Showing posts with label Jonathan Ive. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Jonathan Ive. Show all posts

Thursday, July 26, 2012

Hello Apple, Hi Samsung

Image representing Sony as depicted in CrunchBase
Image via CrunchBase
This fight has to be taken out of the courts and put back into the market where it belongs.

Apple v. Samsung Electronics: The Patent War Claims, Uncut
The gloves have emphatically come off ..... dozens of suits and countersuits around the world involving these two smartphone giants ...... The broad themes of the accusations on each side are well known by now. Apple complains Samsung is a copycat, stealing the product designs and user-experience programming in the iPhone and later the iPad. Samsung replies that Apple is claiming ownership for ideas it may have modified, but certainly did not invent. ...... In February 2006, before the claimed iPhone design was conceived of,Apple executive Tony Fadell circulated a news article that contained an interview of a Sony designer to Steve Jobs, Jonathan Ive and others. In the article, the Sony designer discussed Sony portable electronic device designs that lacked excessive ornamentation such as buttons, fit in the hand, were square with a screen and had corners [which] have been rounded out. Ex. 18(DX 649). Immediately after this article was circulated internally, Apple industrial designer Shin Nishibori was directed to prepare a Sony-like design for an Apple phone and had CAD drawings and a three-dimensional model prepared...... As Mr. Nishibori has confirmed, his Sony-style design changed the direction of the project that yielded the final iPhone designs. ...... When Apple was developing its campaign to promote the first iPhone, it considered – and rejected – advertisements that touted alleged Apple ―firsts with the iPhone. As one Apple employee explained to an overly exuberant Apple marketer, I don‘t know how many things we can come up with that you can legitimately claim we did first. Certainly we have the first successful versions of many features, but that‘s different than launching something to market first.‖ See Ex. 4 (DX 578). In this vein, the employee methodically explained that Palm, Nokia and others had first invented the iPhone‘s most prominent features.
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Wednesday, July 25, 2012

Samsung Deserves Room To Play

Image representing Samsung Electronics as depi...
Image via CrunchBase
Samsung: Apple wouldn’t have sold a single iPhone without stealing our tech
Samsung has been researching and developing mobile telecommunications technology since at least as early as 1991 and invented much of the technology for today‘s smartphones. Indeed, Apple, which sold its first iPhone nearly twenty years after Samsung started developing mobile phone technology, could not have sold a single iPhone without the benefit of Samsung‘s patented technology.

For good measure, Apple seeks to exclude Samsung from the market, based on its complaints that Samsung has used the very same public domain design concepts that Apple borrowed from other competitors, including Sony, to develop the iPhone. Apple‘s own internal documents show this. In February 2006, before the claimed iPhone design was conceived of, Apple executive Tony Fadell circulated a news article that contained an interview of a Sony designer to Steve Jobs, Jonathan Ive and others. In the article, the Sony designer discussed Sony portable electronic device designs that lacked “excessive ornamentation” such as buttons, fit in the hand, were “square with a screen” and had “corners [which] have been rounded out.”

Contrary to the image it has cultivated in the popular press, Apple has admitted in internal documents that its strength is not in developing new technologies first, but in successfully commercializing them. . . . Also contrary to Apple‘s accusations, Samsung does not need or want to copy; rather, it strives to best the competition by developing multiple, unique products. Samsung internal documents from 2006, well before the iPhone was announced, show rectangular phones with rounded corners, large displays, flat front faces, and graphic interfaces with icons with grid layouts.

Apple relied heavily on Samsung‘s technology to enter the telecommunications space, and it continues to use Samsung‘s technology to this day in its iPhone and iPad products. For example, Samsung supplies the flash memory, main memory, and application processor for the iPhone. . . . But Apple also uses patented Samsung technology that it has not paid for. This includes standards-essential technology required for Apple‘s products to interact with products from other manufacturers, and several device features that Samsung developed for use in its products.
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Wednesday, January 25, 2012

Secretive Apple (2)

Image representing Apple as depicted in CrunchBaseImage via CrunchBaseSecretive Apple
Apple: $10 Billion To $400 Billion In 10 Years
The Significance Of Eating An Apple

The Next Web: This is how Apple’s top secret product development process works
Every product at Apple starts with design..... Instead of the design being beholden to the manufacturing, finance or manufacturing departments, these all conform to the will of the design department headed by Jony Ive.

A start-up is formed....... Once a new product has been decided on, a team is organized and segregated from the rest of the company by secrecy agreements and sometimes physical barriers. Sections of the building may be locked or cordoned off to make room for the teams working on a sensitive new project. This effectively creates a ‘start-up’ inside the company that is only responsible to the executive team, freeing them from the reporting structure of a big company.

Apple New Product Process (ANPP). .... a document that sets out every step in the development process of a product in detail .... maps out the stages of the creation, who is responsible for completion, who will work on each stage and when they will be completed.

Products are reviewed every Monday. ...... no product is ever more than two-weeks away from a key decision being made

The EPM mafia. ...... The engineering program manager (EPM) and the global supply manager (GSM). ...... executives that spend most of their time in China overseeing the production process.

Once a product is done, it is designed, built and tested again. ...... a 4-6 week process that ends with a gathering of responsible Apple employees at the factory. ..... The EPM then takes the beta device back to Cupertino for examination and comments, hopping right back on a plane to China to oversee the next iteration of the product. This means that many versions of any given device have been completed, not just partially prototyped. This is an insanely expensive way of building a new product, but it is the standard at Apple.

The packaging room. ...... A room in the Marketing building is completely dedicated to device packaging. The security here is matched only by the sections of the building dedicated to new products and to design. At one point before a new iPod was launched there was an employee who spent hours every day for months simply opening the hundreds of box prototypes within in order to experience and refine the unboxing process.

The launch is controlled by the Rules of the Road....... a top secret document that lists every significant milestone of a product’s development up until launch. Each milestone is annotated with a DRI (directly responsible individual)
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