Steve Jobs famously once quoted Picasso as saying: “Good artists copy; great artists steal.” And by that metric, Apple is a lousy artist.
Apple is stolen from by just about everybody. Microsoft and other companies steal design and interface ideas from Apple’s OS X. Cell phone handset makers steal Apple’s iPhone design elements. The new tablet market is essentially Apple’s iPad plus the tablets that steal ideas from the iPad. Everybody has stolen Apple’s approach to app stores.
There’s a difference between stealing ideas and stealing intellectual property. Stealing winning general approaches to doing things like multi-touch gestures on a tablet device is good. Stealing the code to do that is bad.
Microsoft has long been accused of stealing Apple ideas in the many designs of Windows that have occurred over the years. Windows has tended to be more challenging to use than OS X over the years, and Windows products tend to be less elegant. Because of all this, Apple fans often dismiss Microsoft as a company without innovation.
In fact, the opposite is true. Microsoft’s research wing is an under-appreciated engine of invention, in my opinion. And while Microsoft fails to productize some of its best inventions, it’s also occasionally successful at implementing new ideas in real products.
I’ll go further. Apple and its customers would benefit enormously if Apple were to steal the following five key ideas from Microsoft.
