larger phones “Hummers.” “No one’s going to buy that,” he said at a press
conference in July 2010.
Samsung’s management team didn’t take Jobs’s attacks lightly.
“I am talking to you on a phone right now that Apple just copied,”
Brian Wallace, Samsung’s former vice president for strategic marketing,
told me years later. “I’ve got a Note Edge. It’s a giant fuckin’ phone that
Steve Jobs, to his dying breath, made fun of. Who was right? Fuck Steve.
He’s dead and we were right. Samsung was right.”
The Samsung designers felt they were onto something. With the first
Galaxy Note, released in October 2011, they’d created a phone that was
halfway between tablet and smartphone, and it caught on. The larger
screens pioneered by Samsung became a defining element in the evolution
of the smartphone. Eventually Apple released iPhones with larger screens
in each iteration. In this area, Samsung was leading and Apple was
following.
But Samsung managers continued to be in a frenzy to beat Apple in the
marketplace, to replace Apple as the world’s most famous and successful
electronic devices company. And this desperate desire would expose a
critical hole in their corporate culture. Samsung was still benchmarking
Apple products and was being labeled a “fast follower.” The “copycat”
accusation against Samsung was especially touchy for the company’s
executives. In February 2014, Samsung sued the British vacuum cleaner
company Dyson for defamation after Dyson claimed, in its own lawsuit,
that Samsung had ripped off its patents.
In planning the Note 7, Samsung managers were looking for openings
in the market to exploit, listening for rumors, dreaming up new products
the company could use to beat Apple. But the pressure to overtake the
Cupertino company would lead to sloppiness, and it would ultimately
bring the wildly successful brand of Samsung Electronics, and its prized
Galaxy, to the brink of disaster.
In early 2016, D.J. Koh, the executive I had met with in 2011, was
promoted to CEO—one of three CEOs at Samsung Electronics. For the
past five years, D.J.’s research and development team had pushed the
limits of smartphone technology through rapid-fire incremental
improvements. Samsung released phones with bigger screens and stronger
hardware, sold at greater volumes and with better marketing, overtaking
Apple’s market share. Now he and the other executives had heard that the