It hit me this morning, while I was thinking about it, apropos of nothing. (Almost nothing, anyway. My shampoo.)
The thing that has made Apple a success, relative to so many other companies in the tech industry, is their willingness to spend money on R&D, even for things that don’t have any clear payout on their investment. For instance, Expose and Time Machine were clearly big money sinks; or think of the creative dual-function headphones for the iPhone.
Without the innovation of the company tech-industry analysts love to hate, instead of USB and FireWire we’d probably be stuck with some kind of jerry-rigged hot-swappable serial port or something. Going to all-USB on the iMac is what killed serial. (I say that, but I can’t believe many desktop Windows users still use parallel ports for their printers. Come on, people. What year is it?)
It’s those little things that make Apple products more desirable than, say, Windows or the Dell Jukebox. They may not make Apple money in and of themselves, but when people buy their products because of them, they make it worthwhile.
In that sense, Apple is like the Proctor & Gamble of the tech world. I love P&G products because they move the industry along, even when I myself buy a competing product. Who knows where laundry detergent would be without the constant prodding from Tide, or toothpaste and Crest. My bathroom is full of P&G products (except toothpaste) and they’re always improving on them.
That’s what makes companies successful. And today, when most companies are spending less on R&D than ever, it makes some companies stand apart.
I’ve given a lot of thought to this Psystar business, after trying to read up on it for this month’s column. (Speaking of which: It’ll be done eventually. But I’ve been so tired the last few days, I might as well be writing in Urdu. Vogon, maybe.)
All of the questions about whether they really exist or not don’t seem to be material. The United States has lots of laws, good, concrete laws to deal with fraud; if you plunk down $500, or whatever they’re asking today, for an Open Computer and you don’t get it, you eventually take them up on fraud charges. I’m no lawyer, but it seems to me that “inability to deliver a paid-for product or a refund” is usually a good way for a company to get itself on the hook for legal liability.
No, the real questions are: What business does Psystar have violating Apple’s EULA for OS X; can they; and are they?
Does Apple’s clause in their EULA about helping someone else violate the agreement hold water? That seems like the civil equivalent of conspiracy charges (as in, “conspiracy to sth.”), but I’ve never heard of that before.
Can Apple sue Psystar? It would put them out of business, but then again, the Florida has some of the most stringent consumer protection laws in the United States, so the Sunshine State might take care of that before Apple ever gets done with them.
Would Apple sue the users of Psystar computers? After all, the argument could be made that Psystar makes clear that these are unsupported, gray-market computers, and that anyone who buys one is on the hook, too. They have a good legal argument, if you ask me, but that raises my hackles because it sounds depressingly like the RIAA going after 12-year-olds.
The thing about EULAs is that everyone in the technorati hates them, because they’re long and wordy and I’m probably the only person who isn’t a lawyer who has ever actually read the entire text of one, capital letters and all. (Yes. I know.) But they serve an important function that the laws of the United States don’t right now, which is to provide a clear civil contract between you, the user, and the company that sold you the software. Many of the provisions found in EULAs are clearly unenforceable, and some are almost certainly invalid, but the concept of an EULA is still a good one.
Our alternative is more software-enforced antipiracy regimes, and I’ll take a legal contract any day over something like Quark’s awful license-validation scheme. (If I have to reinstall Quark 6 one more time to deal with the fact that it stops recognizing my legal software, just to keep people from pirating Quark, I’m going to scream.) The pie-in-the-sky world in which the FSF people, for instance, live, where the end of EULAs would result in more free software or something, is clearly not going to happen.
Psystar is threatening the entire regime on which technology companies protect their software. I foresee an awful lot of amicus curiae briefs if this makes it to court.