During her speech at the Democratic National Convention Platform hearing in Washington, D.C this week, Nancy went on to list different elements of the iPhone that various parts of the government had contributed to in certain ways. “Anybody here have a smartphone?” Pelosi asked an audience at a hearing on the Democratic National Convention platform. She then held up her iPhone, and said that “In this smartphone, almost everything came from federal investments in research. GPS came from military, flatscreen, digital camera, digital data compression, voice recognition….The list goes on and on. If you want to learn more, look at the Association for the Advancement of Science in America, and they have the full list.
“They say Steve Jobs did a good idea designing it and putting it together. Federal research invented it,” she said — implying that GPS technology, special alloys and other government-funded research projects were enough to deem the federal government the inventor of the iPhone. An Association for the Advancement of Science in America (AAAS) spokeswoman clarified to CNET that an infographic prepared by Association of American Universities was being misconstrued by Pelosi. She said that the infographic only demonstrated the importance of federally funded research and its contribution to some of the technology elements of the iPhone. The spokeswoman added that Congresswoman Pelosi was mistaken in her reference to AAAS. However, a spokesman for Pelosi, Drew Hammill told CNET that Pelosi knew Steve Jobs personally as a friend and means no disregard for his legacy. “But the point she was making is a valid one. Leader Pelosi believes that Steve Jobs and his colleagues at Apple deserve enormous credit for taking federally-backed innovations off the shelf, refining them, commercializing them and turning them into a beautiful device that changed the world,” Hammill says in the report. The House Minority Leader’s comments are reminiscent of what President Obama said on the campaign trail in 2012 when he declared that no one has built their own business with intelligence and hard work on their own. “Look, if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own. You didn’t get there on your own,” Obama told a crowd of supporters at a rally in Roanoke, Virginia. “I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something, there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there.” “If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.” The credit that Steve Jobs encouraged the creation of a smartphone that looked and operated in a way no one could have conceived cannot be taken away from him. While Apple may not have developed the individual components behind the iconic iPhone, it did design, develop and assemble the hardware and software that constitutes the iPhone and have the IP rights to it. After knowing all this, it’s hard to believe Steve Jobs didn’t build that, isn’t it?
