I would love to know what's going on inside Samsung right now. Samsung does basically three things: Things we don't care about (like building tractors), building electronic parts, and building consumer devices like phones, TVs and so on.
The consumer devices part is obviously behind all this. They copied the iPad design, either out of laziness or to benefit from the similarity to the iPad, as Apple claims. And the trouble started with that, quite predictably. But the other part, the ones building electronic parts, they can't be happy with this. They are already losing business with Apple. And suing customers is generally frowned upon. Apple isn't Samsung's only customers, and all of Samsung's customers will take notice that they are at risk of being sued by Samsung if they do things that Samsung doesn't agree with. In that situation, you will try to shop elsewhere.
Some people have calculated that Apple as a customer is responsible for just 7% of Samsung's revenue. But for the electronic components business, Apple's share is a lot more, probably something like 20%. Losing that kind of customer hurts, especially when it's that part of the Samsung business that you are working at. Sony had exactly the same problem over the last years; a music and video business that crippled them as a hardware maker. Sony didn't have a chance competing with the iPod because their hardware engineers weren't allowed to, out of fear that someone might use a Sony music player to make an illegal copy of some Sony owned music.
I'm sure that some companies in Japan are very, very happy now with Samsung's management
