So the jury has ruled that Samsung has lost the patent case against Apple.

Apple, as expected, is on the victory march & Samsung has come out with a sourpuss respond that “consumers will be hurt.” Samsung lawyers are obviously misguided.

Firstly, I’m for innovation & being paid for my ideas. I used to develop software with GUI meant for people with zero computer experience. Thus, I do admire iOS simplicity despite the fact that I wouldn’t develop for it. (That’s another story).

I remember a time when Linux advocates are criticising MS OS/software as bloated. Many of these developers probably aren’t programming for ease-of-use. It was extremely tedious to develop a software that is intelligent enough to accept inconsistent user input or to accept errors & NOT crash. It takes a lot of error checking & data shaping at the point of user input & MS software does this very well. It also takes a lot of thought into how the user will interact with the GUI to ensure it’s not annoying to use due to constant error prompts ruining the experience. Having lots of graphics also make software bigger & somewhat slower.

Of course, these days, all these checking are abstracted into the background & developers don’t have to spend time doing human input checking anymore. It’s all automatic in MS & Apple software. Smartphones are also more powerful & have more memory than PCs 15-20 years ago so program size is no longer any issue. But for Google’s software, the GUI is less mature due to its reliant on Open Source Software, where developers are still not as concern about writing software for end-users.

Secondly, the Koreans are very good at copying others’ success stories & make themselves successful. They are also very aggressive when their neck is at stake. Just look at Korean car makers. They are out-competing Japanese car-makers by making cheaper cars with more features which also happen to look nicer (or at least unique.) Granted, the designers of these cars are usually Germans but consumers gain by having cars with near Japanese quality with more features at a lower price!

This will be the likely scenario now that Samsung & other Android phones are found to infringe on the patents that makes iOS unique. Google will have to make Android more unique & eventually, consumers win. Android makers like Samsung, LG, HTC, Motorola will have to improve their customizations, which only means better user experiences for those phone.

Nokia has shown that it’s possible to create a smartphone with a compelling user experience without copying iOS. Apple lawyer even showed a Nokia Lumia at one point as proof, there are good smartphone OS GUI that don’t infringe on any Apple patents.

Let this be a wake-up call to Google to stop ripping off other people’s ideas. It’s ok to copy & improve on the design & value-add to the consumers. Make the new design your own instead of doing a poor job plagiarizing prior art.