Milk
“I TOLD YOU THAT wasn’t going to work,” mobile chief J.K. Shin told T.J.
whenever the two crossed paths, a dig at the buggy and flawed software that
was Music Hub, still struggling to catch on.
Samsung had established a task force to reshuffle its software
leadership and had repackaged Music Hub under the new name “Samsung
Music.” But once again it failed. “If you continue to crank out mediocre
services, it’s not gonna help the sale of the device,” T.J. said. “They will just
think of Samsung as losers, and the moment that they buy a Samsung
device, many people will turn off the software and try to delete it.”
T.J., Daren, and Ed were determined to give it one last shot. Like
Todd’s marketing team, they would maintain a veil of secrecy. They would
cut out headquarters, with its bureaucracy and stuffy hardware engineers.
T.J. traveled back to San Jose, where he stumbled on an underutilized
team called the Samsung UXCA Mobile Lab, founded in 2010 with centers
in Mountain View and San Jose. It had been created to design user
interfaces for Samsung products using Silicon Valley flair and expertise.
“We had a terrible reputation in the American job market,” said
director and co-founder Han Kuk-Hyun. This was Samsung’s chance to
change that. The lab poached Bay Area talent from Apple and Google and
elsewhere with the promise that while their current employers were
throwing out their user experience (UX) ideas, Samsung was a fast-growing
newcomer that would actually put them to use. The center had a reputation
for coming up with creative ideas that the company’s rank and file would
have otherwise suffocated.
When Samsung beat Apple to market with the release of its first
smartwatch, the Galaxy Gear, in September 2013, “there was no mass