“A patented design may be the essential feature of a spoon or a rug,”
Samsung’s brief argued. “But the same is not true of smart phones, which
contain countless other features that give them remarkable functionality
wholly unrelated to their design.” Remove a component or a piece of
software under a patent dispute, and the entire phone stops working. Apple
had taken advantage of this pitfall, arguing it owned what were in fact
generic software features, and the black rectangle shape of a smartphone, in
order to shut out competition.
“Isn’t it simply unworthy of such a great company,” asked the popular
patent blogger Florian Mueller, “to engage in behavior that increasingly
resembles the conduct of patent trolls who seek to extract undue leverage
from weak and dubious patents?”
Yet that success came in the wake of a significant marketing pullback.
Todd Pendleton’s successors at Samsung struggled to line up anything
nearly as creative or effective as their previous campaigns.
Casey Neistat, on his popular YouTube vlog after the Oscars in 2016,
revealed that Samsung was “gonna have me skateboard down the aisle, past
Leonardo [DiCaprio], taper down the aisle and jump on the stage holding
their new 360 camera in my hand during the broadcast.”
“This has to happen,” Samsung’s top people insisted to Oscars
counterparts, according to Casey.
“Okay, let’s figure this out,” the Oscars staffers responded. “Is it a four-
second skateboard ride or a six-second skateboard ride?”
Two hours before the broadcast, the scene was cut entirely.
Then there was the decline and closure of Milk Music in September
2016, effectively the end of Samsung’s biggest software inroad against
Google.
“I’m just disappointed, because we had all the right ingredients to be
able to execute on that and we didn’t,” Daren told me unhappily. He and Ed
Ho left the company, their beloved start-up gutted.
And Samsung’s struggling operating system, Tizen? An Israeli security
researcher weighed in at Kaspersky Lab’s Security Analyst Summit: “It may
be the worst code I’ve ever seen. Everything you can do wrong here, they
do it.” The operating system was a long way from catching on.
It was amid these difficulties that the Galaxy Note 7 phones began their
spectacular self-destruction, leading to talk-show jokes, the grounding of an
airplane, a botched recall, followed by a second recall, and the cancellation