[admiralpumpkin]

The Apple lawsuit doesn't vouch for Samsung's quality, quite the opposite. Their argument goes something like: Samsung is purposely copying iOS's appearance and iOS's products' appearances, creating confusion in the marketplace as to which product is the original HIGH quality product, and which is the LOW quality knock off. __

Your second argument is falsely premised on the idea of limited resources. Apple can easily have a good upcoming product portfolio AND pursue lawsuits. They are not resource-limited. They don't have to choose between lawsuits and good up-coming products.

___

Being a huge multi-faceted corporation, it is difficult, in my opinion, to discern their motivation down to a simple, single human emotion.

That said, if I had to guess, or put myself into Apple's mind, I would focus on Jobs' thinking. In my opinion he isn't scared, he is offended. He views his products as acts of creation--as art--and here is someone aping his art, and poorly at that. This offends him deeply.

[fpgeek]

First, if Apple is suing Samsung over their alleged knockoffs, then they are good knockoffs, not bad ones. Apple loves bad knockoffs. Bad knockoffs enhance the reputation of their products by emphasizing how special and hard to copy they really are. Why would they even dream of shutting down the kind wonderful advertising that money can't buy?

Second, of course Apple is resource-constrained. Every company is resource-constrained, but the resources they are constrained by are not always the same.

In Apple's case, the resource that I suspect is most constrained is the time and attention of their top, strategic managers. That's why I find the Samsung lawsuit so telling. Unlike most of Apple's other lawsuits (e.g. HTC, Motorola), the Samsung lawsuit / situation drains a lot of that top-level time and attention. What are the drains?

We can start with the huge supplier relationship. What do you keep sourcing from Samsung? What do you transition? What are your contingency plans if Samsung pulls together a piece of technology you want (e.g. an iPad-size "Retina Display") before the supplier you are transitioning to does? And think of all of the negotiations, planning and so on that go on around this. These are all particularly important because one of Apple's key advantages over its competitors is how it manages and captures key parts of its supply chain.

Next, Samsung is a large, diverse technology company with a robust, complex patent portfolio of its own. You can staff out the analysis of the countersuits, but deciding what to do based on that analysis is a different kettle of fish. If there are problematic patents, how hard are they to work around technically and operationally? What sorts of unexpected legal developments affect not just the legal strategy but Apple's technical and/or business strategies as well (and what do you do about them)? What about depositions and testimony (see Larry Page and Oracle)? And by the way, Apple and Samsung don't just have a simple US legal battle going on, they are lawsuits going in something like 10 countries on 3 continents. The sheer number of moving parts in this mess is a problem by itself.

The more I look at the Samsung lawsuit, the more I see Apple spending a large chunk of their most constrained resource on it. I've drawn my own conclusions about what that means.