Phone Borneo

Unless you have been on a deserted island for the past 6-7 years, it's impossible not to have heard about all the smartphone wars that have been going on. They're everywhere on the news, you see articles in newspapers, you hear individuals talking about them on the subway. Hardly a week goes by without having yet another lawsuit in the smartphone technology planet. Did you ever cease and wonder why? What is their angle? What are they attempting to realize? Definitely the answer can be only one: they are attempting to own the stack, to get control over the four layers that make up the complete smartphone universe. It's easy the much more they manage, the alot more ways they'll have to extort funds from you, the average Joe.

Above, I mentioned the four layers of the stack. The smartphone ''universe'' is composed of these 4 drastically essential parts: Carrier networks (meaning AT&T, Vodafone, Verizon, etc providing the information connection that smartphones use), Devices and their makers (the actual smartphone created by HTC, Samsung, Nokia, which run on the carrier networks), Mobile Operating Systems (representing the computer software basis that runs on the devices) and last but not least we have Apps and app developers (consisting in all those little programs that run on the devices inside the operating systems. As we tried to clarify, all of these layers integrate and are dependent of every single other. Whoever is lucky/intelligent adequate to manage as considerably of the layers as potential, has a huge control over consumers and naturally more than the revenue stream. Their control is effortlessly exerted by means of licenses, agreements, trademarks, copyrights and different patents. All that customers are able to do is fight back by way of lawsuits and urge governments to adopt consumer protection laws.

These continuous skirmishes go back a few years ago, with the very first generation of smartphones among Symbian, BlackBerry and the particularly initial versions of iOS. At that time, the mobile OS, Symbian and Windows Mobile weren't that widely adopted. The hardware as nicely, wasn't matured sufficient, nor was the price. In those days, the companies preferred to just develop large portfolios of tens of thousands of patents. It was very substantially a cold war, with missiles becoming aimed at each other and if a person makes even the smallest mistake, the whole smartphone universe blows into pieces. Exactly as the ''Cold War's ''Mutual Assured Destruction" the businesses knew that the very best way out of that scenario was negotiating, simply because put it easy...if you shoot, I shoot back and as a consequence we're all dead. The way of lawsuits and settlements was preferred than that of mutual destruction.

With the launch of Android OS, things got even messier, simply because this OS enjoyed outstanding achievement and quick adoption, leaving space for a full war to begin. It did not take long until Microsoft sued HTC for infringement on its a variety of Android phones and at the finish of the day, the Taiwanese business decided to settle by paying Microsoft a little fee for each phone that it makes. The exact same items occurred amongst Microsoft and Samsung, and now, Microsoft apparently makes double the capital off these two settlements than with its own Windows Phone 7 smartphones. One other essential war goes on in between Apple and Samsung, a war that with out exaggeration ca be referred to as a international globe, given that it goes by in courts of law from Africa, to most of Europe, India, China, Japan and the U.S. The Cupertino-based corporation is suing Samsung claiming copyright infringement and patent infringement of numerous of its styles, such as the iPhone and iPad. In its turn, Samsung also sued Apple all over the planet, but they don't fairly appear to have as significantly good results. Anyway, the vast majority of these sorts of patent lawsuits generally finish with a cross-licensing deal and possibly even a bit of economic settlement. What this signifies is that the implicated parties agree to share those patents and this way they can not be put to use on every other.

Now that I've summarized the whole thought behind these smartphone wars, let's take a look on how they affect us as customers. Basically, two things tend to take place to begin with off all, when the competition is diminished and slowing it down tends to make a monopoly less difficult which naturally signifies negative news for the consumer. Also, the dollars spent on lawsuits has nothing to do with enhancing the products or services, and it's not like these areas don't will need improvement. That massive quantity of dollars may well bring substantial improvements in investigation and development of each new and greater goods for individuals. In this rhythm, we'll just finish up paying much more for less. The smartphone war is bad, due to the fact it doesn't allow men and women with the perfect to make their own alternatives. Rather, organizations favor to compete with 1 yet another in a courtroom, which means that a tiny quantity of individuals will select for us all. Sounds type of communist, don't you feel?