Saturday, August 25, 2012

What's next for Samsung

The court decided that Samsung had infringed several of Apple's patents, mostly design / user interface / user interaction related ones.

That's good, because shameless copying without acknowledging should be discouraged.

So what's Samsung to do next? as I see it, they can choose one of two paths:

1) The easy way - make the users pay for the infringement by keep on using these patents, raise the devices' price and just give that money to Apple as royalties. As a consequence, there would not be a need to innovate as basically, the problem (how to do good design / user interface / user interaction) is solved, just more expensive to the users.

2) The hard way - make themselves temporary pay for the infringement by investing in innovation. Create better, innovative, brilliant designs / user interfaces and user interaction schemes. Ones that are both better than Apple's and are patentable. This means investment in research, ideation and development, without any promise of success, but with a promise that in case of success, they'll be bigger than Apple (and that's a lot).

Which path will they choose ?