PrinzDoriel D.

Gabriel 11/25/2022
12-ABM Marketers

Apple vs Microsoft(GUI Wars. March 17, 1988)

By guaranteeing authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries for
a finite period of time, copyright law primarily serves to advance science and useful arts. The goal is to
benefit the general public by promoting individual initiative through the enhancement of personal gain.
Congress has placed the code that makes up a computer program in the category of works that receive
copyright protection, which is typically given to literary works. A few non-literal expressions are also
protected.

I. Body
On March 17, 1988, Apple unexpectedly filed a lawsuit in federal court against Microsoft for allegedly
breaching Apple's copyrights on the "visual displays" of the Macintosh. (Apple also sued HP for using the
NewWave operating system on top of Windows 2.0.) 189 disputed graphic displays that Apple claimed
infringed on its copyright were included in the lawsuit. Microsoft countersued, but it was unable to stop
the negative press. The Windows developer community was worried that any modifications to the
software mandated by a court would break compatibility between their products and make Windows
unattractive to customers. The CEO of Borland compared it to "waking up and learning that your lover
could have AIDS."

It might be challenging to understand the effect of this loss on Apple's position in the industry given the
company's current dominance in the electronics and computing businesses. Because Apple's Macintosh
was unable to keep up with Windows' popularity during the mid- to late 1990s, the Macintosh appeared to
be in very real danger of failing by 1996. everything changed when Steve Jobs was reinstated to Apple as
an advisor, resuming the company's upward trajectory, which it is still on today.

II. Conclusion

On July 25, 1989, Judge W. Schwarzer ruled that 179 of the disputed displays were covered by the
current license and that the majority of the remaining ten were not infringing on Apple's copyright due to
the merger theory (the merger doctrine states that ideas cannot be copied). This was good news for
Windows programmers.Copyright laws did not apply to many of the displays in the Apple v. Microsoft
lawsuit because they were ideas rather than physical objects. According to the study of (The Apple Vs.
Microsoft GUI Lawsuit | Low End Mac, n.d.)
Until Microsoft invested $100 million in Apple in 1997, the lawsuit ruined Microsoft-Apple relations on
its own.Sculley suffered almost as much harm as the judgment did from the 1985 agreement.The fact that
the CEO of Apple would grant Microsoft complete access to the Macintosh user interface in exchange for
Excel and Word shocked Mac users worldwide. Apple went to the Supreme Court to appeal the decision,
but the court declined to hear the case.
III . Stand about the topic

In my own understanding and observation, I DISAGREE to what apple accusation. Base on what I
presented as a proof below, at first it looks totally the same at the text, software and other settings, but if
you if look closely about their function and other features, you can see their differences. Microsoft has
put a great color combination while apple is stays at black and white.

Supporting Evidences

“The only major application written for Windows 1.01 (the first version available to the public) was
Aldus PageMaker. PageMaker was actually bundled with a runtime version of Windows, since almost no
PC user owned Windows” .“Windows 2.0 actually had programs for it. During the press conference,
Microsoft revealed that it had finished developing Microsoft Word for Windows and Microsoft Excel for
Windows, and that outside companies including Aldus, Corel, and Microtek were all working on
Windows 2.0-compatible programs”. (2022, July 7). Apple’s lawsuit against Microsoft in 1988 | Legal
Blog. Thomson Reuters Law Blog.

Also, Based on other supporting evidences, In Research from In research from (Dormehl, 2022) It says
that “Microsoft first revealed its plans for Windows, Apple had just introduced the GUI to the general
public with its ill-fated Lisa computer. The Lisa’s operating system, like Windows, drew inspiration from
pioneering work carried out a decade earlier at Xerox PARC”.

Another supporting evidence is According to the study of (Kerr, 2017) “The main ‘copying’ that went on
relative to Steve [Jobs] and me is that we both benefited from the work that Xerox PARC did in creating
graphical interface,”. This evidences will strongly support the stand and conclusion of this paper.

References :

Kerr, D. (2017, February 27). Gates solves Apple vs. Microsoft debate, kinda.
CNET. https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/bill-gates-steve-jobs-solves-apple-vs-microsoft-
debate-xerox/

Dormehl, L. (2022, November 10). Today in Apple history: Microsoft reveals plan for Windows 1.0. Cult
of Mac. https://www.cultofmac.com/513127/apple-history-windows-1-0/

(2022, July 7). Apple’s lawsuit against Microsoft in 1988 | Legal Blog. Thomson Reuters Law
Blog. https://legal.thomsonreuters.com/blog/1988-apple-sues-microsoft/

The Apple vs. Microsoft GUI Lawsuit | Low End Mac. (n.d.). https://lowendmac.com/2006/the-apple-vs-
microsoft-gui-lawsuit/
Articles:

I.
Today in Apple history: Microsoft reveals its plans for Windows 1.0
November 10, 1983: Microsoft tells the world about an upcoming product called Windows that will bring
the graphical user interface to IBM PCs. Although Microsoft’s announcement about the new operating
system comes before Apple launches the Mac in 1984, Windows 1.0 won’t actually ship until November
1985, earning it a reputation as “vaporware.”
At the time, Apple doesn’t view Windows as much of a threat. That doesn’t take long to change,
however.
The Lisa computer and the GUI
When Microsoft first revealed its plans for Windows, Apple had just introduced the GUI to the general
public with its ill-fated Lisa computer. The Lisa’s operating system, like Windows, drew inspiration from
pioneering work carried out a decade earlier at Xerox PARC.
“The main ‘copying’ that went on relative to Steve [Jobs] and me is that we both benefited from the work
that Xerox PARC did in creating graphical interface,” Bill Gates admitted during a Reddit AMA session
in 2017. “It wasn’t just them but they did the best work…. We didn’t violate any [intellectual property]
rights Xerox had but their work showed the way that led to the Mac and Windows.”

Windows 1.0: Not great

Compared to the Lisa, however, Windows 1.0 looked incredibly limited. Microsoft’s software engineers
based it on the same concepts of pull-down menus, mouse support and tiled windows. However, they
failed to pull it off.
Windows did do one thing that grabbed people’s attention, though. It appealed to customers with its low
price of just $99.

By the time Windows 1.0 launched, Microsoft was best known as a developer for the Mac. After Steve
Jobs left Apple in 1985, Microsoft used its position as the maker of Word and Excel to strong-arm Apple
CEO John Sculley into signing a deal granting Microsoft “non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free,
perpetual, nontransferable license to use [parts of the Mac technology] in present and future software
programs” for its then-fledgling Windows.
Apple-Microsoft battle intensifies
Not seeing the potential of Windows, Sculley agreed to the deal. It wasn’t until version 2 of Windows,
which looked suspiciously similar to Mac OS, that Apple sued Microsoft for copyright infringement.
Microsoft then went from strength to strength, as PC sales went through the roof during the following
decade. At the same time, Apple faltered.

The long-running Microsoft-Apple legal battles ultimately got resolved in August 1997, when Cupertino
agreed to drop all lawsuits against its rival. By that point, Microsoft was nearing the height of its post-
Windows 95 power. And Apple was ready to start climbing back to the top of the tech industry.

II.
Today in 1988: Apple sues Microsoft for copyright infringement
If you were paying attention to the computing world in any measure during the 1990s, you knew about
the raging Mac versus PC debate. In fact, it was one of the defining elements of 1990s computing.
Although that dispute is now largely a thing of the past, there was definitely some true animosity between
Apple and Microsoft, particularly because of the events leading up to Apple suing Microsoft for copyright
infringement on March 17, 1988.

The lawsuit was filed only a few months after Microsoft released Windows 2.0, which was a marked
improvement over the first version. According to the higher-ups at Apple, this was because Microsoft
copied Macintosh’s visual displays — and did so without a license. Let me back up for a minute and
explain: We all take for granted the graphical user interface (GUI) of today’s computers, but, as this New
York Times article about the lawsuit demonstrates with its description about GUI, it was a novel idea at
the time, the application to consumer products of which was largely attributable to Apple:

That appearance is based on what the industry calls a graphical user interface, in which information
appears in windows and operations are carried out by pointing at objects and menus using a handheld
device called a mouse – a major selling point of the Macintosh. Anyway, Microsoft and it’s leader Bill
Gates were the first outside developer to get a Macintosh prototype before its release in 1984. The
company was to create productivity software (word processing, spreadsheets, etc.) for the Mac.
Gates instantly fell in love with the Mac OS, and after the public unveiling of the Macintosh, Gates
essentially begged Apple to license the software to outside manufacturers so that the Macintosh would
become the standard in personal computing.
Although there has been much speculation to Gates’s motivations in doing this, Gates himself later stated
that Microsoft’s software profit margins were much higher on MacOS than for those on IBM’s licensed
MSDOS platform.
For a number of reasons, Gates’s proposal was rejected by Jean-Louis Gassée, who had been given
control of the Macintosh and Lisa projects after Steve Jobs was ousted from them.
Later, in November of 1985, Microsoft released Windows 1.0, which alarmed a number of individuals at
Apple because they believed that Microsoft had stolen several design elements of the Mac operating
system. Apple threatened to sue.Because of the close relationship between the two companies, however
(Microsoft’s productivity software was a heavy driver of sales for the Macintosh), they eventually came
to an agreement, wherein Apple licensed Macintosh design elements to Microsoft to be used in Windows.
For whatever reason, though, Apple’s legal team didn’t catch the fact that the agreement was written to
license the use of Apple features in Windows 1.0 and all future Microsoft software programs.

You can imagine Apple’s surprise, then, when Windows 2.0 was released and contained even more
design elements copied straight from the Macintosh operating system. Apple was apparently so upset by
this that it skipped threatening letters and phone calls and went straight to filing a lawsuit (a lawsuit
which is today celebrating its 31st anniversary).
Unfortunately for Apple, on July 25, 1989, Judge William Schwarzer ruled that 179 of the 189 contested
visual displays that Apple claimed infringed in its copyrights were covered by the existing license, and
the rest weren’t eligible for copyright anyhow because of the merger doctrine (which holds that ideas
cannot be copyrighted).After a number of appeals, the legal battled ended on February 21, 1995, when the
Supreme Court denied Apple’s petition for writ of certiorari. In light of Apple’s contemporary dominance
in the computing and electronics markets, it may be difficult to appreciate the impact of this loss on
Apple’s position in the industry. It was during the mid- to late 90’s that Windows rose to prominence, and
Apple’s Macintosh was unable to keep up, such that by 1996, it looked to be in very real danger of
failure.Of course, that all turned around after Steve Jobs was brought back in to Apple as an advisor,
bringing the company back onto the path of growth — one on which it continues today.
But prior to this turnaround, the lawsuit and its eventual failure were symbolic of Apple’s fortunes
throughout most of the 1990s, and although history will be unlikely to remember it for any legal
significance, it certainly is a major milestone in the history of computing and technological
advancements.Even the biggest and most influential companies can face serious setbacks. Make sure your
firm is always on the cutting edge by staying embracing the latest technology and following legal changes
and updates. https://legal.thomsonreuters.com/blog/1988-apple-sues-microsoft/

III.
The Apple vs. Microsoft GUI Lawsuit