Apple and Samsung: is an friendly split possible?

It was the late Steve Jobs’s worst nightmare.

Apple’s iPhone 4s and Samsung’s Galaxy S III

A powerful Asian manufacturer, Samsung, uses Google’s mechanical man software system to form smartphones and tablets that closely jibe the iPhone and also the iPad. Samsung starts gaining market share, symptom Apple’s margins and stock value and threatening its reign because the king of cool in client natural philosophy.

Jobs, of course, had a solution to all or any this: a “thermonuclear” legal war that may keep clones off the market. nonetheless nearly 2 years when Apple initial filed a patent-infringement proceeding against Samsung, and 6 months when it won an enormous legal finish over its South Korean rival, Apple’s probabilities of interference the sale of Samsung merchandise area unit growing variable resistor by the day.

Indeed, a series of recent court rulings suggests that the smartphone patent wars area unit currently grinding toward a stalemate, with Apple unable to point out that its sales are seriously broken once rivals, notably Samsung, imitated its merchandise.

That, in turn, might begin a replacement innovate the advanced relationship between the 2 dominant firms within the growing mobile computing business.

Tim Cook, Jobs’s successor as Apple chief govt, was hostile suing Samsung within the initial place, in keeping with folks with information of the matter, mostly as a result of that company’s important role as a provider of elements for the iPhone and also the iPad. Apple bought some $8bn price of elements from Samsung last year, analysts estimate.

Samsung, meanwhile, has benefited vastly from the market insight it gained from the Apple relationship, and from manufacturing smartphones and tablets that closely jibe Apple’s.

While the 2 firms vie ferociously within the high-end smartphone business – wherever along they management 0.5 the sales and nearly all of the profits – their strengths and weaknesses area unit in some ways complementary. Apple’s operations chief, Jeff Williams, told Reuters last month that Samsung was a vital partner and that they had a powerful relationship on the provision facet, however declined to elaborate.

As their legal war winds down, it’s progressively clear that Apple and Samsung have lots of common interests as they work to chase away different potential challengers, like BlackBerry or Microsoft.

The distinction with different historic technical school business rivalries is stark. once Apple defendant Microsoft within the Eighties of rending off the Macintosh to form the Windows OS, Apple’s terribly existence was at stake. Apple lost, the mack became a distinct segment product, and also the company came near extinction before Jobs came back to Apple in late 1996 and saved it with the iPod and also the iPhone. Jobs died in Oct 2011.

Similarly, the web browser wars of the late Nineteen Nineties that cavitied Microsoft once morest Netscape concluded with Netscape being sold  for scrap to AOL and its flagship product aba

ndoned (although the browser later rose again within the kind of the free Firefox browser, that Greek deity away at Microsoft’s browser share and opened the door for Google’s Chrome).

Apple and Samsung, on the opposite hand, don’t seem to be engaged in an exceedingly company death match most as a multilayered competition that’s by turns each friendly and hard-edged. For competitors like Nokia, BlackBerry, Sony, HTC and even Google – whose Motorola unit is anticipated to launch new smartphones later this year – they’re a formidable couple.