Steve Jobs offered iOS patent licensing deal to Samsung for $250 million; stupid Samsung declined

“In October 2010, seven months after Steve Jobs told his biographer that he was going ‘thermonuclear’ on Google’s Android for ripping off the iPhone, he and Tim Cook offered Samsung a secret licensing deal — a fact that Apple saved for last Friday in its multibillion dollar patent trial against the Korean electronics giant that is both a key Apple supplier and the largest manufacturer of Android phones,” Philip Elmer-DeWitt reports for Fortune.

“According to the late-afternoon testimony of Borks Teksler, Apple’s director of patent licensing strategy, the company’s top executives had been ‘shocked’ in March 2010 when Samsung introduced the first of its line of Galaxy S touchscreen phones. ‘We didn’t understand how a trusted partner would build a copycat product like that,’ he told the jury. Jobs and Cook contacted Samsung and demanded a meeting,” P.E.D reports. “In August 2010, Apple prepared a document that identified dozens of instances where it believed Samsung was using or encouraging others to use Apple’s patented technology, Teksler testified. Then the jury was shown Defendant’s Exhibit No. 586: A Keynote presentation Teksler created in early October that spelled out exactly what Apple wanted in return. ‘Because Samsung is a strategic suppler to Apple,’ the preamble reads, ‘we are prepared to offer a royalty-bearing license for this category of device.’”

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