SONY, Samsung and Apple

Who is the top brand in consumer electronics world?
Maybe about ten years ago, many would say it's Sony.
But how many can say it at current moment?

--> Sony vs. Samsung

Sony was very strong brand about 10 or 20 years ago. Sony's walkman is the most popular
and innovative, cool product. I myself had sony walkman. Not one but I had two.
About in 1994, when sony introduced Play station. It is still the brand everyone envies.
But little by little, It's edge and power yield its way to Samsung.

Samsung is now the king of TV. Its market share against sony is now two digit difference.
It is also the number 2 in mobile phone. But for the high end phone, it will be the No. 1.
For major countries, Samsung is now No.1 player and brand in mobile phone. For most of CE products from washing machine to refrigerator, Samsung is now the cool brand. Samsung is unique brand and its fundamental is quite strong. It has been No. 1 in memory semiconductor
for many years. As you can see, many digital devices use Samsung's memory chips inside to enable their products including Apple. It is well known fact that the huge success of Apple's ipod in big part be contributed to Samsung's supply of memory chips at the very attractive price to Apple.

--> Samsung vs. Apple

Now Samsung became the glory brand that Sony used to be. But for the brand loyalty, it still
has to go another extra way to be like Apple. I myself used to use Apple. I was one of the early adopters of Apple Power Mac in 1994 or 1995. I paid 3.5K $ for my first power Mac. But it had
many freezes and it lacks in terms of reliability. But Apple now is the pronoun of great User Experience. I am using iMac 24 inch as my desktop and ipod touch II for my mp 3 player.
Its user experience is really the top notch. I really like to buy New Mac book pro, but the cost is too high considering the low evalution of korean won (currency). And Apple Korea's Customer Service is very famous for its in-capability and ignorance to local market (Korea).

Though the product delivers the far good value, if the other expericences and values (from employees) are less than our expectation, its total UX can not be good. For this, I guess Apple needs to work much harder. And considering these other UXs, Samsung can become like Apple soon. Pls take a look at Samsung's new LED TV. If you look at it in person, you can see that Samsung will now take up the brand loyalty status of Apple if it continues to apply the efforts of LED TV to other products of Samsung.

From walkman to ipod and to LED TV, we need to take up big part of people's lifestyle to be the trend-setting & truly innovative product. With the advent of Full HD contents and recent global economic downturn, TV is getting more presence and people's time. Some also say that Apple with its rather limited product line-up (ipod, iphone, laptop/PC) has advantage to produce innovative products, but if it gets bigger size of Sony or Samsung, it may lose its edge.
Well, let's see who's (Apple or Samsung) doing better job of providing true digital experience...