Schmidt stole iOS. Gates and Jobs robbed Xerox.
Not good, long term.
“Gates and Jobs robbed Xerox.”
Jobs paid them.
Sigh. Yes, Schmidt stole iOS's user interface, although probably not the OS.
However, Steve Jobs did not rob Xerox of anything. Jobs paid Xerox for the two visits to Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) with a contract for the visits that included the right to buy 100,000 shares of pre-IPO Apple Common stock for discounted $10 per share, or $1 million. That agreement allowed Steve Jobs and up to sixteen Apple Engineers of his choice to visit PARC and observe what was being done there and use what they saw. They were not allowed to take notes, take photographs, or take away with them any software code. They were at PARC for a total of sixteen hours. They used what they observed in work they were ALREADY developing. AppleTalk bears very little relations ship to Xerox's SmallTalk. Much of the Apple user interface was developed by Apple such as drag and drop, movable overlapping windows, nested drop-down menus, live interactive icons on which one can drop a document and have it open the app, the trashcan metaphor, and the infinitely findable top menu.
After the Initial Public stock Offering in 1980, Xerox sold those shares for $16 million. Had they kept those shares until today, they would be worth $630,952,000. Xerox was well compensated.
Bill Gates never compensated Xerox anything for use of their ideas and did in fact lift most of the ideas for Windows from Apple's GUI, although much of Windows 1.0 looked more like Xerox's Star SmallTalk because of the tiled windows.
A Xerox Star office installation for even one workstation to be functional could cost upwards of $40,000. Four times the cost of the Apple Lisa, and sixteen times the cost of a working Apple Macintosh.