There are a lot of things that could be blamed for Samsung‘s poor mobile performance in recent years – arguably it’s a industry-wide shift rather than one targeted at Android’s largest manufacturer – but it appears interviews with former and current Samsung employees point to a common weakness within the company: management that “inherently doesn’t understand software”. As many of you will know, Samsung is one of the premiere hardware manufacturers in the world, but it seems that distrust of software as a consumer-facing marketing opportunity has lead to Samsung struggling to stay ahead and canning many software projects after only brief tenures – remember Milk Video and ChatON?
In an example of perhaps how chaotic the situation was internally, one manager recalls that the strongest opposition to a new hands-free app for the Galaxy S4 they were developing was from within Samsung itself. There are signs of change, of course, with Samsung’s executives calling for a change in culture if the Korean tech giant is to stay alive in this cutthroat industry – and some analysts believe that if Samsung is unable to change, it will be out of the smartphone business in as soon as 5 years.
It’s pretty startling to hear accounts like this from employees of Samsung’s, and while we’ll have to assume that there is another side to the story, it’s hard not to see that this reluctance to develop strong software platforms has cost Samsung dearly. What do you think about these accounts from within Samsung?
