The Ecosystem
“THERE IS NO OBSTACLE that cannot be overcome. We must work harder,
push harder, and go faster!”
At the product planning meetings for the Galaxy, Kang Tae-jin (T.J.),
senior vice president for software and content, was sitting through a tongue-
lashing from his superiors. The engineers had been building blazingly fast
hardware for the Galaxy phone, overtaking Apple in many areas. But their
software—the animus that breathed life into each device, that allowed for
communication with others in an ecosystem—was buggy and clunky.
“Readers Hub, Video Hub, Music Hub,” T.J. recounted to me in his
corner office at the new company he now worked at, sipping tea, thinking
about the Galaxy’s original (and disastrous) Kindle and iTunes wannabes.
“You had to sign up separately for these individual services run by
completely different people, different companies.” They had contracted
with Samsung “so the sales and marketing offices could check off their
boxes, with little thought to quality. It was a terrible experience.”
“We had a Kindle, we had an iTunes, we had a Netflix. There was no
exchange of information, so all payments were different. If you registered a
credit card to purchase music, you had to do another registration to
purchase an e-book.”
T.J. spoke with a certain resignation in his voice. A well-known
software entrepreneur in Silicon Valley, he’d built a name for himself as the
founder of ThinkFree in the late 1990s. ThinkFree was a free Web-based
word processor back when such software, dominated by Microsoft Word,
was strictly a hard-drive affair—before the days of Google Docs and cloud
computing.
In the end, ThinkFree was too small to overtake Microsoft. But