 |
 |
 |
|
Let's patent my ass
Since pretty much anything anybody hasn't done exactly the same way before can be patented, copyrighted or otherwise laid claim to, Amazon obtained a patent for it's OneClick shopping business method. I've weighed in on this several times. So have a lot of other people, including Dave and Tim, who even offered a bounty on prior art, which literally included a Doonesbury cartoon and just enough elbow room to justify both the patent and an apology from Tim in this letter. On Tim's other hand, however, is the context that matters:
It's a truism in business that all of the smart people don't work for you. If Amazon wants to reap further benefit from others' Web innovations, they need to nourish the spirit that created the Web in the first place. By filing and then seeking to enforce the One-Click patent, Amazon alienated the web developers who'd built much of the platform they rely on, and who, in addition, were among their best customers BrOOOOOOOWRR! What's the first to go when a whiteboard company cuts back? The guys with the colored pens: the marketers. The trap doors drop and advertising, PR, design agencies, whole marketing departments drop through the floor. Once again, Chain Saw Marketing prevails. Wipe out Here's more evidence that too many companies are still little more substantial than colored marks on whiteboards. The sad irony is that Eazel still rocks, as Dan Gillmor points out here.
|
