A few words on Apple

I just watched Steve Jobs' 2004 WWDC keynote speech, which was awesome. Apple and Jobs are the ultimate example of a company that takes new technology and markets it really, really well. It's really inspirational to see all of the new technology Tiger has to offer, and the ingenious, logical, and user-friendly ways in which Apple's packaging it for its users.

One big sour point though: two of the big new features in Tiger are very similar- nearly identical, in fact- to existing Mac applications. The Spotlight search functionality is remarkably similar to the shareware program LaunchBar, and Tiger's Dashboard functionality is a BLATANT rip-off of Konfabulator.

This is very, very bad.

LaunchBar and Konfabulator are awesome products- truly revolutionary programs- that were created by developers who were creating programs that harnessed the best of Mac OS X. It was Mac OS X that allowed these apps to be created. This is good. And Apple should certainly be picking and choosing the best third party utility apps for inclusion into the OS.

But Apple has got to be doing this with the cooperation of their developers, as opposed to stealing from them. Apple should have either hired the Launch Bar and Konfabulator programmers, paid them a licensing fee, or at least acknowledged their groundbreaking efforts before coopting their features.

The fact that Apple has ripped off its own developers so blatantly goes a long way toward destroying the good will of a community of people who is uniquely qualified to recognize just how awesome Apple is in the first place. It's developers like the folks who created LaunchBar and Konfabulator who harnessed the unique features in previous versions of the Mac OS to create truly unique programs- but they won't do it any more if they fear their products are only going to be stolen.

They're poisoning the well.

While we're on the topic, a lot of what made the Mac so revolutionary in the first place was ideas that originated at XEROX.

What Apple is amazing at is marketing innovation. But they must not steal the innovation that they market. Failing to realize the distinction could be Steve Jobs' Achilles Heel.