Side-Effect of the Apple v. Samsung Trial: Increased Sales for Samsung

New submitter jbernardo writes "There seems to be an interesting side-effect of the flawed jury verdict of last Friday — Samsung sales have surged. Even with the approach of the launch of Apple's new iPhone, the Galaxy SIII is sold out in many stores, and there is a measurable increase in sales, according to Trip Chowdhry, the managing director of equity research at Global Equities Research, cited in Forbes. Maybe Apple really managed to convince its customers that Samsung phones are equivalent or better, so they are being overcharged? Or is it a rush to buy the currently best smartphone in the market in case there is an injunction on its sale in the U.S. any time soon?"

Comments

Streisand effect?

[Reibisch]

At this scale? That'd be interesting.

Re:Streisand effect?

[EdIII]

Not really all that many factors.

It is supposed to be a kick ass Android product. Pretty good chance it will be banned from sales in the future.

I can easily see people that might have waited otherwise rushing to get it now before they can't. What's the alternative? Apple??

Yeah, right. There are quite a number of people out there that would sooner die then choose Apple because of their shiny retarded walled garden approach to computing. I'll go back to a clamshell phone before I choose Apple for anything.

I don't know what Apple is thinking here. People that want Apple, largely have it. People that will never choose Apple are not going to embrace them, especially if they approach competition like this. Nobody likes to be forced.

Re:Streisand effect?

[Desler]

How is there a 'pretty good chance' of the G3 being banned when it wasn't ruled infringing and isn't part of the list that Apple is asking to be blocked?

Re:Streisand effect?

[EdIII]

let alone anyone else, would clearly exhibit a dearth of faculties, as you would be willing to forfeit your existence over something so trivial as a piece of technology.

Your failure is thinking the choice of technology is trivial. It is not trivial, but in fact crucial to our very future. That is not hyperbole.

How we approach computing in the future with respect to freedom, privacy, and anonymity will be a deciding factor in the very nature of freedom, privacy, and anonymity outside of computing.

It is inarguable that our lives in cyberspace and "meat space" are progressively becoming so intertwined as to be effectively indistinguishable. If you want to argue that is untrue, explain how somebody was arrested for a tweet? How the stock markets can lost a half a billion in a matter of moments affecting the economies? How we could have massive power outages due to negligence or malicious hackers? How an incorrectly entered piece of data in an insurance carrier platform can result in suspended license plates and somebody being pulled over and arrested? How child porn could be put on a machine and result in the loss of freedom for an individual?

The walled garden is a very simple paradigm:

1) You own nothing.
2) Your very existence is at the discretion of the garden. Failure to comply with the will of the garden can result in punishment, which can be all the way up to expulsion from the garden.
3) You may only perform actions that are compliance with the will of the garden.
4) You may not perform any actions that could endanger the garden, or make it less "shiny".
5) The garden cannot be wrong.

At first glance that may seem like hyperbole, but is quite accurate.

Now apply that to real life and see if you would not be part of a revolution to overthrow it .

Fairly sure it's because of the trial

[gentryx]

...and the coverage in the news. Here is a nice story on how people react on the verdict.

Just bought mine

[Anonymous Coward]

I went and bought a Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 even though it wasn't a part of the lawsuit or a ruling against the Samsung Galaxy Tab line. I had been scouting it out for a few months now. Even though I disagree with the ruling, I wanted to buy it before an increase in price due to licensing fees, in case Samsung decides to license the technologies that were borderline borrowed from Apple.

Re:Bias

[jc42]

But I can loathe a company that tries to stop competition with frivolous lawsuits, that copies everything and patents the most obvious stuff to stop others doing the same, blocking innovation the same way James Watt's patents blocked the evolution of the steam engine for 30 years.

It's interesting to read comments pointing out what assorted historians have been saying for a long time: The primary use of patent laws has always been to block technical progress. We keep hearing the propaganda (enshrined in the US Constitution, among other places), that patent law is to encourage progress. But the historical evidence is contrary to this.

The only actual use of a patent to to prevent your competitors from using something. Yes, you can use it to extract royalties, but this is just an indirect way of making the products more expensive, and thus interfering with competitors' development and sales.

But more important than price is the effect of multiple patents. The historians' explanation of Watts' delay of the steam locomotive is that a practical locomotive required a number of other inventions in addition to Watt's efficient steam engine. But Watt and several other inventors each wanted to own it all, and refused to license their inventions to each other unless they each got the lion's share of the results. They pretty much all held out until their patents expired. Then, since Watt had the largest bunch of good engineers working for him, he was able to quickly start manufacturing and selling practical locomotives. He became rather wealthy late in life, but could have become rich decades earlier if he and the other inventors hadn't been so greedy, and had agreed to share the proceeds in a reasonable manner.

Part of the history is also the patenting of well-known ideas. But that's a different story from Watt's. It is a lot of what's going on now in the US, as exemplified by the Apple-Samsung case. We have somewhat reduced it to an ongoing series of jokes about patenting a rectangle with rounded corners. But it's a lot more pervasive than that. There was a cute offshoot of this humor yesterday on SMBC, based on the idea of lawyers in India filing suit against the Western computer industry, based on the fact that the number 0 was invented in India, and stolen by Western traders. (Actually, it was stolen by Arabian traders, but that's "Western" to people in India. ;-)

Re:Walled garden

[Anguirel]

My problem with iProducts is that iTunes is malware, as far as I'm concerned, and Apple expects you to do just about everything through iTunes.

I've found ways around it, eventually, but doing something as simple as importing e-books I'd bought well before the iPhone existed took multiple hours to figure out (for a device marketed as "simple to use, UI-is-everything, it just works"). I tried to add them as "Books" to the device. Nope. Apparently that only applies to the iBooks program, so it has to be in the Apple format already. I tried drag-and-drop. Nope. I looked for other ways to get them onto the device within iTunes and didn't see anything obvious. I ended up using Calibre, a third-party program, to import the books to Stanza. And then discovered that if I wanted to test out a competing e-Book reader app, I need to import the books again, because there's absolutely no data sharing between apps. That's also what clued me in to how to add things in iTunes -- you need to have the app installed first, and import it straight to a specific app.

If you're willing to do everything inside the Walled Garden, sure it works. As soon as you want to step outside, even for data, it's not quite so easy, and can often be quite a hassle.