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The Real Reason Apple Is Suing Samsung
doperative writes with this quote from a speculative piece at Business Insider about Apple's real motive behind its recent lawsuit against Samsung's Galaxy devices:
"Android is free. In some cases, it's even cheaper than free, with Google sharing some revenue from Google searches on Android phones with partners. This is hugely disruptive to both Microsoft and Apple's business models; Microsoft because they make money on software licenses, and Apple on hardware. And this disruptive approach is winning: Android is surging past iOS in marketshare. A lawsuit from a big company, even if doomed, still takes a lot of time, energy and money to fight off. So Samsung or someone else might settle, accepting to pay some form of license. If that happens, Apple can go around to the other manufacturers asking for the same license and have a much stronger claim. And now OEMs have to factor that cost into the decision to choose Android. And all of a sudden, Android has a price."
Samsung has fired back with a lawsuit of its own.
You have any evidence of this at all? I mean the slightest?
Very few of Microsoft's former mobile partners have agreed to work with WP7. Even Sony, which was exclusively WM6 is now a fierce exclusively Android competitor. Microsoft hasn't sued any of them.
Motorola was on a patent war path. The timing of the Motorola suite suggests that Microsoft sued Motorola on behalf of some of its other hardware partners, which unlike Apple, it desperately needs.
No the profit in perfect competition is not zero. The profit in perfect competition is what is called normal, the rate that rewards capital cost and opportunity cost, besides other variables. What is called zero profit in microeconomics is abnormal profits. A perfect competition market is said to have no such abnormal profits because competitors will enter and end with those surpluses.
It's all beautiful theory since there is no such thing as perfect competition. It's a microeconomic model based on quite a few assumptions that aren't that much reality-driven. It's useful to analyse markets but there will never be such thing as perfect competition.
Now get back to talk about you understand and leave economics for those who understand it.
http://gigaom.com/video/google-forces-roku-to-take-down-its-youtube-channel/
http://www.webpronews.com/skyhook-wireless-sues-google-2010-09
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/03/31/google_clamps_down_on_android_partners/
http://www.businessinsider.com/eric-schmidt-tried-to-get-google-to-hide-his-political-donation-in-search-results-2011-4?op=1
You believe wrong. Every quarter that Google announces the squishy "Android Activations per day". Apple announces the number of iPhones and iPads sold. For the last two quarters, while they haven't given out exact iPod Touch numbers, they have given out iPod numbers and said "more than half" are Touches. Simple math shows that Apple is still selling more iOS devices than Android.
This isn't the first time apple has tried to sue over vague look and feel like assholes. Last time, in a saner era (well, apart from the thousands of nukes just waiting to rain down on USA and Russia and anyone in-between), they got their ass handed to them on a plate,
The last time Apple won the case, and eMachines and Future Computers (or something similar) had to stop selling computers that looked like iMacs. Apple had design patents that protected the design of the iMac. They have design patents that protect the design of the iPhone. So I expect the same outcome. Interestingly, eMachines also had a design patent for an all-in-one computer that reminded me strongly of an alien with ears so they must have been aware of the protection that design patents give you; they probably just liked Apple's design of the iMac better than their own.
I'm glad you made those points regarding trade dress suits. I'm reminded of an excellent writeup I saw a few days ago which went into detail about the lawsuit and its merits. They really tried to put the importance of the different points in laymen's terms so that anyone could understand whether or not a particular part of the lawsuit was fluff or substance.
Certainly the ideas of rectangular device with rounded corners came out before the iPhone.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LG_PRADA
Apple does an amazing job of taking ideas from others, and improving those ideas, and doing a great marketing job. But practically ever big idea from Apple, did not originate from Apple.
Apple did not invent:
- the PC
- the GUI
- the mp3 player
- the online music store
- the smart phone
- the tablet computer
- or much of anything else.
So isn't Apple just as much of a "copycat" as anybody?
Correct. Microsoft basically outmaneuvered Apple. They requested a license, based on the pretext that they could potentially be sued for using Apple's user interface elements in their own Mac software (Excel and Word). Apple did not see them as a user-interface competitor, because Microsoft's version of a windowed interface was quite different, using "tiled" rather than overlapping windows. But the elements that Microsoft requested a license for were precisely those that were most unique to Apple. As soon as Microsoft had the license, they released a version of Windows that copied the overall style of the Mac OS, as well as Apple's special flourishes. Apple did not have a legal leg to stand on. But Apple's loss was not based upon a court rejection of "look and feel" lawsuits. In fact, many such lawsuits over the years have been successful.