John Biggs writes “Why Samsung Is The Next Apple”:

Then consider Samsung’s lead in cellphone sales. While many would argue that Samsung specializes in meh and me-too, 60 million cellphones sold in 2011 can’t be a fluke. This isn’t about Android or iOS or Windows Phone – it’s about Samsung making and selling millions of phones to millions of people. Samsung is mercenary. They’re happy to use anyone’s OS as long as it puts phones into boxes and boxes into shopping bags.

So you have two superlatives: biggest phone manufacturer and biggest TV manufacturer. Add in some tablets, some washing machines, and some acceptable software and you have a real and vibrant ecosystem. The next year will bring plenty of efforts to bring streaming media into the home, but the guy who is already there will win.

John Biggs surely has been to CES more times than I have (actually, I never have) and he knows this industry, but he’s plain wrong. On several fronts. John is looking at the problem from the tech nerd’s perspective – the one that considers gadgets alone, and probably tech specs, the most important factor in the ecosystem equation.

There are many issues with this way of thinking. First: “some acceptable software” and “some washing machines” alongside mobile devices and TVs are not enough to build a “real and vibrant ecosystem”. It’s a start – though we could argue on the washing machines – but it takes a lot more. Ask Apple, who’s the company Biggs is comparing Samsung to, that is been building an ecosystem and devices for more than 10 years and yet sometimes still struggles to keep it all together. Ask Google, who still can’t get their social act together after all these years spent indexing people’s search results and web behavior.

Samsung is huge. It’s a huge company with a huge array of devices in a variegated catalogue of different hardware. But it takes an awful lot of software to build ecosystems, and TouchWiz is a laughable foundation for a “real and vibrant” ecosystem.

Second, it takes experience. Apple and Google (and Microsoft, too) have been building ecosystems of apps, services and users for years. It’s not just the software itself, as in the operating system that runs on computers and smartphones. Does Samsung sell songs? Do they host millions of user accounts? Do they facilitate digital purchases thanks to a system that has millions of credit cards on file? Do they run the most popular email web service in the world?

The answer is they don’t, but they sell a lot of Galaxy S units, Smart TVs and consumer devices. Yet in the popular line that Biggs mentions, the smartphones, they don’t completely own the experience: for as much as they customize Android with their UI “innovations”, the OS is still being made and maintained by someone else. Samsung may be selling millions of smartphones and they’re undoubtedly on track for a successful 2012 with televisions, but I just don’t see how the millions of devices Samsung is selling now can nurture a vibrant ecosystem with just some acceptable software and washing machines.

Is there any doubt that owning the experience is key to building a real ecosystem?

Apple, Google and Amazon seem to agree with me. Also worth remembering: Samsung comes from an OEM perspective that’s always generally used software by others, or at least never fully committed to building real ecosystems with its own code. The three companies above have been preferring the integrated approach as of late, with only some exceptions (Google has its own OSes but lacks hardware; Amazon is doing its own hardware but still forks Android).

Third: Apple – which I mention because Biggs compared it to Samsung – doesn’t just sell millions of devices, build and own its software ecosystem and nurture customer lock-in (as loyalty is apparently defined these days) – they also have a direct, strong relationship with customers through a retail presence worldwide. The importance of retail stores in relation to the ecosystem can never be stressed enough – it’s overlooked sometimes, so I’ll just link to the actual numbers again. Retail stores have become the link between software ecosystems (which are intangible) and the real world, which is made of people. Does Samsung have any plans about that? They’re doing something, and they also have good taste in icons.

Last, I could illustrate the theory on Samsung doing pretty well as long as Apple designs great things, but I’ll just make the facts speak for themselves (again).

It takes years to build an ecosystem. And I don’t see how we can write Samsung “will be the next Apple” just yet.

CES, the tech industry’s largest (and most crowded) trade show, is happening this week. By now, I’m sure you have already seen many of the important announcements, watched a couple of press conferences, and perhaps even read multiple tech blogs to get all the possible news from CES.

Good for you. Unlike previous years, I won’t be bothering skimming through all the headlines this time, because I’m seeing a trend that, at least for me but I believe for others too, is tiresome and deeply annoying.

As bloggers, we’re subject every day to shameless copies and imitations of Apple products. I’m not making this up. Watching CES from the outside these past few years (that is, reading from home) has been an initially ironic, then quickly annoying rush towards having to learn about the latest product from company X that is not an Apple product but looks like one. I swallowed the obvious shift in smartphone design and the hilarious copying of interface elements and tablets. Maybe those weren’t strictly related to CES, but I don’t care, because the underlying problem is the same, with the difference that during CES it’s all there in its shameless glory, rolled up in one week. We hear about these things all year. With CES 2012, I decided to stop paying attention.

Now I won’t rant and say that the tech industry doesn’t innovate. And I won’t even say that I stopped watching CES altogether, because I’ve had my fun with Ballmer and the Tweet Choir. Sony does have some amazing products (including, wait for it, two distinctive tablet designs) and they seem to be *at least* understanding what the concept of ecosystem is. Microsoft, Ballmer aside, has great taste with WP7 and, it appears, certain parts of Windows 8. Some guys made an awesome touch-based-whatever cooktop that doesn’t waste energy. Thunderbolt is looking more promising every day. The Nokia Lumia 900 is great.

There’s still some innovation going on in this industry, thank God. But the rest is bullshit.

Let’s see what CES offered, shall we? Acer unveiled a cloud-based service that looks somewhat familiar – where by “familiar” I mean look at those slides. The Ultrabooks – God bless Intel, it understands the market’s needs – were in full force at CES. They all look awfully familiar to the MacBook Air, which isn’t an “ultrabook” because Ultrabook is something the industry made up to justify the need for Windows computers that look just like MacBooks. So yeah, it looks like a MacBook but it’s not a MacBook. Get it? HP did a long time ago.

I mean, Sir Jony Ive must be proud. Even Vizio is now, well, being inspired by Jony’s creations and coming out with, again, familiar faces. Cheers to Vizio for being bold enough to announce the whole family.

We even have the computer that copies a purpoted Apple computer that doesn’t exist. They copied the patent.

Then there’s the mobile market. Smartphones and tablets. Man is it difficult to keep up with all those Android phones. Even Samsung, skilled player, must have thought this, as they have created a new category of their own so it’ll be easier to keep up with that. They call it “phablet”. Well okay Samsung, I guess I’ll take a padfone next. Oh wait. I’ll just settle for the UltraTab (No joke, I wouldn’t be surprised to see this coming out later this year). I can’t even count how many iPhone and iPad lookalikes I’ve seen on The Verge and Engadget. And don’t get me wrong, it’s their job to report on these things and I completely understand how you can get excited for the latest Android phone or 7-inch tablet. I, however, have stopped paying attention.

I personally don’t get people that purposefully buy gadgets that “look like _insert name here_, only to save a few bucks. Problem is, they might not even save those dollars anymore, because “a race to the bottom” has begun and Apple is winning. I blame those prices on the recession. Perhaps corrupted politicians, too.

It’s not all bad though. After all those clones, I look at the Nokia Lumia 900, Windows Phone 7 and OnLive and I’m reminded that there’s still hope. The innovators are out there, and there are some incredible companies working on amazing technologies that don’t make headlines at CES. There are even people who seem to get what I’m thinking here, more or less.

No one is defending the argument that folks like Samsung copy everything that Apple does. Or that Apple doesn’t copy certain trends sometimes. But the amount of shameless copying and blatant efforts of coming up with unoriginal marketing jargon going on at CES are just too much for me.

You can still find innovation. Just make sure you don’t get the Chinese rip-off.