front of them.
“Within a matter of hours, there were more than seventy thousand
downloads, which was crazy,” said Daren. “And then it just took off from
there.”
Finally, the Galaxy was closing in on that elusive third force in the
smartphone ecosystem: its iTunes, its software. Apple had been slow to
innovate, and Samsung was catching up.
That’s when Google stepped in, putting up resistance to Samsung’s
forays into software. The gentlemen’s understanding between the two
companies was that Samsung would stick with hardware, Google with
software, and everyone would be happy.
“Why are you guys doing this?” politely asked Jamie Rosenberg,
Google’s vice president of digital content, clearly not pleased with Milk
Music and its movie counterpart, Milk Video. “We should just all work
together, right?”
PHOTO BY NADIA CHAUDHURY. COPYRIGHT BIZBASH.
Samsung’s Milk Music streaming service launches at the South by Southwest
Festival in Austin, Texas, in March 2014.Sitting around a conference table, the Google executives laid out what
they knew about Milk. Daren was unsettled.
“They were tracking us,” Daren said. “They knew more about Milk than
I thought they would.”