Apple's Best-Case Scenario

If you're a huge conglomerate of celebrity status, with your products in feverishly high demand, recognized as an industry leader in every respect, from research and innovation, production and sales, and you're launching a lawsuit against another large corporation whom you accuse of plagiarism, it helps immeasurably if the lawsuit is heard in a court nearby where your corporate operations are located.

All the more so if the corporate interests doing the suing have lodged a somewhat-credible complaint against a competitor who just happens to be a foreign manufacturer.  Inbred bias isn't too hard to detect when an American court and a jury comprised of locals who may be involved at some level apart from national pride, in judging the activities of a foreign-based counterpart are invoked.

And added to that an element of seeking to undermine the influence of another corporate entity through its connection to the party being sued, and you've got a win-win situation for the company that has achieved the status of the largest, most prosperous manufacturing-and-service company on the Planet.  Yet Apple Inc. had its nose out of joint by the fact that its competitor, Samsung, sold more iPhone and iPad units than they do.

The verdict handed by a U.S. jury is a sweeping legal victory for Apple over Samsung with the claim that Samsung's Galaxy line of phones among others violated Apple's patents.  Samsung has sold 22.7 million smartphones and tablets that Apple insists uses Apple's technology.  Apple demands Samsung withdraw its most popular cellphones and computer tablets from the U.S. market.


The supreme irony in all of this is that Apple buys all of its computer components from Samsung.

The result of the trial awarding Apple $1.051-billion in damages from Samsung was predicted.  Industry insiders looked at the makeup of the jury, selected from Silicon Valley where Apple's founder Steve Jobs, remains a revered technological pioneer, both before and after his untimely death.  The issue boiled down to whether or not Samsung's products had the look and feel of the Apple products.

Unsurprisingly, they do.  Now, other companies that sell smartphones based on Google's operating system, also used by Samsung's devices will be looking at paying royalties to Apple for its Android OS. Apple's shares on the stockmarket have zoomed, and Samsung's have plummeted.  In earlier lawsuits in other countries in Australia, Britain and Germany, Apple lost their lawsuit against Samsung.

The icing on the cake for Apple with its own operating system is putting a kink in Google's freely-offered operating system.


A court in South Korea came to a more balanced conclusion, finding both companies to share for the blame.  Samsung was ordered to stop selling ten of its products including the Galaxy SII phone.  And Apple was banned from selling four different products, including its iPhone 4, in recognition of Samsung's counter-suit against Apple.

Will such utter domination of the market for these products of one company be in the best interests of consumers?  Will this advance research and innovation worldwide?  Will the cost to own and operate these products remain reasonable, or be set to rise exponentially?

Microsoft redux.