Corporate theft brings to mind men dressed in all black diving through dumpsters to steal internal documents and product design information. In the computer age nothing could be further from the truth; all the thief needs to do is walk right into a store, buy the product in question and reverse engineer it. Unfortunately because of the vague and sometime fuzzy wording on patent laws, often the original rightful owner has no recourse. Apple Computer has been stolen from on many occasions because of their innovative forward thinking ideas and designs.
The year was 1983 and Apple Computer was set to light the business world on fire with the Lisa Computer. The Lisa came loaded with the first Graphical User Interface on a desktop computer. Since the Lisa was radically different, Apple offered a suite of office software known as Lisa Office 7/7 to increase productivity with the system. This was an industry first, a complete package that included Word Processing, Spreadsheets, Presentation software and more. Unfortunately the Lisa was an underpowered and over priced, so it never caught on. Not being ones to miss an opportunity, in late 1983 Microsoft Corp took the idea of a full office suite of software and began development of the Microsoft Office products for the PC and compatible. By 1986, Microsoft came out with Office 1.0 and Apple had long since pulled the plug on the Lisa and since it was a PC program, Apple had no recourse for theft of intellectual property.
Not being a company to sit with egg on its face, Apple began the next major advancement in personal computer technology, the laptop computer. Up until Apple began development, a “portable computer” was the size of a small suitcase and generally weighed 15-20 pounds. The intent was to make a portable computer that really was portable and did not weigh much. Product development took much longer than expected, and it wasn’t until 1991 that the PowerBook 100 was released to an eager public at...