What The Google Phone Stole From The iPhone

Slate:

There is a story that Steve Jobs likes to tell about fonts. In 1972, Jobs enrolled at Reed College in Portland, Ore.; after a semester, seeing little value in college, he dropped out. But Jobs hung around Portland--he crashed in friends' dorm rooms, recycled Coke bottles to buy food, and sat in on several courses that he found interesting. One of these was a calligraphy class; it was there that Jobs first realized the simple, underappreciated beauty of the written language on a page. Calligraphy, he recalled in a 2005 commencement speech at Stanford, was "beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating."

For many years, Jobs' interest in typography played no part in his work. In 1976, Jobs and his hacker friend Steve Wozniak started Apple, and their first great machine, the Apple II, featured the same bland, monospaced typefaces found on other computers. But in the 1980s, when Jobs and his team were developing the Mac, he realized that he could squeeze all that he'd learned in his calligraphy course into the new computer. The Mac was the first consumer machine to offer multiple fonts and the first to use "proportionally spaced" typefaces, meaning that unlike on a typewriter, some characters could be wider or narrower than others. (The letter I needs less space than the letter W.) Jobs' revolution in typography didn't go unnoticed; Microsoft wisely copied his proportional fonts when it developed Windows. In other words, there's a direct connection between a choice Steve Jobs made in college and that unfortunate PowerPoint you just made in comic sans: As Jobs told the Stanford grads, "If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do."

I got to thinking about this anecdote as I spent time over the past few weeks with the T-Mobile G1, the first phone to run Google's new Android mobile operating system. Among Android's many visually arresting features are its fonts. Google commissioned Ascender, a font house in Illinois, to create a custom Android font to render most of the phone's text; the font, Droid, is both stylish and highly readable, calling to mind Apple's minimalist aesthetic. That's not the only thing reminiscent of Apple in Google's phone. The G1 and the Android operating system are not copies of the iPhone and its software--they're not Windows Vista to Apple's Mac OS X. But in a deeper sense, everything about the Google phone seems inspired and indebted to the iPhone.

Read the whole story: Slate

Comments

[Palemoon]

How can you steal something that Apple didn't make or invent or even have?

[Erdgeist]

Most American CEOs are unfit to manage their companies. They crush innovation -- and then in a few years the company goes belly-up. Both Apple and Google have management that understands, just like Edison did, that if you are not innovating as a company you are dying.

[KarateKid]

It's too bulky, too awkward, quirky operating system and not stylish enough. Sorry.

[kellygrrrl]

they can all keep trying to copy the iPhone ... it's not going to measure up. Maybe they should trying being innovative and come up with their own new bells and whistles.

[Sundialsvc4]

This "borrowing" is how the computer industry innovates. Now, that statement might sound very strange, but it really isn't. We take what has already been done and then try to advance it in some way.

Within Apple's own domain, "the iPhone itself" is just such an "adaptive innovation." Virtually all of the software environment is ... OS/X. Yep, the same software that runs your Macintosh. Which, in turn, is based on open-source Darwin Unix.

The Android is an open-source system implemented on a different kind of phone. It was done this way specifically to encourage and to facilitate this "adaptive innovation" idea. Instead of putting up barriers to keep you from getting "where Android is now," they've handed it to you with their blessing.

And so we will see, in Apple's inevitable response, a very-rapid advance in the technology and the capabilities of BOTH systems. We're already seeing advances taking place in other more-traditional telephones. And because the developers who are working on these projects are talking to one another every day, for us consumers "a rising tide lifts all boats."

[situationcritical]

What the Google phone stole from the iPhone.

Um, let me guess...it's sphincter?

[J E Mugford]

Jobs is an interesting phenom. A weird combination of maniacal ego and raw creativity. Anyone who has heard him speak over the years knows when he is really excited by something his labs create and when he is just pushing product. Having watched with delight as he has ridden the elevator of sucess up and down several times, i am thankful to live in a world where people of such mercurial talent can push us all forwards. On the other hand if you want business acumen, go with Bill Gates and Steve Balmer.

[Sundialsvc4]

I dunno ... all three of those cats are pretty smart. (And let's not leave out the folks over at IBM.)

Steve Jobs is incredibly good at "being Steve Jobs." Being the CEO of a publicly traded company that not only trades but thrives in the market-segments they've ecked-out is no picnic, but Jobs does it with style. And he's been doing that since he was a kid.

Gates and Ballmer are just as good, just very different. Their company provides a counter-point to Apple, and I daresay that's no accident.

[KarateKid]

Gates and co. stole the Apple interface. They cannot create and innovate with any stylishness that Apple does routinely. Look at their mp3 player, does it compare with iPod? Hardly. The Zune will never even approach it. You'd think a company with the resources of Microsoft could afford some designers. But, they're good at trampling the competition.

[iPolitics]

Clone Steve Jobs and let the clones run GM, Ford, and most of the other failures in the American corporate world

[fedupwiththis]

I'd much rather they clone Woz and put this egomaniac out to pasture.