Samsung, it's Time to Flex Your Muscle

The latest news on the Apple protection racket is the outlawing of 8 Samsung products mostly under the name Galaxy.  As predicted, it was a hard place for Apple to win and I do not expect the appeals process to be any easier (but maybe a bit fairer).

However, Apple forgets who they are dealing with and it’s time for Samsung to really push back hard.

Samsung is not a phone maker.  It is a massive manufacturer of so many products that it probably had a better defense in the silos than in the phone specific part of the company.  For example, the Samsung MP3 player had a display that looked more like the iPhone than the last series of phones before the Galaxy.

So Samsung, show the national pride and flood the U.S. market and you can do something that won the Civil War for the North: flank them.  Not with phones, but with networked devices of all kinds in a way that makes Apple rue the day they messed with you.

Here is your plan:

Every device you make should have a web client API going forward.  Stay the course with Google, but make the social networking side of Google more important than Android.  Of course bring the Chrome browser into everything. If you want, you can bring WebRTC into the mix (ask  Google they know what they are doing there), or just enable the browser interface to touch everything. (We will talk about this in a minute.)  

At the end of the day here is your goal:  to take your HD homescreen TV and make it the only device consumers need to open.  You have already turned them into computers offering Skype and online connectivity, now we are going to push that ability. In other words, make the TV the center or the universe.  After all, why waste your time doing anything when you pay Apple all the time when the Internet is so much bigger?

Now, on to flooding the market.

The MP3 players should be cheap to make and easy as hell to bundle with every device you manufacture.  I would “give them” away as often as possible and enable them to talk to your TVs for downloads. This will endear you to the cable and service providers if you give them a way to use their OTT strategies.

Next comes all those appliances. Make the smart grid leap on your devices and let the user turn them on and off remotely, get alarms or call the support line all from Skype and Google Talk. It is worth mentioning that iChat is not available on other devices, so when they give you an app for them to join your network, evaluate it.

Now we come back to your PC and phone units. Don’t make a new look and feel, make CSS 3.0 style sheets for look and feel. As a matter of fact, open them up for people to play with. Remember that two finger navigation? It was originally built on Adobe by a yet to be hired Apple employee. (Now that an interesting prior art discussion. Did he assign rights or just come on board?)

I have about five other recommendations, but for now let’s get these right.  I can’t wait to watch what happens on my Samsung TV.


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