Robert Barr Quotes

My company invents all kinds of new technology in lots of different areas. And we do that for a couple of reasons. We invent for fun - invention is a lot of fun to do - and we also invent for profit. The two are related because the profit actually takes long enough that if it isn't fun, you wouldn't have the time to do it.

Bell Labs was a fantastic research organization but having them create and market new products for the world was terrible. They were not good marketers and yet it was AT&T engineers who were deciding what the products of the future were.

Except in very narrow cases, where there's breakthrough science that needs patent production, worrying about competitors is a waste of time. If you can't out iterate someone who is trying to copy you, you're toast anyway.

The reality is, is that we love competition, at Apple. We think it makes us all better. But we want people to invent their own stuff.

support … continued widespread innovation by resisting the wider application of patents

The patent system was established to encourage inventors to disclose the details of their inventions. Its purpose was to help society rather than to help inventors. At the time, the life span of 17 years for a patent was short compared with the rate of advance of the state of the art. Since patents are an issue only among manufacturers, for whom the cost and effort of a license agreement are small compared with setting up production, the patents often do not do much harm. They do not obstruct most individuals who use patented products.

Britain is famous for being great at inventing and poor at commercializing.

I think Microsoft will have to change. I think that the business of Microsoft, the company of Microsoft, is going to continue to succeed. But I think the business model of Microsoft is going to have to change.

You need to invent things and you need to get them to people. You need to commercialize those inventions. Obviously, the best way we've come up with doing that is through companies.

When we look at investing, we always think about 'how defensible is this, how likely is it that somebody is going to copy this.' E-commerce tends to be something easy to copy because it's execution.

The most successful company in Silicon Valley is Apple, and they're the most secretive.

I think the high-tech industry is used to developing new things very quickly. It's the Silicon Valley way of doing business: You either move very quickly and you work hard to improve your product technology, or you get destroyed by some other company.

Lincoln said that the Patent Office adds the flame of interest to the light of creativity. And that is why we need to improve the effectiveness of our Patent Office.

The problem with Myspace was always that it was never as strong a product as it needed to be. It left itself vulnerable to competition. It was only a matter of time before someone created something better.

I think it's doing very well. I'm pleased to see the concentration on semiconductors. I think this will help.

Patents should be for technological innovations. So a program for a new machine tool should be patentable but a non-technological innovation, such as grammar-checking software for a word-processor, should not be.

Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property. Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but this may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from any body.

People are going to copy your product if you build great stuff. Just because Yahoo has a search box doesn't make it Google.

There's no way we can invent enough stuff for a company of Merck's size.

As a student, I had a hobby of inventing new ideas for products. For me, thinking of new businesses is like inventing new products.

I have no problem with money coming in and spawning competition. I am honest enough to admit that Mahindra & Mahindra would not have been going to the IITs and doing research if there was no competition.

With Facebook's IPO, the world learned a new way of organizing businesses around one overriding imperative: to ship new products quickly.

If you bet on Microsoft, you are not going to ask anymore, 'Hey, where is the innovation?' The challenge going forward is how do we keep up with it.

There is a premium on innovation and commercializing new ideas.

All things can be done by every company in the world. Apple builds a phone, and so does Samsung. It's not about being different but about being better at what you do.