Samsung internal doc: 125 iphone pic competitive analysis

http://www.scribd.com/fullscreen/102317767?access_key=key-o1nfmlft8am5nw1qlpr

by nilsbunger • 14 years ago

70 61 14 years ago

nilsbunger5• 14 years ago

It's a fascinating doc. Is there a point where you cross the line from "inspiration" to methodically duplicating every last detail? Or should it not matter?

arrrg• 14 years ago

I think that’s an interesting moral question – but I also think it shouldn’t matter legally.

That said, I can get behind legal protections for consumers (not companies) to not be deceived. I’m not sure that’s the case here, though, and at any rate, Samsung’s phones now look sufficiently different as to not be confused with any Apple products.

nilsbunger5• 14 years ago

Yes, I also learned a lot about "trade dress" from this suit. It does make sense to me that intentionally making a device so similar that it confuses consumers shouldn't be allowed. It's a different issue than SW patents, and seems more clearly wrong to me.

biggfoot6• 14 years ago

It is a competitor analysis document. Lot of products do this. Much of the feedback in that sheet is just honest comparison and improvement suggestions.

cmelbye2• 14 years ago

It's not just an analysis. They systematically compared every aspect of the phones where the iPhone had the advantage, and then provided a directive on how their phone should be modified so it was more like the iPhone. That's not merely analysis, it's concrete directives.

lusr• 14 years ago

Incredibly deceptive title. It's a UX review. What did you expect Samsung to do, sit around and wait for customers to complain or be proactive in ensuring a high quality UX? What exactly is wrong with using the market leader to establish how great your UX is in your competing product?

rendezvouscp2• 14 years ago

Agreed; it doesn’t feel like instructions to copy, rather recommendations for how the user experience can be improved. I wish the original[1] was the one on the front page right now.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4353762

duskwuff2• 14 years ago

A typical UX review would be evaluating an interface on its own merits, not by comparing and contrasting everything to the way a competitor implements it (and recommending that everything be changed to look and behave more like the competitor).

ljf2• 14 years ago

This list is only this things Samsung felt the iPhone was doing better - there are lots of other things that differentiate the two phones, this is not a doc on how to clone the phone, but how to follow it's best practices.

vidarh4• 14 years ago

That sounds like an incredibly idiotic waste of resources when faced with a dominant market leader. Every place I've worked we'd consider how we stacked up with the market leader first, because that's what we'd be compared to.

nilsbunger5• 14 years ago

I changed the title, didn't mean to be deceptive...

The part that didn't look like a normal UX review was where every difference between the devices was followed with an instruction to eliminate that difference.

tomp4• 14 years ago

No, only the differences in which iPhone has better UX were presented, followed with the most straightforward idea of how to improve S1's UX.

its_so_on• 14 years ago

changing your comment to read,

>What did you expect Samsung to do, sit around and wait for customers to realize it's not an iPhone?

would work just as well.

rendezvouscp2• 14 years ago

Of note, on page 131: “Strong impression that iPhone’s icon concept was copied” “Directions for Improvement: … Remove a feeling that iPhone’s menu icons are copied by differentiating design.”

Even the evaluator determined that the layout of the home screen was too similar to iOS.

biggfoot6• 14 years ago

IMO nothing illegal or underhand here. Most products do this. If I'm not mistaken many products release detailed descriptions to competitors under some kind of NDA too.

jayfuerstenberg• 14 years ago

The only potential problem with this document (from a legal perspective) is that it only references the iPhone.

Samsung should have shown other devices as well.

Blara2• 14 years ago

Care to elaborate on that?

ljf2• 14 years ago

I wonder if that will come out in time - I'd be very surprised if Samsung only conducted detailed competitor analysis of a single phone/brand.

tomp4• 14 years ago

What if there were other reviews referencing other phones as well?

I imagine they would be much shorter, though...

kenjackson• 14 years ago

This actually looks like good competitive analysis more than anything, IMHO. In some sense I expect most companies to do something similar. I'd hope that Ford walks through Toyota, BMW, Honda cars with a fine tooth comb understanding all of design trade-offs and places where they can improve.

I want companies to be comfortable looking at and improving over their competitors, rather than being in constant fear of being sued.

nilsbunger5• 14 years ago

Without the bottom directives, I'd agree it's good competitive analysis, especially if similar documents exist for multiple vendors' phones.

But the bottom directives turn it into a PRD (requirements doc), and the directives themselves call for steps that make the devices much more similar.

vm• 14 years ago

Excellent point - Samsung looked at the iPhone design as the definitive source, rather than deconstructing use cases or consumer needs.

Even the icons and color themes are the same on many screens. That by itself shows that Samsung copied Apple in prior product reviews as well. Kinda funny that they still had so many design discrepancies...

jkn• 14 years ago

Sometimes the competition does it just right and you have to make it "more similar". Many times in this case.

Sometimes the competition does it better but not necessarily the only right way, for example the email indicator on slide 20. In that case the directive suggests another way of improving the interface.

Whoever wrote this document did not want the devices to be too similar:

Strong impression that iPhone's icon concept was copied. Directions for improvement: Remove a feeling that iPhone's menu icons are copied by differentiating design. (last slide)

Wish they did that before putting the phone on the market...

tomp4• 14 years ago

If I understand correctly, this is a report - for me, it's natural that it would include product recommendations as well as criticism. Whether the company follows up on those recommendations or not, is an orthogonal issue.

vidarh4• 14 years ago

But in this case for feature after feature the reason it makes the devices much more similar was that at that stage the iPhone UI decisions made obvious sense. There's a lot of stuff along the order of "we've tucked stuff off in the border somewhere in a color that blends in, but we need to make it bright and put it in a noticeable position" where the iPhone was a good example of UI done right but where the same overall direction could be had by looking at any number of other products (and not just phones either).

I've not read the whole thing, but I've not seen any clear examples where they've had lots of choice in how to make things better without making things more similar to the iPhone. Now that's an impressive testament to the quality of Apple's UI design, but most of it is "obvious" - the problem isn't that it's hard to figure out that you'd like a "previous" button to go with a "next" button, but that it takes a lot of attention to detail to get this level of consistent quality throughout the product.

And Apple does that well, and Samsung at that stage clearly had not done all that great.

If Samsung had put in that attention to detail, the devices would likely have been a lot more similar from the outset.

oemera2• 14 years ago

This is the thing I hate about HN guys: when it comes to the discussing Samsung vs. Apple nearly all members seem to close there eyes plus minds and just say "I don't see what Apple is talking about. I don't see any attempt to copy or something which got copied".

Did you even see the document? The document clearly shows that they compared nearly every feature and what needs to be done to improve their feature to work like the competition. This is like when BMW would analyze a Mercedes and say "We need to exactly work and look like a BMW. Let's have a look what we need to do to work and look like a BMW".

This document isn't about the defacto standard. This is not about how users are working with their phones and what can be improved to get a better experience with a Samsung product. This is not about analyzing how you do against a strong competitor.

This is just: Let's copy the strongest competitor on the market and we are good to go. And this exact thing is a shame and it is even a bigger shame that no one wants to admit that there is something fishy going on here!

Just stop fucking copying and start developing own good products.

Gigablah• 14 years ago

They already did: the Galaxy S3.

roblopes• 14 years ago

I'm confused, Samsung is being sued for copying iPhone when Samsung uses Android? So did Apple copy Android..... Is this the real question?

biggfoot6• 14 years ago

Apple has beef about the UI which is deceptively similar on the first few models released by Samsung

slurgfest• 14 years ago

What was 'deceptive' about it? Was Samsung trying to get people to confuse its phones with iPhones and buy them by mistake?

edit: it is a serious question - why does the word 'deceptive' apply? Can this not be another Android vs. Apple thing (I do not own either kind of phone)?

_djo_• 14 years ago

Many Android manufacturers developed their own custom UI skins on top of Android, especially with Gingerbread. HTC's is called Sense UI and Samsung's is called TouchWiz.

There's little doubt that earlier versions of TouchWiz looked much more similar to iOS than any of the other manufacturers' UIs (or the Android default skin), which is part of the reason this lawsuit exists. Whether this amounted to outright copying or deceptive business tactics is what this case will hopefully settle for once and for all.

esolyt• 14 years ago

Basically Samsung is comparing their product with a strong competitor's product and emphasizes its shortcomings. I wouldn't call this a document showing they copied iPhone.

cmelbye2• 14 years ago

Did you miss the part where below every shortcoming they issued a directive to change their product to be more like the iPhone? This isn't merely a comparison.

gjm11• 14 years ago

1. Product explodes when red button is pressed. FooCorp's products do not explode. Suggested improvement: fix our product so it doesn't explode.

2. This menu is really confusing because it has lots of entries in an arbitrary order. FooCorp's product has simpler, better structured menus. Suggested improvement: rationalize and simplify menu structure.

3. This dialog box is full of ugly scaled-up bitmap graphics. The corresponding thing in FooCorp's product does not. Suggested improvement: either provide carefully created bitmaps of the right size, or use vector graphics that scale nicely.

O NOES THEY COPIED FOOCORP AT EVERY POINT THE LOUSY PIRATES

Nonsense, right? But most of Samsung's document is like this. They've gone through their product and their leading competitor's, looking for places where the competitor provides a better user experience, and suggested ways to make their product better. Often that amounts to "do the same as the iPhone" because what happened is that they did something silly and Apple didn't. Which, sure, is good for Apple and bad for Samsung, but it's got nothing to do with patent infringement.

(And perhaps what they actually ended up doing really was just copying the iPhone everywhere. But this document doesn't say "copy the iPhone everywhere". It mostly says "here are lots of places where we did a bad job and Apple did a better one; learn from them", and there is nothing wrong with that.)

andybak• 14 years ago

It must be noted that many of the recommendations were NOT followed. (I owned an S1 and an S2)

CamperBob22• 14 years ago

Anybody got a downloadable .PDF link? Scribd can get bent.

damncabbage• 14 years ago

There's a "Download" button at the bottom of the screen. No account needed; just click it and it downloads the PDF.

CamperBob22• 14 years ago

Hmm. Thanks -- the link in the article looks very different now. Yesterday, the document had various ads inserted in it, and was framed by "Download" links and various other buttons that demanded a Facebook or Twitter login.

I'm not seeing any of that now, just the button you mentioned, which works.

olalonde• 14 years ago

Two things I'm wondering about:

- The document states it is highly confidential. Was it leaked? Otherwise, why does it state it is confidential?

- Samsung is a Korean company. Why is their internal document written in English rather than Korean? Is it common for multinationals to operate in English despite their country of origin?

tvdw• 14 years ago

- The judge required the documents to be released

- It is a translated document

Happer• 14 years ago

- I'm not familiar with American law, but I presume the document has the status confidential, until it is allowed as evidence by the court.

- read page 133. It shows a signed Certificate of Translation.

redcap• 14 years ago

Bear in mind that the term "confidential" only applies inside the company - that company needs to ensure its security is good enough.

However, when it comes to a court case you have document discovery and I presume this "confidential" document turned up. The judge gets to decide whether it can be used as evidence, and I presume the only thing he or she considers is whether it is relevant to the case - the "confidential" part is irrelevant.

saddino• 14 years ago

We could save ourselves a lot of back-and-forth commenting by understanding that it doesn't matter whether this (or any) document on its own is damning or a smoking-gun. What matters is the totality of the evidence. That's what the Jury will consider. Saying "this just looks like a competitiveness analysis" is missing the overarching point. And the same will hold true for evidence introduced by Samsung.

ericcholis• 14 years ago

Anybody else bothered by the constant use of i-Phone rather than the actual branded name, iPhone?

kenster07• 14 years ago

I don't believe the UI was copied, but that is not the relevant issue.

The LOOK OF AN ICON is not worthy of a patent. This sort of UI is not worthy of a patent. So, case dismissed, imo.

Samsung internal doc: 125 iphone pic competitive analysis

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