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Con #1: Steal and Protect
Great companies often rely on some sort of lie or IP theft to accrue value at a
speed and scale previously unimaginable, and the Four are no different. Most
horsemen have fostered a falsehood that cons other firms, or the government,
into a subsidy or transfer of value that dramatically shifts the balance of
power to them. (Just watch Tesla over the next few years as it fights for
government subsidies for solar-and electric-powered cars.) When they
emerge as a horseman, however, they are suddenly outraged at this sort of
behavior and seek to protect their gains.
This dynamic can be seen even more starkly with countries. In the
geopolitical context, there is only one horseman, the United States of
America, and its history demonstrates this dynamic. In the period
immediately following the Revolution, the United States was a scrappy start-
up, with plenty of opportunities but little capability to exploit them. In
Europe, industrial innovation—the Industrial Revolution—was flowering
during a period of relative peace, and American manufacturers just couldn’t
compete. In particular, the important textile industry was dominated by
British weavers, using advanced looms (whose designs they’d stolen from the
French) and related technologies. Britain sought to protect this industry with
laws barring export of equipment, plans for equipment, or even the artisans
who built and operated them.
So, the Americans stole it. Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton
issued a report calling for the procurement of European industrial technology
through “proper provision and due pains”—even as it blithely acknowledged
that British law prohibited such export.
1
The Treasury offered bounties to
European artisans willing to come to the United States, in direct violation of
emigration laws in their home countries. U.S. patent law was modified in
1793 to limit patent protection to U.S. citizens, thus depriving European
owners of this intellectual property any legal recourse against this theft.
From these seeds, America’s industrial might grew quickly. The town of
Lowell, Massachusetts, known as the cradle of the American Industrial
Revolution, was built by the corporate descendants of Francis Cabot Lowell,
who had years earlier toured British textile plants as a curious customer
(which was true, if incomplete) and memorized their design and layout. Upon
his return to the United States he founded the Boston Manufacturing
Company and built America’s first factory—and, in a nice connection with
our modern tech industry, conducted the country’s first IPO.
2
The thievery
gave rise to a multibillion-dollar industry: consulting. The United States has
the best consulting firms in the world—theft is in our DNA.
Today, the United States is the industrial behemoth, with its own
technological advantages and markets to protect. And while we celebrate
Alexander Hamilton on Broadway, our laws repudiate his casual attitude
toward intellectual property. The United States is now the great proponent of
patent and trademark protections, and you can’t go wrong, as a U.S.
politician, criticizing China for stealing U.S. technology. And not without
cause, as China, eager to achieve horseman status on the world stage, is
sending its own Francis Lowells over, in person and through cyberspace, to
grab whatever can shorten the path to prosperity. Meanwhile, after decades of
stealing the world’s patents, China now feels strong enough in IP that it now
has seen the light and is becoming a vocal advocate of patent law.
Perhaps the most famous “theft” in tech history is at the root of Apple,
when Steve Jobs turned Xerox’s unfulfilled vision of a mouse-driven,
graphical desktop into the industry-changing Macintosh.
3
Like Lowell and his contemporaries, who improved upon British designs
and powered them with the vast resources and growing population of the
young United States, Jobs saw Xerox’s GUI had the potential to explode the
PC market beyond what even his massively successful Apple II had achieved.
The GUI could create, as Apple famously put it, “the computer for the rest of
us.”
4
This was something Xerox was never going to do, was never capable—
institutionally, strategically, philosophically—of doing.
So, Apple merely takes innovations developed elsewhere and uses its
better “marketing.” Sort of. It’s certainly the case that Apple has bought or
licensed many of the technological underpinnings of its current leadership
position, from Xerox’s GUI to Synaptics’ touch screens to P.A. Semi’s
power-efficient chips. The point is not that young companies just “steal”
things to become great, but that they see value where others don’t, or are able
to extract value where others can’t. And they do so by whatever means
necessary.
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