Apple Asks For Another $707 Million From Samsung: And The Interesting Bit - Forbes

I think we all knew that this was coming:

Apple Inc has asked for a court order for a permanent U.S. sales ban on Samsung Electronics products alleged to have violated its patents along with additional damages of $707 million on top of the billion-dollar verdict won by the iPhone maker last month.

Having achieved victory in the Californian patent trial against Samsung Apple is now asking for further damages. Interest on the damages already awarded, damages for the continuing sales that are ongoing and so on. However, here’s what I thought was the interesting part:

“The harm to Apple was deliberate, not accidental,” Apple attorneys said in court papers filed Sept. 21 in the U.S. District Court in San Jose, California. Samsung “willfully diluted its trade dress, taking billions in sales in the fast- growing U.S. smartphone market at a key moment in the transition between feature phones and smartphones,” attorneys said.

I’m not surprised that this is what they’re thinking, it’s just interesting to see the point being made openly. This isn’t a fight about who sells what telephone hardware: it’s a fight about who gets to dominate the future ecosystem.

Every so often we get to a break in a technology. When the incumbents find themselves faced with disruptive insurgents. Examples abound: the move from horses to cars meant that those providing energy for transport found that their incumbency protected them not one whit. For that energy for travel moved from hay and oats, or perhaps teams of horses, to the provision of petrol. So there was no value any longer in that supply chain that provided horses, hay and oats. And no incumbency value either: that you had such a chain, that an insurgent would have to spend a lot of capital to build one, didn’t help you either.

Here we’ve got this move from feature phones to smartphones. Nokia and RIM were perhaps the incumbents in that earlier world. Apple clearly faces competition from Android in the smartphone world. And the battle isn’t just to make sure that the current generation of phones sold come from Apple. It’s to make sure that the dominant ecosystem is Apple’s. That’s what they’re pointing to in this “at a key moment in the transition”. They want to make sure that competition (as they allege from copying) doesn’t allow a second provider. For it is at this very moment of technological transition that many forms have an opportunity to establish a market beachhead. Once we’ve made the transition, to the point where the smartphone market is largely a replacement one rather than users adopting one or other design for the first time, then it will be very much more difficult for a new market entrant to successfully compete.

That’s really what the battle is about at present. To a reasonable level of accuracy those who go with one smartphone ecosystem or another, Android, Windows, Apple, are likely to stay with it through their lives. And this transition point is precisely when an entire generation of customers is up for grabs. Something that’s unlikely to happen again if truth be told, this ability to gain a lifelong customer without actually having to persuade them away from another ecosystem.

That’s why the fight is being fought so aggressively. There’s decades of profits riding on who gets how many of this first generation of smartphone customers now.

Rather like there was with Apple and Microsoft‘s Windows for PCs those decades ago. And I have a feeling that’s a comparison they ruminate on in Cupertino. Along with a “Not this time!”.