After nearly six months of efforts to pursue a transaction with no meaningful progress, we are withdrawing our proposal to acquire SanDisk. I am disappointed that we have been unable to reach an agreement on our proposal. I continue to believe that a combination of our two companies would have created a superior global brand, an unparalleled technology platform and the scale and resources to drive convergence in the marketplace.

Simple: It needs to bulk up to contend with the might of Apple, one of the largest buyers of flash memory.
Samsung has supplied the memory chips for Apple's iPhone since its launch last year. Before then, Samsung sold Apple memory for its iPod line, and continues to do so today. Apple is a huge customer for Samsung — so huge that it can command deep discounts, and tie up an enormous amount of Samsung's manufacturing capability. When Apple first launched its flash-memory iPod Nano, it locked up enough production to keep rivals off the market for months. (Even Samsung and SanDisk tried to launch me-too clones of the Nano, to no effect.)

Regulators may block Samsung's SanDisk bid. But they ought to keep an eye on Apple, too. Antitrust cops tend to spend all their time watching for monopolies — sellers who wield undue influence over a market. They should crack open their investment glossaries and look up "monopsony" — the condition that exists when a buyer dominates a market.

(Illustration via Apple Insider)

Platform-A is offering advertisers the opportunity to purchase a 300x600 ad unit for AOL homepages: AOL.com, the AOL client and co-branded sites. AOL is the only portal that offers advertisers this ad unit size, which is double the size of the largest ad unit – 150x300 – that advertisers typically purchase on the other portal sites.

Samsung ad buyers at Mediaveest already took the plunge, running a 600x300 ad on AOL.com today that when "expanded," goes beyond the margins of my browser window. Annoying? Yes, but — at least long as AOL's revenue growth stays so slow — AOL's belly-buster ads are here to stay. Studies show that larger ads can lead to 4 times as many conversions as smaller button ads.

Sony, Samsung, Motorola and Hitachi have banded together to adopt Amimon's ready-and-shipping wireless HDTV chips for next year's products. Because the products will have no cable jacks, the new gear will sport a conspicuous logo that indicates it will connect to other devices with the same logo. If you want to play pundit, predict a format war between Amimon's WHDI and SiBeam's WirelessHD, which other manufacturers are tinkering with. But if you want to know who will win, Amimon's technology is already shipping and SiBeam's isn't.

Likely not. Expect to read lots of gadget-press slavering over PA Semi's speeds and feeds, and debate over its chips' suitability for an iPhone. That may well have nothing to do with why Apple bought the company.

PA Semi's prize is its founder, Dan Dobberpuhl, a famed chip designer, and his 150-person staff. At less than $2 million per engineer, the price Apple paid is in the range Cisco pays to snap up talented engineers. With them working at Apple, Jobs can push established chipmakers to adopt its technical innovations and perhaps swap licenses for intellectual property. That's far more likely than actually switching away from Intel chips for the Mac; Apple actually explored using PA Semi's chips before choosing Intel. Even the iPhone, which would benefit more from PA Semi's low-power chips, is an unlikely candidate for an all-new chip design.

Why? Volume economics favor Intel and Samsung so strongly that it's hard to imagine that a new microprocessor design from the PA Semi team could replace their wares. $278 million doesn't buy Jobs a rival chip; it buys him a tool to chip away at his suppliers' prices.

Motorola sells 20 times that many phones in a year. No, the real problem is that Samsung has taken market share from it in the U.S., where Motorola dominates, and Nokia is killing it in the developing world. And that's entirely Motorola's fault. Fixated by the high-end smartphones popular in the U.S., Motorola didn't sell enough cheap phones elsewhere. While we debate the relative virtues of locked and unlocked iPhones, billions of people wait to make their first telephone call ever. You can only sell so many phones to The 250 — even if they keep breaking them.

Expect more consolidation: Just as the PC-chip market has narrowed to two suppliers, Intel and AMD, the flat-screen market can likely sustain even fewer players than it has now. Will Sony be one of them? Unlikely. Caught flat-footed by the rise of LCD TVs, it was forced into its Samsung venture. Now, with Sharp, it will be a junior partner, owning one-third of the business.

The Trinitron made Sony a household name. But in the LCD business, it's just another purchaser of commodity parts, with a brand name tacked on. Sony will no doubt argue that in a future of networked televisions, software, not hardware, is what matters. But in that field, Sony has hardly distinguished itself.