> I don't even... what do you expect Apple Legal to innovate?

Apple Engineering creates great products. Apple Legal pays private security firms and complicit local officials to storm journalist's houses. Apple Engineering is trying to create a reputation as a great place to work, Apple Legal is scaring away engineers left and right. Apple Legal plays dirty, Apple Engineering and Design talk about the nobility of great products.

> The tech crowd doesn't get that a local meritocracy where the best phone wins optimizes existing things, like making a better keyboard or improved battery life, but it doesn't often lead to an iPhone or other revolutionary change. A pure merit-based market actually punishes innovation -- if you spend years and a billion dollars researching HCI, form factors, etc and your competitors just copy you then you are competing with a billion dollar hand tied behind your back.

I'm not sure how Apple hasn't been rewarded for their efforts. What more, exactly, do they need? They've gone from 0 to a lead in smartphone marketshare, dictating the discussion and product form factors the entire time. The entire industry turns on the axis of Apple's release cycles. Their product, "iPad", is practically the "kleenex" name of the post-PC era. They have an incredible stockpile of money, goodwill, and clout in their local government.

Do they also get to make spurious patent claims left and right now, and expect everyone to take them seriously?

> Is this particular patent valid? Maybe, maybe not... it doesn't really matter.

I am pretty sure it matters a lot, as there's nearly $100m in bonds being laid out.

> What really matters is that unless Apple's competitors need to compete much more effectively in order to make up for their lack of innovation then the market has failed.

But they _do_. Please note how many big players in the market have simply been crushed because of their complete inability to adapt to the market forces Apple brought to bear. Nokia? Pif. Blackberry? Swirling down the drain.

Android is only where it is because the remainder of the industry banded together and formed some kind of freakish multi-headed alliance which barely works and has taken twice as long to even begin to compete. And it's taken a ton of money and engineering time dumped in by Google to keep the project from imploding.

The problem, ultimately, is that the patent system is broken. It should not be possible to patent such obvious variations on interface tropes as "search as you type... from multiple sources... also on a phone!" It _should_ be the case that Patent holders get punished for writing broad patents (so that more things qualify as prior art) rather than the current situation where patents receive almost no vetting at all and are seldom challenged.

I'm not sure how much advantage Apple should get for being the first mover, but at some point competition will exist. We've had years of Apple sitting on an epic pile of money and not hiring engineers while the entire valley of has been gobbled up by Google, Facebook, and others. If other companies are finally starting to outpace Apple, it's inevitable given Apple's oddball management decisions. These are the same bad management decisions–in my opinion, of course–that have led Apple to be so very weak when it comes to actually fielding software services. They've had nothing but a string of embarrassments in this field and most people I know in my field are extremely leery about considering employment with Apple in this capacity as a result.

Trying to litigate on weak patents and novel definitions of "irreparable damage (!!!™)" is bad for me, as a consumer. I am yet again disappointed in them, and I am furious at how broken our patent system for software and technical innovation.