Tuesday, March 12, 2013

Week 7 Blog 1 - ViewSonic exits the European Smartphone Market

In last week's blog, I talked about how Nokia was suing a few companies for patent infringement in Germany. Of those companies, I was unfamiliar with one of them - ViewSonic - so I decided to look further into this company. Well, from one of the posts from Foss Patents, I found out that this company quit its smartphone market in Europe at the beginning of this year. ViewSonic stated that they wanted to go through a change of strategy, meaning that they will focus on other products, such as projectors, monitors, audiovisual information systems and cloud-based products to sell in Europe.
To me, this makes sense. As the author of this article suggests, the smartphone market is overcrowded. Also, since Samsung is dominating the Android market, it makes sense for the other companies to look for other opportunities in different markets.
The interesting points to focus on the company's withdrawal from the smartphone market in Europe are the existing lawsuits going on in Germany between Nokia and ViewSonic. Like I mentioned earlier, Nokia sued ViewSonic along with a couple of other companies, Blackberry and HTC, about several of their patents. Since ViewSonic no longer sells any smartphones in Europe, the best Nokia will get would be the damages for past infringements. On the other hand, since Blackberry still continues to sell their smartphones in Europe, they have paid Nokia for their intellectual property.

http://www.fosspatents.com/2013/01/viewsonic-which-nokia-is-suing-in-us.html


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3 comments:

  1. Alisha ManandharMarch 15, 2013 at 8:31 PM

    I agree. It makes sense that companies like ViewSonic to exit the phone market since companies like Samsung are dominating the android market. I wonder if there will be a out of court settlement between ViewSonic and Nokia

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  2. Peter KwonMarch 17, 2013 at 11:54 PM

    I agree that Samsung has been stealing the spotlight from other Android phone manufacturers like HTC and LG. I remember reading an article about how Google is worried that Samsung may become too dominant in the Android market that Google may have to depend on Samsung. I hope this would encourage more Windows phones now.

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  3. ShayanMarch 24, 2013 at 10:34 PM

    Especially with HTC on the downfall, Samsung is positioning themselves for significant growth in the future. I am expecting Apple iOS to be releasing something groundbreaking in the future

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