What about paying our respects to our friend?
In the fourth quarter of 2008, Nokia, which had long been the phone industry’s profit leader, sold 113 million devices worldwide, about 15 million of them smartphones. It made about $1.2 billion in profit on all those phones. That same quarter, Apple sold just 4 million iPhones. But that single device earned Apple a profit of $1.3 billion.
These numbers provide the backstory to an industry in panic. If you were a phone maker watching the iPhone’s sudden rise in 2008, you had to make a quick decision. […]
One option was to do nothing. A lot of firms opted for this path—Nokia and RIM, for instance, seem to have decided that the iPhone was a blip, a cultish device that would never reach mass appeal. […] Another option was to try to leapfrog Apple. […] This was Palm’s idea. […] Then there was a third choice. You could just copy Apple. […] On Friday, a federal jury decided that Samsung was guilty of doing just that.
