Samsung and the pressures of competition
An interesting report from Bloomberg, “Rush to take advantage of a dull iPhone started Samsung’s battery crisis”, reveals how news about the launch of the iPhone 7 and above all rumors that its improvements were incremental and unattractive, pushed Samsung to improve the specifications of the Galaxy Note 7, leading to the launch of a defective product. The need to take advantage of Apple’s supposed weakness led the Korean brand to install a battery that was too large, as a result of which the pressure exerted by the housing generated short circuits in some cases.
The global recall of the Galaxy Note 7 will cost the company an awful lot of money. It faces legal action as a result of the phone exploding and it has also been banned by airlines; the company has also had to create a page for users to check if their device is affected, while changing the battery icon from gray to green to differentiate safe models, and has announced that it might remotely disable terminals that are not returned.
The episode shows to what extent competition between the major consumer electronic brands is over the specifications of every single component, putting the brands under incredible pressure, as well is illustrating how difficult it is to compete against the specifications Apple includes, which while often criticized for not being totally cutting edge, forces the competition to go further than might be considered wise.
A great complement to this topic comes from the article by Jean-Louis Gassée here in Medium, “iPhone nonsensus: Apple’s debt to bloggers”, which explains how Samsung saw an opportunity to beat Apple’s device having seen that expectations for it were low. The author says Apple should be enormously grateful to all those analysts who, in the months and weeks prior to the launch of the iPhone 7 dedicated themselves to describing how boring it was going to be, and recommending people to wait for the iPhone 8, allowing the brand to deal effectively with the low expectations when the iPhone 7 was launched. And as we now know, had the beneficial side effect of almost pushing its competitors over the edge in their efforts to outdo the company…
(En español, aquí)
