But shouldn't companies like Motorola, Samsung, Palm, et al have those resources at their disposal? They are consumer electronics companies, after all.
There's a general lack of focus or apparent belief that their core competencies should only include one (1) of hardware or software among most consumer electronics brands, it seems. And a lot of timidity regarding innovating something new that cannibalizes your sales of some older thing.
Motorola, Samsung, Nokia et al don't have the extensive software culture.
Palm/HP is the only one that does.
[1] Also a weakness with Android phone manufacturers - my phone has a small screen, making the icons just too small to hit accurately - Apple would never let a device like that leave the building, Samsung are quite happy to and Google are OK with having their name slapped on the back of it.
EDIT: forgot about formatting
I mean, even Nokia had to capitulate to stay competitive in the smartphone market, ceding control to a not-even-second-place Phone 7 software stack with an app store ecosystem that literally has to bribe hot developers to port over their stuff let alone have a fiercely competitive market like App Store or Android Marketplace.
Sonly also doesn't fab their own processors for mobile devices like Apple now does.
Sony is also 130% the size of Apple in terms of revenue, 180% the size of Apple in terms of assets and 340% the size of Apple in terms of employees headcount.
> Sonly also doesn't fab their own processors for mobile devices like Apple now does.
Apple does not fab their own processors (for mobile devices or otherwise), and — up to the A4 anyway — don't have that much input into them (the A4 is almost of-the-shelf, we'll have to see for the A5 but so far there's been no great works there)
Which suggests that Sony makes ~39% of the revenue per employee that Apple does.