I know it is hard to pass judgement from a single story like this, since I am sure someone has another version of this story to tell...but this still takes a bite out of my "I love Apple" mentality. If this is entirely true, it is the kind of thing that should really upset someone who has believes in a fair and just world. The fact that lawyers can get away with filing million dollar lawsuits with falsified information is a slap in the face of what the legal system should be.
I have seen this in much smaller scale personal lawsuits as well and it is really disparaging to see the system manipulated by lawyers and there to be no consequence for doing it. In my opinion if a lawsuit is filed with entirely fabricated information which was easily verifiable by the filing part at the time of filing, then there should be serious consequences for those people.
What's most incomprehensible to me is that they really don't need to do any of this. They are winning in the marketplace, they are making the best products by far and they are raking in record levels of profits. Why stoop so low when you don't need to?
This is what bothers me as well. Its one thing to be some 'wanna be' player who is struggling for market share, its quite another to be the gorilla in the market and to pull stunts like this.
I suspect that they do it because they can do it, and frankly I hope the whole "design patents" issue goes the same way the "look and feel" lawsuits went in the 90's, which is to say "Its not exactly the same, deal with it."
Not to mention that they have liberally borrowed features from Android for the last two major iOS releases. Folders, the notification system, cloud integration, OTA updates etc. If you're going to take such a self-righteous stand on borrowing then you better be lilly-white yourself.
Given that Android was such a complete and utter ripoff of iOS I don't think a couple of features is much to point out. Lets put it in perspective here.
I think Android's great, but seriously, come on. There's homage and there's 'shit, touch phones rock, we need to completely copy iOS now!'. Which is exactly what Google did.
Android was obviously heavily inspired by iOS, but most of the new features in iOS 4 & 5 seem to have been borrowed in the other direction. The stuff Google is doing with live widgets and the status bar in 3.2 is advancing the state of the art and it would be a shame to see this kind of real innovation stamped out.
Awesome product and awesome progress from a small dedicated team with a ton of determination and passion! These are the kind of stories that inspire others(myself included) to work those extra hours on their idea. Keep up the great work Weebly team!
I completely agree, I have been a "subscriber" for months and I am borderline considering it just another piece of spam. But the real point here is how bad it is for so many businesses. I am not saying it is not great for some as well, I just have heard too many stories of groupon trying to hard sell small companies that don't fully realize the impact these "deals" can have. That is just a business model that scares me!
I think this is a bit of a pessamistic view of the companies in questions. I mean sure we can all agree that their revenue model at the end of the day is ALL about advertising, and sure companies only care about making money right? So I can see where you care coming from and why, but there are a lot of engineers at those places who could care less about serving up a single ad.
Google, Facebokk, Twitter, and anyone else who wants to make a dime off of advertising has 1 goal that should always be higher on their priority list than serving up ads...getting more users and keeping them happy. Without the massive scale of users that these companies have, who would care how many ads they are serving.
I know what I am saying is all very obvious, but I think there are far more people inside those companies that are aiming to solve and inovate on problems within the user space rather than just the ad space.... just IMHO.
Love the concept of tutorspree and the idea of what it could mean for a some what ignored space. Excited to see what you guys come up with over the next few months!
I completely agree. I think what we really need is some rethinking and innovating ideas on public transportation. I know that is a vague concept to a lot of American's that live in cities other than NYC and maybe Chicago and a few others, but it is a solution that works in other areas of the world. We have some obstacles to get it to work here for sure, but good old American ingenuity can surely solve those can't they?
This is the type of industry that really needs that type of standardization and enforcement of it. I can fully understand why the government wanted to step in and help enforce that standardization for a greatest benefit of all involved, and I can not really think of an alternative to the cash incentive to get people to do it. Can anyone else offer up a reasonable alternative?
Getting certification and offering a $44K incentive are different things. I can understand the former being required of software companies - but the medical providers aren't the one who have to seek certification, they have to purchase the software and are being given an incentive to do so, because there isn't otherwise an obvious cost benefit for them to switch over.
I feel the software company should provide the cost benefit for the medical provider to switch over. Free market competition, without incentives thrown in, would eventually allow that.
