“I just want you to know that the CEO approved this interview,” he
said, emphasizing the gravity of the invitation. Samsung, he said, typically
does not give interviews on sensitive topics like lawsuits against it.
After riding in a company car through the grubby industrial town of
Suwon and getting cleared past Samsung’s security checkpoint—where
guards checked my old Samsung phone to be sure it had not been
tampered with—we passed within the campus walls, where I saw more
seemingly obligatory coffee shops. After taking a tour of the company
museum, we arrived at the closely guarded premises of the Samsung
Electronics mobile phone unit.
A portly Samsung executive named D.J. Koh, vice president for mobile
research and development, waited for me at the conference table. D.J. had
an imposing presence, a booming voice, and a way of lightening the mood
with his cheesy jokes.
“I feel like the movie star George Clooney. But I will admit my look
and feel are totally different,” he said in the spotlight at a product launch.
You laugh at his jokes not because they’re funny but because they’re
hilariously silly. But D.J. was deadly serious as he faced me at the table
and made a case for Samsung and its strategy against its archrival, Apple.
“Instead of presenting a product and saying, ‘This is it, follow us,’ and
leading the way, we want to satisfy the needs of different preferences of all
the different people, to support their lifestyles.”
Though he never mentioned Apple by name, D.J. was tacitly revealing
Samsung’s strategy in the recently launched smartphone war against Jobs
and Apple. At the time, Apple was the control-freak company with a far
narrower catalog of product lines. The company had little diversity. You
had the choice between the most recent version of the iPhone and the
much bigger iPad. And that was it. They made those who used them cool;
if you didn’t own them, you weren’t cool. As Jobs was famous for saying:
“People don’t know what they want until you show it to them.”
Samsung’s market researchers in the United States thought Apple’s
“Think Different” motto was pompous and presumptuous. Their research
suggested that Android users—who used Samsung products—considered
themselves smart and independent in their choices. In contrast, they saw
fans of Apple products as consumers who fancied themselves creative but
were, in reality, sheep—followers. Samsung had decided to embrace the
opposite strategy to Apple’s: tailoring a version of each product for