patents, China now feels strong enough in IP that it now has seen the
light and is becoming a vocal advocate of patent law.
Perhaps the most famous “theft” in tech history is at the root of
Apple, when Steve Jobs turned Xerox’s unfulfilled vision of a mouse-
driven, graphical desktop into the industry-changing Macintosh.^3
Like Lowell and his contemporaries, who improved upon British
designs and powered them with the vast resources and growing
population of the young United States, Jobs saw Xerox’s GUI had the
potential to explode the PC market beyond what even his massively
successful Apple II had achieved. The GUI could create, as Apple
famously put it, “the computer for the rest of us.”^4 This was something
Xerox was never going to do, was never capable—institutionally,
strategically, philosophically—of doing.
So, Apple merely takes innovations developed elsewhere and uses
its better “marketing.” Sort of. It’s certainly the case that Apple has
bought or licensed many of the technological underpinnings of its
current leadership position, from Xerox’s GUI to Synaptics’ touch
screens to P.A. Semi’s power-efficient chips. The point is not that
young companies just “steal” things to become great, but that they see
value where others don’t, or are able to extract value where others
can’t. And they do so by whatever means necessary.
Con #2: Not Stealing, Just Borrowing
Another way the Four cheat is by borrowing your information, only to
sell it back to you. Google is a good example.
Google was founded based on mathematical insights about the
structure of the web and the nature of search, but it became a
horseman based on the founders’ (and Eric Schmidt’s) insight that
information could be given away free with one hand, while made very,
very profitable with the other. Marissa Mayer, then an executive at
Google, sat before Congress and told a bunch of mostly white, mostly
old, mostly men that newspapers and magazines had a natural
obligation to let information be crawlable, sliceable, query-able, and
searchable... by Google.^5 Stories provided by Google News, she said,
“are sorted without regard to political viewpoint or ideology, and users