Backfire: Beleaguered Samsung’s exploding phones triggered by rush to beat Apple’s iPhone 7
“Earlier this year, managers at the South Korean company began hearing the next iPhone wouldn’t have any eye-popping innovations. The device would look just like the previous two models too. It sounded like a potential opening for Samsung,” Yoolim Lee and Min Jeong Lee report for Bloomberg. “So the top brass at Samsung Electronics Co., including phone chief D.J. Koh, decided to accelerate the launch of a new phone… They pushed suppliers to meet tighter deadlines, despite loads of new features, another person with direct knowledge said. The Note 7 would have a high-resolution screen that wraps around the edges, iris-recognition security and a more powerful, faster-charging battery. Apple’s taunts that Samsung was a copycat would be silenced for good.”
“Then it all backfired,” Lee and Lee report. “Just days after Samsung introduced the Note 7 in August, reports surfaced online that the phone’s batteries were bursting into flame. By the end of the month, there were dozens of fires and Samsung was rushing to understand what went wrong. On Sept. 2, Koh held a grim press conference in Seoul where he announced Samsung would replace all 2.5 million phones shipped so far. What was supposed to be triumph had turned into a fiasco.”
“‘This is creating an enormous problem for the company — for its reputation and ability to support its customers when there’s a problem,’ said David Yoffie, a management professor at Harvard Business School and board member at Intel Corp,” Lee and Lee report. “The misstep has set off soul-searching at the Samsung conglomerate and in South Korea, where the company employs hundreds of thousands and is revered for leading the nation’s rise since the Korean War. Samsung’s flagship electronics unit built its reputation on high-quality products and cutting-edge technology, becoming the largest phone maker in the world and a powerful rival to Apple in innovation. One employee, in an online discussion group, called the episode ‘humiliating.'”
“‘Clearly, they missed something,’ said Anthea Lai, an analyst with Bloomberg Intelligence. ‘They were rushing to beat Apple and they made a mistake,'” Lee and Lee report. “Twenty years ago, in a chapter of Samsung Group history that employees can recite by heart, Chairman Lee grew so frustrated by faulty mobile phones that he piled up thousands of the devices and lit the whole heap ablaze… Today, Samsung phones are ablaze once again… ‘The potential damage to reputation is far greater than short-term financial losses,’ said Chang Sea Jin, a professor at National University of Singapore.”
MacDailyNews Take: If you stumbled here from Google: You wasted your money on an iPhone wannabe from a slipshod South Korean dishwasher maker? We’d ask, “What are you stupid?” but there’s no need since the data already tells us you are.
If it’s not an iPhone, it’s not an iPhone.
And, yes, Karma is one indescribably beautiful bitch!
Jeep charging a Samsung Galaxy Note 7 (left) and a Jeep charging an Apple iPhone (right)
Garage charging a Samsung Galaxy Note 7 (left) and a garage charging an Apple iPhone (right)
