Making Sense of Samsung and Apple’s War

There’s nothing like history to make the present clear. It’s true with governments and wars and religions (want to understand Ukraine or the Middle East? History is your friend, far more than the news of last week) and it’s true of everything else, including companies.

Most of us know Apple’s storied legacy, folklore, and everything about Steve Jobs from the way his dad focusing on how the back of a cabinet or a fence looked to his personal dietary choices. Google might not be the focus of as many books, but there’s still a pop-culture awareness of their culture and history, and Steven Levy’s “In the Plex” brings as much insider info to Google as most could hope to know about 1 Infinite Loop. But when it comes to Apple’s most direct competitor, Samsung, they’re little more than a name. We know of Samsung, but we know precious little about Samsung. Even if you’ve read everything there is to read about Samsung, you’ll know about their reboot when their chairman burned all their electronics and decided to make better devices, but that’s about it.

That’s where Kurt Eichenwald’s “The Great Smartphone War” piece for Vanity Fair comes in. It takes apart the Apple and Samsung litigation, looks at Samsung’s history of patent violations (in hardware, not just user interfaces and software) and lawsuit settlements, and how they use them to take over markets. If you want to make more sense of the smartphone/tech world of today, it’s a must-read.

Continue reading at http://www.vanityfair.com/business/2014/06/apple-samsung-smartphone-patent-war.print

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