many devices as possible across the world,” Tsui said. But right away,
Samsung’s speedy hardware culture didn’t jibe with the mSpot way of doing
things.
The Galaxy marketing team in Korea demanded that mSpot’s services
be made available in 170 countries as soon as possible. They wanted to
conflate the process of developing, releasing, and patching software
programs with the manufacture of hardware. With hardware, you designed
a set order of parts, cleared out your inventory, and sent it off. Job done. In
software, the release of the program itself was hardly the end of its
development.
Crafting a software ecosystem, as T.J. pointed out to them, was softer,
was trickier, and took time and patience. To make his point to the hardware
engineers, he pointed to Apple’s experience.
“After the launch of the original iTunes service,” he said, “it took Apple
three or four years to enter the next country, which was Canada. And it
took them seven years to make that service available in twenty countries.”
It would take years to navigate a tangle of copyright laws in each
country, he pointed out, and to negotiate with music labels and publishers
all over the world. Then there was the censorship.
“We decided not to launch a video service in Saudi Arabia,” T.J. said,
over concerns about bans on showing a woman’s bare ankle, among other
problems. He told the marketing executives, “Let’s start with the U.S. and
Korea and see how it does.”
In a compromise, Samsung rushed out mSpot’s new service, called
Music Hub, to seven countries—a much more manageable number than
150 but still far more than what the software developers thought was
reasonable. “There were a lot of bugs inside of the code because, you know,
we were forced to operate fast and there were so many features,” Daren
Tsui said.
Samsung’s local sales offices complained about pre-installed bloatware
that annoyed customers. Daren, Ed, and T.J. encountered lackluster online
reviews.
Nor were they the only ones struggling against Samsung’s corporate
culture.
“Samsung worked with Silicon Valley in the same way they worked in
Korea,” said Sumi Lim, a former business development manager.
One such story was rampant in Samsung’s offices. Android founder