Giddyup, Apple!

Apple just to stop Samsung from selling its in the United States. This is the wrong approach for a category leader to take when dealing with inferior products and right now, every tablet is inferior to the iPad.

But this won't be for long if Apple does not step up the pace. We should have had an iPad 3 by now and an iPhone 5 by now. Apple seems to be following the lead of Microsoft and coasting once it gets ahead of the competition.

Microsoft might have the excuse that it lacks innovative ideas and when it does think of a new concept, it blows it. Microsoft has a monopoly in operating systems anyway. It can afford to blow it now and again (Windows ME, Vista, Windows 8).

Apple does not have this luxury because everyone is breathing down its neck, including Samsung, a partner of Apple's. Teardown experts have shown that at least . Meanwhile, Apple is suing Samsung over its tablet.

And I should mention that many of Apple's "patents" are ludicrous design and process patents. The curved edges and centered screen, for example, are patented.

Samsung is going to calculate what it lost in the court action and I can assure you that someday in the future, when the opportunity is right, Samsung is going to pull the plug on some component. It will make sure that Apple eats at least that much money in lost sales.

None of this would be necessary if Apple was running faster, at Adobe's speed, for example. Adobe Photoshop is the perfect example within the Adobe lineup. If Microsoft owned the Photoshop franchise, I can assure you that we'd still be using Photoshop 4.0. (Photoshop is now in its thirteenth release, , as version 8 was rebranded Photoshop CS.) Microsoft would see no reason to get carried away with upgrades and improvements.

The best example of this is Microsoft's sudden slowdown in upgrades. All we get are tweaks as if it were Microsoft Word.

If Adobe owned the Microsoft Word franchise, we'd have a product that accurately corrected grammar, restructured writing, and perfectly translated idioms and foreign languages by now. But instead, we get some UI tweaks and a new .docx default that is useless.

Apple is slowly going in the Microsoft direction. This only works in a real monopoly. Perhaps Apple thinks it can achieve a monopoly in the tablet category by suing everyone. Good luck.

The company should take a closer look at Samsung and see what else it is up to. While the iPhone users are using the once-fashionable, fragile , Samsung is rolling out a line of big screen beauties like the and the . And there's the . All these phones are much slicker than the iPhone 4 by any honest standards. Who knows what exactly is waiting in the wings when Apple eventually brings out the iPhone 5?

It's taking Apple so long to blow out something new that it will be under immense scrutiny when it appears.

Apple must quickly change the release cycle to match the fall-winter-spring-summer cycle used in fashion. Nobody can deny that Apple is fashionable, and most iPhone users buy the newest so they can be fashionable.

To do this right, Apple needs a new phone every quarter. This means four new phones a year with the old ones discontinued or sold off cheap. The Apple fans will buy four phones a year instead of one or two. Business will boom.

But it does mean that Apple must run faster. Right now, it appears to be seated—in a courtroom.