mobile phone market, they needed to create an ecosystem,” T.J. said.
Over lunch, his friend Ho Soo Lee told T.J. about a new office he was
heading at Samsung, called the Media Solutions Center (MSC), a five-
hundred-person group housed in a sprawling old VCR factory. Their
mandate was to build a software ecosystem linking every Samsung device
—“to match what Apple was doing,” T.J. recalled.
“I very much wanted T.J.,” Ho Soo later recounted to me in his office at
his new company, near the top of a skyscraper southeast of Seoul. “If
anyone could get this done, it was him.”
“Why don’t you come work for Samsung?” Ho Soo asked him.
When T.J. started at Samsung, however, he found himself in a disaster
zone when it came to software.
“Samsung had eight or nine operating systems running our devices,” he
said. Software developers were struggling to design an in-house operating
system called Bada (“ocean” in Korean). It was released in February 2010,
just a month before T.J.’s arrival, and the company quickly realized it was a
failure. Basic applications like Skype couldn’t be used because of
restrictions on VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) software, and the GPS
system was poor.
Samsung’s executives realized they had a chicken-and-egg problem.
Few people were willing to use a junky operating system without
applications, and few developers are willing to make applications for their
software without users. The solution was twofold. They needed to build a
community of developers, some in-house, some out of house, and from
there they could build a community of users. But how should they begin?
T.J. sat in a presentation with G.S. Choi, the CEO, around a conference
table of executives as they discussed their next move.
“You must have some idea about this, right?” G.S. Choi asked the
fresh-faced software developer. “What’s the best way forward?”
T.J. looked around at the conference table of executives.
“Acquisitions,” he told them.
It was a bold proposal. The blundered acquisition of the PC maker AST
Research in 1995 had ripped through the psyches of Samsung’s leadership.
It made them distrustful of acquiring other companies. The more globally
minded G.S. Choi was keen on acquisitions, but mobile chief J.K. Shin and
his engineers opposed them. Shin thought that acquisitions were too risky,
according to numerous employees familiar with the company’s strategy.