Apple wins battle,tech war to go on
A landmark ruling by an American court last week awarding damages of over $1 billion to Apple, maker of iPhones and iPads, against South Korea’s Samsung, known for its Galaxy (Android) phones, is only the first battle in a war pitting innovation against imitation. Conspiracy theories already abound over this epic battle over the world’s ever-expanding smartphone market, in which the iconic US company, driven to innovation by the late Steve Jobs, is up against a firm that outsells it by a huge margin, apparently by copying patented technology. The US company still makes most of its products, which revolutionised the lifestyles of people around the world by the sheer breadth of its imaginative iPods and iPads, in sweatshops in China. Even so, it is unable to beat the Asian firm’s price advantage in being able to retail smartphones at almost one-fifth the cost of an iPhone and half that of an iPad. This, clearly, is also a battle of business philosophies between the world’s most valuable company in market capitalisation and one driven by a more aggressive spirit of enterprise.
Industry circles spoke of this as a proxy war between Apple and Google, inventor of Android technology, but in many ways the real gainer had been the buyer on the street, who was able to use most features of the high-priced iPhone at a fraction of its cost. Judgments across two continents showed the contrasting viewpoints adopted; and while it might have been apparent to any user of the two products that certain methods had been copied by the Asian company, the fact remains it served a larger clientele in the world’s poorer areas by making attractive, user-friendly technology affordable.
A few centuries ago, the world’s industrial age began with innovations and industries in Britain and Europe driving factories in the United States, which later went on to assume the role of innovators, while industries got busy around the world with production. The Japanese were early innovators from the east while the Taiwanese and then the Chinese succeeded them as mass production economies. The big move east was arrested by high-tech Western companies like Microsoft, IBM and Apple, while India and China became the preferred back office space for information technology and sweatshops.
History is illuminating in the sense that everyone has contributed in different ways to the march of technology, even if it must seem reprehensible that Samsung may have believed that imitation was the best form of flattery! The only winner as the companies flex their muscles in the marketplace is the world itself, as lifestyle products reach the consumer while the difference in business philosophies re-energises a very old debate over the ends and the means.
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