Technology firms on ‘litigious rampage’ stifle consumer choice

After Apple filed 10 lawsuits in a variety of countries against Google, claiming patent infringement, it seems Facebook’s launch of a mobile web platform this week, which is a direct challenge to Apple’s (and others’) control of their ecosystem, may ring in another round of what some fellow bloggers call the company's "lawsuit rampage".

Of course you can argue that Apple just puts upon everyone else what has and is being put on them by others. A simple online search reveals the multitude of suits and countersuits, class actions, trademark infringements and even libel disputes the company has had to fend off over the years by anyone from the Beatles and patent trolls to consumers, resellers and, of course, competitors large and small.
 

While Apple seems to be the most active and gets most of the publicity lately, other tech firms are not slow to unleash lawsuits on anyone, particularly if it throws a spanner in the works of its competitors’ operations. Think about Oracle’s patent infringement lawsuit against Google over Java last year, or the 2009 action Skype’s ousted founders brought against eBay over key P2P technology that was not part of eBay’s purchase of the VoIP provider in 2005.

Technology as an industry is heavily dependent on innovation and in an increasingly saturated world even the smallest new feature can potentially mean a big difference on the balance sheet. It is understandable therefore that technology companies are concerned with protecting their assets. But I wonder if rather than spending time and money sparring – often in vain – with their peers, companies should concentrate more on delivering the products and services that attracted consumers to them in the first place.

One of the reasons tech companies increasingly choose a legal option may lie in the confusion between patents, which can include proprietary rights, and copyrights, which can’t, leaving a lot of room for interpretation. In addition, with business interests now firmly being played out on a global scale, different countries, court systems and their respective interpretations of law further muddy the waters.

Tech companies are of course not the only ones finding themselves facing a court room over copyright issues. The slipperiness of its definition was recently demonstrated when Australian band Men at Work lost a law suit that alleged their 1981 world smash hit “Down Under” ripped the signature flute riff off a popular ditty written in the 1930s. While as far as I am concerned the flute riff is as close to “Kookaburra” as Doris Day is to Rihanna, the courts had a different opinion and the band now has to hand over 5% of profits from the 1981 song to the publishers of the 1930s song.

Back in the tech world, one of the more interesting copyright decisions the courts have handed down over the years is actually Apple vs Microsoft concerning certain GUI elements. Apple lost on the grounds that the GUI elements were either unoriginal to Apple, or were the ”only possible way of expressing a particular idea”.

This bears certainly similarities to Apple’s current court clash with Samsung over the latter’s Galaxy tablet, which Apple says looks identical to its iPad. But Apple is not the inventor of the tablet computer and a touch tablet has to have a rather large screen as much as a car has to have a motor. And here’s the crux: It’s the difference in horse power under the hood, quality of materials used and varying ranges of gadgets available that not only make a car, but every technical device unique and recognisable. Apple so far has been exceptionally successful in transforming itself from an equipment manufacturer to a true entertainment company that owns almost its entire ecosystem. This, not sleek design or form factor, is first and foremost the reason why the company is such a trail blazer and the envy of every telco and equipment manufacturer that keeps struggling to move up the value chain.

Technology may be a vastly complex field when it comes to copyright and intellectual property issues. However as the users of the technology that’s being fought over just now, we have to ask ourselves what is in our best interest. As the saying goes, consumers win with competition and lose when competition is stifled, which is what these lawsuits essentially are aimed at.
 
Looking at how many suits got retracted or thrown out over the years on the grounds of being baseless, litigious companies’ actions increasingly look like vengeful tantrum throwing rather than serious attempts at minimizing purported commercial damage that is based on provable offences. As the creator of the Java technology Oracle and Google fought over last year put it so succinctly, these types of lawsuits are all about ego, money and power.

He’s got a point. With success rates for these types of lawsuits checkered, it is questionable whether the vast legal fees generated by them warrant the outcome. So when excessive lawsuits bog down the courts and new products are being kept away from consumers during lengthy appeals processes, the only winners – no surprises here - seem to be the lawyers.

What has all this to do with hospitality? Well, plenty. In a world where there is a chance that a particular technology, feature or piece of hardware may no longer be available and thus no longer supported poses a risk to providers and consumers alike. It underscores the importance of a flexible approach when deploying technology. Think about the anxiety Google’s purchase of Motorola Mobility continues to cause handset manufacturers that use Android as their O/S. Despite Google pledging its commitment to its handset manufacturing partners, I am sure some of them are looking at a plan B should Google claim the monopoly on Android for itself.

So designing your system as open as possible will go a long way to safeguard your technology platform against not only litigious companies and their well paid lawyers, but also against unexpected shifts in technology trends.

The Limits of Using Icons as a Visual Vocabulary

It was just the other day when we looked at coming up with a new set of Icons for our in-room entertainment Graphic User Interface that it occurred to us that while the various technology devices that anchor our lives these days allow us to communicate ever more visually, our collective reference points are more and more fragmented. From the old Egyptians and their hieroglyphs to today’s Apps, mankind has always sought to use pictorial descriptions to communicate. When you study for your drivers licence, you have to memorise the look and meaning of as many road signs as possible in order to pass the test. In order to make it easier, the road authorities around the world came up with pictorial representations of the various signs which over the years were adopted more or less universally in the developed world. But while learning the meaning of these signs came with a clear incentive – i.e. learn them or don’t drive – the visual identifiers and pictorials that guide so many other things in life evolved much more haphazardly.

The windows approach to computing was probably a major milestone for making icons a centre piece of way finding in our daily lives. In the early days of the desktop computing age, these icons were necessarily simple, but not only because of the graphic restrictions, but because of the need for a simple conduit into a complex world that would be understood by the most technically inept person. The artist who created the icons for the original Mac desktop and applications believed that icons should work like traffic signs and convey information without distracting the user. So born was the ‘folder’ icon with the little stub poking out that looked exactly like the ones stacked in everyone’s office desk, alongside the ‘recycle bin’ that looked like Oscar the Grouch’s trash can, the pair of scissors that signaled that you were about to ‘cut’ something and a paperclip that meant you were ‘attaching’ a document. Then, when the internet came of age, the depiction of a neat little house with a chimney wasn’t an advertisement for a furniture shop anymore, but the icon that signified the homepage of an internet site. All of this is of course common sense and has largely managed to align most of us along one common path of iconography that enables us to recognise that a shopping cart icon means “check out” a pad lock means “security” and an umbrella has something to do with the weather.

However, what happens when the corresponding physical object has no longer any distinguishing features that are so important for being both instantly identifiable and minimally distracting? Or what if the activity it is meant to represent becomes too complex for a clear pictorial representation? A house is a house is a house is a home – ok. But take out your mobile phone and look at the symbols on the buttons for making a call and ending a call. It’s the old fashioned banana-shaped head set that was part of the home phone before it was replaced with a very different looking hands free set or a mobile phone. Or try saving something on your computer and you’ll see that this action to this date is symbolized by a floppy disc, something that joined the technology scrap heap more than 15 years ago as other portable storage options such as CD-ROM took over.

But it was when I was sitting with my graphics team to ponder a new set of icons for the User Interface of our in-room entertainment system that it really hit me how little the pictorial representation of our world has changed in the face of the relentless evolution of our communications world. How better to represent TV channels than a box with the old rabbit ears on top? And nothing says “movie” better and clearer than the old 35mm movie reel, even though today’s box offices smashes are more likely a combination of digital video and CGI. Music channels are much better represented by a full blown stereo headset rather than the now more prevalent micro earpieces. And what says better “you’ve got mail” than a good old fashioned letter envelope? It will be interesting to see if these ‘old’ pictorials finally disappear simply because a new generation of users has no longer any memory of them ever being in existence. But what will replace them? The problem is that as the physical part of human interaction and communication gets more complex, so by necessity does the iconography. What was once a clearly defined activity, such as “I watch TV”, has morphed into “I Skype my friend on my connected TV”. “I read the news in the paper” is now more likely to be “I read the news on my smart phone”. The question is at what point finding a universal visual vocabulary for ever complex activities becomes futile. Some icons will move into the abstract space where the meaning is instilled through what is commonly known as branding. We can already see this with Facebook, Skype and Twitter, whose logos have effectively turned into icons describing an activity.

But what about the so-called ‘way finding’ icons? At the risk of sounding a little nostalgic, my bet is that while newspapers may go completely digital and TV’s become multifunctional communication devices, their original form and purpose will live on in the world of icons for generations to come. And as for our User interface? In the end we decided to do a combo of words and icons. Nothing beats a good compromise.