Don't Touch that Number!

The other day somebody emailed me a phone number. I opened the email on my phone, and of course the phone number was highlighted. I touched it, held my finger on it, and a dialog box came up asking if I wanted to dial that number. That’s pretty intuitive. Kinda common sense that it would work that way. Well, no more.

You see, Apple owns the patent for that action. By April, only Apple phones will be able to respond that way. Really? Apple can patent a touch? Really? What’s going on here? If the officials who decide these things are trying to stifle tech progress, they’re doing a pretty good job. I’ve written about this before, but it just keeps getting worse.

How did you get to read this blog? You probably clicked on a link somewhere. That’s pretty much how the web works. Now imagine the person who came up with that had been as greedy as Apple, and as shortsighted as the patent officials. If that had been the case, you wouldn’t be able to click on links to navigate the web. Unless of course you were on that single one brand of computer system. In other words, the web would be owned by one company, one brand. Who could, of course, charge pretty much what they wanted. How much do you think the web would have developed in that scenario? No, it wouldn’t have. At all.

Now try this. Put your mouse over any word in this blog, and double-click. It selects the whole word, doesn’t it? We’ve come to expect that kind of thing. But someone, in some software program at one time, first implemented the “double click selects the word” idea. If they had patented that, then you’d have to learn a different way to select a word in every different program you used. Or how about dragging with the mouse to select text? Yep, that could be someone’s patent as well.

Android manufacturer google says they will design an alternative to the touch. But honestly, why should they have to? And of course, every phone/tablet/computer system will have to come up with their own way to respond to that phone number. Each different one you use, you’ll have to learn a new system.

Apple has hundreds of law suits just like this, in dozens of countries. And of course, other companies are filing their own law suits in response. For those of you who love free enterprise, and good old American competition, this is not going to help.

This really can’t end well.