The Scariest Company in Tech

For example, Apple doesn't do any manufacture themselves, and yet they have costs so much lower than the competition that they are able to define entire new markets in the time it takes for their competition to develop cost-competitive supplies.

This has happened three times now, firstly with the original iPods (Apple pre-signed huge contracts for those tiny hard drives, proved the market, and when competitors wanted in they had to wait for new sources to come online), the iPod touch (Apple pre-ordered a huge proportion of the worlds flash memory supply) and finally, most recently with the iPad.

Ever wonder why it's taken a year for anyone to build a 9"/10" iPad competitor? It's because no one can get capacitative touch screen in sufficient quantities. Even Samsung (which owns the factory!) had to make do with 7" screens.

Now, finally new factories are beginning to come online, which means that competitors can release their products. The problem for them is that Apple locked in much lower prices (because of their bigger purchasing power), which makes it hard to compete on price. This applies to Samsung as much as to anyone - they can't afford to drop Apple as a customer, but the capital costs of building a new factory means it costs them more to supply themselves (selling in smaller volume) than it does to supply Apple.

http://www.samsung.com/uk/consumer/mobile-devices/mobile-pho...

If I were King of Samsung, this would be cut down to around three models. The model names would be consistent, recognisable, and the names would not be discarded when the phones are updated. This way, when my Samsung Galaxy Pro is due for a replacement, I can go and ask for the latest generation Samsung Galaxy Pro. No need to spend ages trying to figure out which of the vast selection is supposed to be the flagship, or which is the budget model. The laptop situation is even worse. What's scary is how nobody but Apple seem to have figured this out.

And even though they have the price advantage over the other "premium" vendors, they are fighting a war on two fronts. The ultra cheap vendors can undercut even Samsung by doing things like using super cheap plastic, having batteries that stop working after 6 months, dead pixels, and a software team of like 2 people who just maintain a couple drivers and slap some shitty graphics and free apps on top of stock Android.

So Samsung's playground is a sizeable but bounded slice in the middle: people who don't care about having the BEST phone, and want it to be really cheap, but not cheap cheap. Cheap, but on-brand.

Microsoft had no real competition. No one else was really licensing an OS for commodity hardware. Apple, IBM, Sun et all were all selling their OS on their own hardware.

Samsung is beset on all sides by competition, and they only hold one of the Aces (supply chain).

Want to be even more scared?

http://www.rasterman.com/index.php?page=News

:-)

a) regularly updated with Android tech as opposed to seemingly lagging the rest of the industry

b) supported worth a hill of beans instead of getting a "uhhhh we don't support that in the US market" when asking about AT&T

c) a good demonstration of Android capabilities in the first place.

Samsung makes decent phones. Nothing spectacular. The GPS in the Galaxy class phones draws endless complaints about bugginess. The builds deployed on AT&T are mediocre. Their Kies desktop software is bloated, slow, and unreliable - it's frequently the case that disconnecting and reconnecting the phone/tablet fails to recognize it (and in turn it doesn't work with a number of US SKUs, thanks to AT&T).

Sorry gang. There's the potential there to be great. But it's quite a leap from there to dominance. Nokia has had plenty of potential and in the past a pretty dominant position too, but I think the shellacking they took the last few days here on HN is entirely deserved and demonstrative of "you have to nail all facets of the user experience."

I would like to see a company like that enter the mobile market. Someone who makes a product that speaks for itself.

I tried signing up to be a developer about a year ago when they first announced it and I had a under-powered feature phone (Samsung Behold I), yet was discouraged by the fees and other associated things to even sign up...

After reading the Wikipedia page on it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bada_%28operating_system%29#Cri... ...I'm glad I saw the light and bought an iPhone.

From link "Apple Inc. (AAPL 356.85, +2.31, +0.65%) is expected to purchase components used for its handheld devices from Samsung Electronics Co. worth about $7.8 billion this year, the Korea Economic Daily reported Monday, citing industry sources.

The paper also said that Samsung will supply Apple with liquid crystal displays, mobile application processors and NAND flash memory chips used for the U.S. company's iPhones and iPads.

If the contract pushes through, Apple will become Samsung's largest customer, the paper added."

The author never gives proof that Samsung "controls" any of the important components of a smartphone. Don't they merely license their chip designs from ARM, Qualcomm, etc? Is their screen technology based on in-house IP or are they basically commodity manufacturers of new technology? In the absence of these arguments, this article felt like fluff from someone that's seen the word "Samsung" on the BOM for a few phones.

Also, a company's manufacturing and distribution prowess has almost nothing to do with their ability to create a popular consumer software platform. See: Nokia. The only reason Samsung can be mentioned is that they've rapidly adopted Google's operating system. Surmising that they could fork Android is as absurd as imagining that Dell or Asus could alone create a Linux distro that could compete with Windows.

"You can only call your friends (or 911) if they've got a Samsung"? I don't see that working too well. (Especially because, in the US, a call that sounds bad or doesn't go through on Samsung to X will be blamed on the Network, so the carriers will just leave Samsung (or whomever) out in the cold.)

Could be that manufacturing capacity is slack, or they need a technology demonstration for design firms that otherwise aren't moving quickly enough ("Hey, we have all this stuff, let's make something cool out of it!").

That'd explain why they were one of the first Android tablets out there, especially with Android not really being tablet-ready. That kind of risk could break a firm that had to outsource manufacturing. But Samsung already had all the hardware pieces; they just had to drop in the software.

Sorry, just don't see that happening.

Oh, and HTC's phones are so much better quality than the Samsung phones.

Applications are C/C++ UI is GTK/EFL. Has multitasking and Debian package management.

http://jeffhoogland.blogspot.com/2011/02/samsung-is-backing-...

http://www.oss.kr/?module=file&act=procFileDownload&...

now let us wonder about the non-goog customers of canonical, with Unity, the need to ditch X11, ditch Gnome3 …fresh release of GTK3.

If you look at it in those terms, there are two manufacturers that are vertically integrated- Apple and Samsung.

Samsung is weak on software, and software is the critical component of this age (more important than flash, RAM or SoCs). Meanwhile, Apple is a design house, and doesn't have manufacturing capability of its own.

So, one question is whether owning your own plants will be critical or not.

Consider this possibility- it is like the Windows market, only instead of it being a licensed OS, it is Apple, and Apple devices, but HTC et. al. become contract manufacturers for Apple. The margins may not be any better than competing in the commodity phone market, but the R&D and marketing costs are a lot less, and so they may be more profitable.

I'm sure this goes against their DNA, but unless FoxConn can expand enough to cover the demand (for Apple and for everybody else) I can see the commoditization happening at the manufacturing level, rather than the device level, as it did in the PC market.

Samsung has had a decade to replicate the iPod, or to build a video game system. I don't know if they will be able to build the expertise or find the mojo that Apple has on software.

I don't think Apple is going to start building plants nor will they build expertise in lithography, etc.

But I think that while software is easy to commoditize (eg: Android) a quality software experience is much harder. Meanwhile, it is cheaper to be a contract manufacturer for a %5 margin than it is to try and compete with your own products.

So, Apple could be the new Microsoft, and Samsung could be the new Apple-- if software is what matters. The reverse could occur if lithography expertise is what ends up mattering.

I (sadly) still use a Samsung Instinct and the OS is of their own design. If you've ever used Samsung's Instinct you'd know it's absolutely terrible and slow. I can't remember the last time I typed something - and I don't even type fast - and it wasn't at least a couple of seconds behind my fingers... pretty annoying when the touch screen won't calibrate and you make at least one typo every other word!

The only upside to the phone is the relative ease of "unlocking" it for use as a 4G modem.

Why should I bother to read about your views on Samsung when:

1. you show neither data nor other facts on which to base your opinion

2. you don't disclose anything about yourself?

For all I know you could be a Samsung employee trying to increase the value of his stock benefits.