It's surely innovative and a great product, but there's very little on the iPhone that hasn't been done elsewhere before. Apple merely had the design and engineering talent to put together a coherent product based on those ideas.
If these engineers left with only vague product design ideas in their heads (e.g., use triangulation for location awareness, use an accelerometer for rotating the screen) and built their own iPhone work-alike (which is difficult work), I'd side with them as well.
Thanks for correction. I treat NDAs as enforceable, I stick by my word. Just to be clear: I am entirely against IP theft (taking actual source code from a company).
Nonetheless the idea of "social network for X" is not unique and deserves no protection similar to what a chip architecture or a machine learning algorithm may receive. Not that there aren't ambiguous examples e.g., using SVMs to categorize users of a social network or using an emulated RISC architecture to profile the GUI front-end of a web application (such as a social network) but in the cases the idea is not very useful without the engineering chops to put it into use.
> What's more revolting is that Zuckerberg agrees to do the work for them and then stalls them so he can steal their idea. You call it smart, I call it being a shady douche bag.
There are far more engineers burned by business guys stalling and not paying them then there are business guys burned by shady developers.
To put it another way, I am much more scared of a howitzer than of a derringer: there's very high profile and tragic cases of people being killed by derringers (Abraham Lincoln), but there are much more cases of people being killed by howitzers (that we don't even think twice of them).
I don't know a single recent Apple product that's truly innovative, including NeXT. Please fill me on this:
* Apple II had tons of competitors on the market
* Lisa/Macintosh? Xerox PARC roots
* iPod? Tons of poorly constructed devices before it
* NeXT and OS X? Obj C is not the first "C with objects" language, Mach kernel is from CMU
* iPad/Newton? Tons of prior art (the idea itself belongs to Alan Kay)
I have major problems with Apple (they aren't friendly to hackers who don't work at Apple), but the fact that people forgot the predecessors of Apple's devices is only an example of importance of execution.
> Like if an Intel manager comes up with an idea and asks an engineer to work up a prototype, surely it'd be illegal for the engineer to quit and work up that same prototype for a new chip-design startup instead?
Yet this is how many Silicon Valley (back when the valley was actually about Silicon) start-ups began. Generally, however, the pattern was engineer and manager would identify a business need that real customers have. They would attempt to build it as a "pet project", be stiffed by conservative and hunch-driven product organization and would then both quit and take a large chunk of the engineers along with them.
The reason this succeeded is that NDAs and non-competes are unenforceable in California. Law suits would still come (due to alleged theft of IP, which generally never happened) and be settled out of court for only a small proportion of the the equity the "idea" produced.
Personally, I will stand by my words. If you can't build your idea it's worthless (you can't estimate whether others can either). If everyone else can (welcome to web 2.0), it's worthless as well. Sure you may be able to sue somebody over your idea (but you generally have to have something more, like a claim of IP theft), but your lawsuit proceeds will be a fraction of what the person who "stole" your idea has made out of it. That $65mm doesn't change Zuckerberg's life _a single bit_ (not having another $65mm
might only make life easier for him, as that's one less bodyguard to hire to protect it).
On the other hand, if you have a genuinely new idea i.e., you have a new CPU architecture you invented but don't have the ability to build the prototype chip _all by yourself_ then one engineer quitting and competing with you won't succeed unless he _actually_ steals your design (this is real IP theft) and even then you'll likely outdo him (as he'll have a bug for bug copy of your design, whereas you actually understand the design choices).
If management wants to be rich, they have to treat engineers with utmost respect. There's difference between engineers mere _coders_ who turn business requirements into code (usually by gluing software others have written together) and engineers. Spot the engineers early on, challenge them, give them autonomy and responsibility. Let them work on pet projects (Google calls it "20% time", but it's merely a codification of something successful companies had been doing before), tune your product vision with their data.
I have a very neutral opinion about Facebook and no strong attachment. While I respect their ability to solve some really interesting scalability challenges, I don't work there: I ignored them early on thinking they're "just another PHP website", their recruiters did reach out to me recently but I've already started a new position. I am not a heavy user of the site: I don't message other users, don't use any applications and update my status from Twitter. Essentially, I don't have a bias for or against Facebook.
On the other hand, I find the Winklevoss brothers revolting: "Oh hey, here's this nerd who can our build vision for us and make us rich! Let's hire and pay him pittance! Oh no, he executed on our unique idea himself?!".
As for most other developers, when approached by "business guys" my typical reaction is to polite say no. Zuckerberg did a much smarter: took their (simple and intrinsically worthless) idea and built a product and a business on it himself.
It's sad that the courts gave the brothers any money (rather than treating the lawsuit as frivolous). Nonetheless, I still hope this will be a sign to "business guy" jocks that this model won't work: it's a lot easier for a nerd to learn business than it is for you to learn programming. Want to build software? Pick up the K&R book, instead of trolling the CS lab.