Apple has launched two lawsuits against Motorola, both concerning the use of 'multitouch' technology in mobile devices. Simply put, multitouch involves "touching a screen with multiple fingers at the same time." This is the latest salvo in a series of lawsuits between the two companies. Motorola launched lawsuits against Apple a few weeks ago on a wide variety of smartphone-related technologies, none having to do with the user interface.
These two lawsuits suggest that Apple is attempting to defend a key competitive advantage of the iPhone - multitouch capability. There are precious few ways for users to interact physically with mobile devices. For receiving information, users can listen and read/see visual imagery. For providing information, users can speak, type characters, or touch a screen with a finger or object (single point touch). That's about it. There is lots of innovation and competition in other layers of the value stack, e.g. visual user interface design, communications and networking technology, and content distribution. But there aren't many ways a product can distinguish itself in the realm of physical interaction with a mobile device. Apple's multitouch technology, introduced with the iPhone, was one such way. For this reason, Apple appears to be defending the technology as an important leverage point for asserting ownership of what are presumably the most value-creating aspects of the mobile device layer. The assumption, of course, is that the value created can then be extracted by Apple. This assumption may not hold - witness Dell's success in dominating the layer of PC hardware, only to be sidelined when this hardware became marginalized in importance relative to innovations in the software layers above it.
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