A couple of years ago HTC was, if anything, nosing ahead of Samsung in smartphones. In fact, in the last quarter of 2011, HTC had become the bestselling smartphone brand in the US! An amazing achievement for a firm that entered the branded business only in 2004! Then HTC slid, and the last two and a half years years have been a struggle for the brand. What went wrong?

Thinking about it, it struck me that the big difference between HTC and Samsung is that Samsung has moved on to provide an eco-system of consumer electronic products, both personal (e.g., smartphones, cameras, pads, notebooks) and family (e.g., TVs) that connect and talk together, while HTC has not moved beyond smartphones and pads.

Not only do the various Samsung products talk to each other, but Samsung has launched the Kies software which allows Samsung users to organize and move content easily from one device to another. This is the capability that made Apple such a successful brand in the first place.

The lesson for building a successful consumer electronics brand, then, is not just that one must have good products, but that one needs to be able to offer an integrated eco-system of products that seamlessly connect to each other as well as easy-to-use software that helps the consumer readily acquire, organize, and manage content across devices.

I wonder if HTC is making a move in this direction? I clearly preferred the HTC One smartphone over the Samsung Galaxy S4, when I acquired a new smartphone last year, but I bought the Samsung Galaxy S4, as it made my life overall simpler. I hope your listening, HTC!