their focus. Why go head-to-head with Apple, they wondered, when
Samsung could simply supply the chips and displays for the iPhone and
other models, making money by riding off Apple’s success?
Many in Samsung’s headquarters were keen on this risk-averse route.
“Samsung had a revolutionary new screen technology called Super
AMOLED that it at first wanted to put in someone else’s device,” Business
Insider’s Steve Kovach reported, “perhaps a phone built by a major wireless
carrier like Verizon.”
J.K. Shin had already tried to compete with the iPhone once in a
panicky response, rushing out a Windows-based smartphone called the
Omnia II in October 2009. It was an irredeemably ugly phone, even by the
standards of the time. The phone dropped calls and auto-rebooted and had a
clunky touch screen.
“Some customers burned the product on the streets or hammered it to
bits in public displays of disaffection,” Reuters reported.
Compared with the iPhone, said J.K. in a company memo in 2010, “the
difference is truly that of Heaven and Earth.” He added, “It’s a crisis of
design.”
After the iPhone 4 came out, Samsung Electronics saw its $885 million
in revenue from telecom from the first quarter of 2010 tumble to half that
number in the following quarter. Samsung’s scattershot mobile strategy
needed a reboot. It needed a single premium smartphone brand that could
stand up against the iPhone onslaught and carve out market share for
Samsung.
The Samsung Men, it seemed, had forgotten the chairman’s lessons of
the past two decades. Too busy chasing Motorola, Sony, and Nokia, they’d
developed tunnel vision as a result of their insular and reactive culture. The
tech world, meanwhile, had shifted under their feet.
—
ON THE NINTH FLOOR of the Samsung headquarters, in the corporate
design center, Samsung’s head designer, Chang Dong-hoon, told me he had
a “single direction...all the way from the top” to put out Samsung’s first
premium smartphone iteration, the Galaxy S, in June 2010. It happened a
full three years after Apple’s first iPhone, at an obscure and little-watched
product launch in Singapore.