If Android is a "stolen product," then so was the iPhone

Apple CEO Steve Jobs called Android a "stolen product," but theft can be a tricky concept when talking about innovation.

The iPhone didn't emerge fully formed from Jobs's head. Rather, it represented the culmination of incremental innovation over decades—much of which occurred outside of Cupertino. Innovation within multitouch and smartphone technology goes back decades—the first multitouch devices were created in the 1980s—and spans a large number of researchers and commercial firms. It wouldn't have been possible to create the iPhone without copying the ideas of these other researchers. And since the release of Android, Apple has incorporated some Google ideas into iOS. You can call this process plenty of names, some less than complimentary, but consumers generally benefit from the copying within the smartphone market. The best ideas are quickly incorporated into all the leading mobile platforms.