Originally Posted by
MacRulez 
Quote:
Originally Posted by
muppetry
Well that's odd - the post numbers seem to have changed. Apologies for the misdirection. They are now posts 191 and 192, and were responding to you.
One of those was from a poster I'm familiar enough with here and elsewhere that I don't spend much time with what he writes.
In your post #191 you wrote:
"So, just to be clear, you really think that Samsung's detailed, feature-by-feature comparison study including options to copy Apple's implementations is equivalent to a discussion at Apple on whether or not to make a 7" tablet."
In the Apple email in the article I linked to it describes Apple's head of Internet software/services Eddy Cue having spend enough time with Samsung's 7" tablet to have evaluated a wide range of different types of apps, and apparently spent enough time with the browser app to come to the conclusion that while not optimal it was at least acceptable.
Dissecting the precise number of hours each company spent with each product would leave us with some arbitrary threshold beyond which the practice is somehow "unethical" but below which it is "ethical". Respectfully, that just seems like splitting hairs to me. All companies study their competition.
I know one person who worked at Apple at a time when they were making an upgrade to a competing software product, and they had that product running on a Mac in the meeting room, going through it feature by feature, deciding which features to implement as the other product had done and which to do differently.
As with any company prudent about remaining competitive, I don't hold that as any sort of indictment against them. It's just how any smart company works. And sometimes "any smart company" might just include (*gasp*) Samsung.
Fortunately for both Apple and Samsung, and perhaps the fairness of the court system itself, nothing anyone writes in this little corner of the Internet can have any effect on the outcome of the trial. The question the jury will be given isn't "What is the number of hours each company spent studying the other's products?", but rather they're being asked to evaluate very specific elements within a very specific context.
My only point in posting that link was that finding that a company studied a competing product isn't any sort of proof of the allegations in this case; studying the competition is not a crime, not when Samsung did it or when Apple did it. It MIGHT be evidence favoring such an argument, but we'll have to see how the jury feels about that. Given how smart companies work, they may not find it significant at all. Ultimately the decision will have to rest on the outcome of the process - the final product - and not exclusively on the process itself.
As a side note, I found it amusing that even Cult of Mac has more balanced coverage of this trial than AI. Not surprising, just funny. Like Fox News, AI has clearly found a certain pandering business model that works for them, so even if the editorialism is funny no one can deny that selling their readers' eyeballs to their advertisers has done well for them in keeping the joint running.
Oddly enough, it seems they're leaving a lot of money on the table using a poorly-targeted ad server. It sometimes shows links to Android phones, Google's Nexus 7 tablet, and Windows software, and sometimes the links are completely broken like the one on the front page right now ostensibly for some racing game you can "Download to your PC" but clicking it takes you to the American Heart Association. Almost makes one wish they used an ad network with smarter profiling.
