How to succeed in the gadget biz | CNET News.com: "'Companies no longer have a little lab where they invent things themselves and come out into the market and the world and expect it to be a big success. In fact, a lot of the big breakthroughs you see are coming out of companies collaborating together,' Bailey said.

The Sony Ericsson partnership, he said, is a good example of a hardware and content-provider union that has reaped benefits for both: inventive design and increased sales figures.

So far this year, Sony Ericsson has released three Walkman-branded music phones, and a Cybershot-branded 3.2-megapixel camera phone. The results are in, and they're pretty good: The partnership reported second-quarter sales of $2.89 billion, a 41 percent increase over the same quarter of last year."

tags: integration control design