What do Germany and Australia have in common? They’re the 2 main countries where Apple almost succeeded in banning the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 from the market. Fortunately for Samsung, consumers and the market at large, Apple failed, and now Samsung is using that to their own advantage.
Apple has been warned before by the blogosphere that this will only create the Streissand Effect for the Galaxy Tab, which means that whenever you try to censor something, it gains a lot more popularity than it would’ve gotten otherwise. By going after the Galaxy Tab, Apple showed everyone that they think Samsung’s tablets are the greatest threats to their iPad world domination.
This helped push Samsung as the biggest Android tablet vendor. So in Apple’s quest to make the Galaxy Tab “disappear” from the market, they actually helped make it one of the most popular tablets. This is also helping Samsung become an established name in the tablet market, and it ensures that other future tablets from Samsung will receive attention from both the media, retailers and consumers.
Apple did manage to stall the launch of the Galaxy Tab for quite a bit, which means that by now the tablet is a little behind the times compared to the other tablets launching soon, but least Samsung has a good platform for launching their future tablets now. The question is, did the Apple lawsuits really help them? I can’t say that they did. It only created media backlash, and it pushed Samsung in front of other tablet makers.
Apple’s trivial lawsuits are also becoming a pretty big distraction for Apple themselves, and instead of focusing on innovating their own products every year, they instead focus on who’s copying them, while in the same time Apple ends up copying themselves a year later, instead of introducing something truly new. This is what happened with the iPhone 4S.
Now that Apple has new leadership, that is probably more rational about things like this, they will hopefully back off from suing everyone left and right for stuff like “having round corners just like us”.