My theory regarding

[hannesoth]

The iOS vs Android war have been going on for a couple of years now. To be honest I think that having conversations about which OS is the best has a positive impact on the costumer in general, thus it most likely gives the general costumer a better view of what's avaible on the market, which platform is capable of performing a specific task and so on. Yes, sometimes it gets to much but normally I don't think it make much harm.

If you've ever read a conversation between two different persons who prefere different OS it's common that the sentence "X (X=Android/iOS/Windows Phone etc) was first with Y (new design, better performance etc) and than claiming that the other company copied the other. I will use a fresh example to make it 100% clear what I'm talking about. There have been numerous of threads, posts and articles saying that Samsung copied the fingerprint scanner from Apple. I don't say they did, I don't say they didn't. I'm just question if it even would be possible to copy it.

The iPhone 5s was unveiled September 10, 2013. Samsung Galaxy S5 was unveiled February 24, 2014. That's a little more than five months later. I've now come to my issue. Is it really possible to develop such a (I think) complicated thing to a level high enough for putting in a smartphone? A flagship smartphone that probably will sell in a couple of millions units? My theory is that Samsung have been developing it for much longer time. I actually think they were going to ship the S5 with it with no intention to copy Apple. Apple just released it first.



I don't only think my theory cover this specific example. I think it goes for a lot of different conflicts in this "war". What do you think?

Ps. I don't take any side in this "war". I just felt to share my thoughts and I'm curios about the response.

 

[carjakester]

I believe that both apple and samsung, have their next 2-3 phones in development. Obviously in different stages but if apple were to release their 6 with a new feature, samsung could possible have that feature somewhat already in the works and would be able to speed up the development of it to meet the market demands.

 

[hannesoth]

I believe that both apple and samsung, have their next 2-3 phones in development. Obviously in different stages but if apple were to release their 6 with a new feature, samsung could possible have that feature somewhat already in the works and would be able to speed up the development of it to meet the market demands.

I think you are right. It's kind of logic that they have a few phones in development (well, Samsung offer a broader range of phones so they probably have a lot of more phones in development).

 

[ApfelKuchen]

Ah, but the rumors and information from the supply chain started well more than 5 months prior.

What is undoubtedly happening, at all manufacturers, is that they have many more features in development than they ever put into a new model. There's no point to releasing more new features than is necessary to spur sales, throw down a gauntlet to the competition, stay within price constraints, and to keep up with the Joneses.

In this particular case, the reportedly poor implementation by Samsung (relative to the enthusiastic reception for Apple) strongly suggests Samsung dusted-off something that was already on the shelf, improved what they could based on Apple's recent example, and pushed it out the door. They probably knew that their home button implementation would be sub-par, but the layout of the device was already too far down the line to make that kind of change.

There's nearly always group-think when it comes to new features. There may have been a research paper published 10 years ago, a new product announcement by a chip-maker two years ago, a great idea that was poorly implemented and abandoned years earlier, a prop in a sci-fi TV series that catches the public imagination... We're still pursuing concepts that were popularized by Jules Verne and H.G. Wells!

It's really hard to put a finger on "first," since nearly every idea evolves from another. Henry Ford's moving assembly line is often considered a "first," yet the idea was picked up by one of his engineers when visiting a meat packing plant - the hanging carcasses were moving from meat-cutter to meat-cutter via an overhead conveyor. The only material difference was "disassembly" vs. "assembly." And the mechanized version may have been inspired by workshops where apprentices carried items from one skilled craftsman to another. And so on, until we find two ancestors divvying-up the workload - "You make the hole in the ground, I'll drop in the seed and cover the hole."

There was an article recently about Samsung's approach to design, that it's "consumer-driven." In other words, they try to perceive what the consumer wants, and deliver it. There are certainly advantages to filling a known need - less risk of failure among them. The problem is that the public often has a lousy imagination. Apple's sometimes-derided "we know best" approach delivers things the customer had never seriously considered. So long as the implementation is successful, Samsung's customers will now know what they want.