The fourth quarter is usually considered to be a company’s best. Makes sense when you think about it, almost all the world’s religions celebrate one particular holiday or another during the the last few months of the year. Yet for Samsung’s mobile phone unit, revenues were down 9% compared to Q3 2013, and profits were down by nearly a fifth. Looking at Samsung Electronics overall, this was the first quarter in over two years where profits didn’t grow.

So I’ve got to wonder, have they peaked?

Taking a step back, let’s try and remember what Samsung was like before they introduced the Galaxy brand. Almost no one bought their phones. The leader, globally, used to be Nokia. In America, it was Motorola or BlackBerry. In Europe, when you met someone who didn’t have a Nokia phone, which was rare, there was a high probability it was a Sony Ericsson device.

Yet all of a sudden, and I’ll never forget when this happened, Samsung launched the 4.3 inch Galaxy S II and seemingly overnight they became a global brand. Was the success of the Galaxy S II the result of careful planning, or was it an accident like the success of the company’s Note family? My gut tells me it’s the latter.

When the Galaxy S III came out a year later, it put the company over the top. Samsung knew they were starting to get some attention, so they threw billions of dollars at their marketing department. Admittedly, they made some pretty fantastic ads. Regardless of what you think about Android or Apple, they were amusing because they poked fun at phone nerds.

And then the Galaxy S4 changed everything, for the worse. The company’s launch even in New York City was considered a monumental disaster. When the phone did eventually hit the market, it had a nice burst of sales at launch, but then almost no one wanted it. Reports say Samsung missed their internal S4 sales targets, though a specific number isn’t mentioned.

In a few weeks we’re going to see the Galaxy S5, and it’s probably going to come with the best spec sheet ever conceived, but you can feel a total lack of excitement around the product. Why is that? With the Galaxy S3, Samsung went overboard with TouchWiz and bloat. Instead of fixing that with the Galaxy S4, they simply added even more features, to the point of being ridiculous. When I configure a Samsung phone for the first time, the first 20 minutes are usually spent disabling everything.

Will Samsung smarten up with the Galaxy S5? Leaked images show that TouchWiz is going to get a fresh coat of paint, but it’s one thing to see a static image and another thing altogether to use a device. The S5 is a wildcard at this point, but it’s going to face some pretty stiff competition when Apple launches its rumored larger iPhone. Sure, Android has an 80% global market share, but if you look at expensive phones as their own segment, Apple is eating Samsung’s lunch.

The high end is only half of the picture. Entry level devices are giving Samsung a pounding headache. The Ace, the Core, the “mini” versions of flagship phones, they’re all ludicrously expensive compared to what the competition offers. Samsung’s Galaxy Young, arguably the cheapest Android phone Samsung sells, is a complete pile of garbage, yet for the same amount of money, chances are a consumer in China will be able to buy something with specs that were considered bleeding edge just two years ago.

So the more I think about Samsung’s current situation, the more it reminds me of Nokia back in its prime. They owned the smartphone space, but then the iPhone came out in 2007, Android came out a year later, and then component companies like MediaTek figured out how to enable hardware vendors to come out with smartphones in as little as three months.

What should Samsung do?

Nokia bought Symbian so that they could control their own destiny. While I’m not suggesting Samsung should buy Google, they probably could considering they’re responsible for a fifth of South Korea’s GDP, I’m hoping that they could form some sort of partnership.

Doesn’t Google already own a handset maker? Motorola, yes, but they’re such a small player at this point that they don’t even count. That and Motorola is nothing more than a component integrator. They take software from Google, chips from Qualcomm and other firms, and slap them together into a pretty package. If Samsung offered Google access to their incredibly manufacturing arm, then together they could be unstoppable.

Just ask yourself this question: If Samsung stopped selling smartphones tomorrow, would you care? Probably not. Sony’s phones are practically just as good, HTC makes some amazing pieces of hardware, and LG also has talent, though they like to hide it by creating a software skin that makes you want to cry.

Now what would happen if Google disappeared? The world would implode.