxed, as technology
itself has become more complex, the ill-equipped and under-trained
bureaucracy has increasingly taken to giving patents to wide-ranging
abstractions.
Design concepts, behavior adjustments, and new approaches
to problem solving are all patentable innovations. The system itself
assumes that litigation
is the check on the system. Which means, fundamentally, that the litigant with the most resources and greatest status wins.
But
let us not argue the case that all this quite obviously impedes
innovation and is part of a new unreal property land grab – not about
technology at all, but about intellectual property: an effort to
privatize much of what was once understood to be shared and public
(indeed,
not ownable, like the
shape of the
iPhone). But rather, for a moment, let's look at this as a form of hubris that has inevitable consequences.
The
Apple that has won against Samsung is the same Apple that lost against
Microsoft. In other words, it is the kind of company that, through sheer
willfulness, discipline, and perfectionism, can achieve brand hegemony
of a singular type. But it is, too, the kind of company – the exact sort
of company – that becomes, perhaps inevitably becomes, the bete noire
of consumerists, regulators and, of course, most of all, its
competitors.
This is the story between the lines of its great
victory and its further share price surge. On the one hand, there is
this seemingly golden company. On the other hand, there is anybody with
any sense of history knowing this is going to end badly.
American capitalism
Companies
that acquire the nation's imprimatur often, if not invariably,
over-reach. It is a characteristic of American capitalism: the price of
getting really big and overbearing is that you incur an inverse
reaction. In the early 1990s, an ambitious department of justice (a
Republican administration DOJ at that) commenced its assault on
Microsoft.
For better or worse, by the time the feds were finished, the
company, with its rotten operating system, besieged and beleaguered, had
become just one of many not-very-adept players in the space – an
unimaginable outcome if you remember the once God-like power and
scorched-earth wrath of Microsoft.
Apple, and its rotten phone, have a ways to go. But karma should not be underestimated as a factor in this game.
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