This isn’t the first time something like this has happened, but it never gets old. Apple Insider has the scoop on tennis player David Ferrar, on the Samsung payroll, tweeting his love for the new Galaxy S4 from his iPhone. Will they never learn.
Hat tip to The Loop
There’s little doubt Samsung has played dirty against it’s competition in the past. There’s some evidence to suggest it may be doing so now against Apple. Philip Elmer-DeWitt posted a story on the topic to his Apple 2.0 blog. He follows up today with a post about the reaction to that story.
To borrow a phrase. Don’t be evil.
Google’s intent with Android was always to provide a free platform to manufacturers to build hardware on. Google would benefit because these hardware devices would use Google services. That sounds great in theory. But what happens if a majority of device manufacturers eliminate Google services completely? Benedict Evans explores this possibility in a very interesting blog post.
If Samsung were to decide to fork Andoid and remove Google services, Google would have a big problem.
Innovation is hard. Just ask Samsung, who have rarely innovated anything. Apple has been beaten up lately in the press for not innovating anything new since the iPad three years ago. Samsung has been immune to critisism as they’ve become the market volume leader in smartphones. I’m not sure why people expected a bunch of innovation with the launch of the new Galaxy S4, but they did. Philip Elmer-Dewitt has the details at the Apple 2.0 blog.
Hilarity ensues.
Benedict Evans sums up the smartphone industry is a couple simple charts on his blog. Apple and Samsung are the outliers in this industry, but in very different ways.
Apple needs to get it's chip production away from Samsung. Intel desperately needs relevance in the mobile space. Both of these serious itches could be scratched if this Reuters report is true.
MG Siegler writing for TechCrunch about why Samsung deserves to mentioned along side Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Google.
But trying to suggest that Samsung is not one of the most important companies in technology is increasingly folly. In fact, there’s a decent chance that it will end up being the most important tech company of 2013.
James Allworth has written a very interesting post at Asymco about Apple's choice to use Samsung so extensively as a supplier. He makes an argument that Samsung's emergence as the only profitable Android handset manufacturer may most closely be linked to their relationship with Apple. It's an interesting thought experiment at the very least.
While there’s no doubt that Google has played a key role in Samsung’s success by handing out a free mobile operating system to pretty much anyone who wants to build one — it is actually Apple, more than any other company, that is responsible for Samsung’s present success.
How? By outsourcing as much work to Samsung as they have. And it’s impossible not to wonder whether Tim Cook’s announcement yesterday on bringing back Apple’s manufacturing to the USA is the beginnings of an attempt to rectify the problem.
The rise of Samsung in the handset space is truly remarkable. Horace Dediu chronicles their story with a series of charts and finishes by asking a few spot on questions.
There will be much said and written about the verdict in the Apple v. Samsung trial concluded yesterday. People's opinions are widely divergent, but early on it seems that opposite ends of the spectrum are represented well in the writings of both Andy Inhatko and Marco Arment.
I come down on Marco's side on this one.