global patent deal which will last a decade,” Gordon Kelly wrote in Forbes.
“Buried within it was an agreement that Samsung would tone down
TouchWiz, refocus on core Android apps over its own customizations and
cancel more radical customizations such as its ‘Magazine UX’ interface.”
Two days later, in January 2014, Google publicly announced the sale of
Motorola Mobility to Lenovo. Google would no longer be overseeing the
manufacture of smartphone hardware, removing it from direct competition
with Samsung, at least for now.
Google kept most of Motorola’s trove of twenty thousand patents,
however. The patents served as a buffer between Samsung and Apple.
Google had the patents to hold off lawsuits from Apple, while staking out a
hilltop position from which to keep Samsung at bay in software.
Jay Lee, meanwhile, was skeptical about continuing to develop in-house
software at Samsung.
“G.S. Choi and Jay Y. Lee did not always see eye to eye, especially on
the software side,” said T.J. “It’s not that Jay Y. didn’t understand the
importance of software. He saw what Apple did...but he just didn’t believe
that Samsung had the DNA to have that capability grown organically.”
Adding to his growing doubts, the profit margins on smartphone
margins had peaked. Samsung executives had a gnawing fear of the
difficulty of continuing to pour money into software acquisitions in the
face of declining profits.
Arguments broke out between the crown prince and his regent. Jay
believed that Samsung was a hardware maker at its core, and that it was
time to go back to hardware. G.S. Choi responded that it took many years
to build a software ecosystem. “We have to try,” he’d tell Jay. “We’ll never
get there if we don’t try.”
While the South Korean media painted Jay Lee as a cultural reformer,
inside Samsung the reality wasn’t so straightforward. His father, the fire-
and-brimstone chairman of years past, had promulgated a vision of
software. But Jay ended up questioning the very core of that idea by
moving away from software. Jay’s rising leadership, ironically, was in many
ways a return to a hardware tradition at the company. He was cautious,
careful, and reticent. He wasn’t promulgating a vision for a bold new future
like Apple’s. Rather, he was starting to look more like his prudent
grandfather, the Samsung patriarch B.C. Lee, who’d died twenty-seven
years earlier.