Comment by Jtsummers
13 years ago
And if Samsung unilaterally ends their relationship with Apple it sets a dangerous precedent. If you knew that your trading partner would end their sale of products to you because you had a (valid or invalid) suit against one division of their business or had a product suite that competed with one of their division's product suites, would you want to do business with them or would you find someone that can actually play well with others?
How would you determine whether or not that was true about the next company? What about business that is ended between companies due to overlapping interests? That happens all the time.
Those were outside the hypothetical that was proposed (namely that Samsung could give up Apple as a customer and not notice it - presumably meaning longterm). Sure companies end relationships when they have overlapping interests, but sometimes they prop each other up as a result of that as well - see Microsoft's support of Apple in 1997, monetarily and with product support. It was apparently to their benefit to support a (failing) competitor, in this case I'm guessing it was to do with the anti-trust charges. But they were competitors at the same time.
In this particular case though (Samsung/Apple) the overlapping interest is part of Apple's core, and just one of many Samsung divisions. It would not be (or at least it's not obvious that it would be) in Samsung's interest to poison the well of their component division just because it happens that their phone division competes with Apple. Ditching Apple may not, on its own, be an issue after a couple years, but it would put other component customers on edge. See the concern some Android phone manufacturers had when Google bought Motorola's mobile division for a similar issue but from the software side.