Samsung’s decline in the smartphone market isn’t exactly a secret. With the presence of the budget Chinese smartphones and a general slowdown of smartphone sales, it is inevitable that Samsung wouldn’t be able to stay dominant in the market forever. Well, such is the case right now and the Samsung Executives are apparently blaming this decline on company’s focus on the hardware of the phone instead of the software.
According to former and currently serving employees, Samsung’s culture of being focused on hardware has stymied many previous efforts to develop software and service platforms to support smartphone business. “Samsung’s upper management just inherently doesn’t understand software. They get hardware – in fact, they get hardware better than anyone else. But software is a completely different ballgame,” says a former employee.
The lack of software expertise among the Samsung Executives has resulted in the shutting down of Samsung’s ChatON messaging service in March as well as the Milk Video app in November.
Not all is doom and gloom in Samsung’s smartphone division however. For instance, Samsung Pay, the company’s own mobile payment service, is gaining traction in both South Korea and the US. This feature is credited to Dongjin Koh, the current head of Samsung’s mobile division.
“There are signs that Samsung is trying to change and the company is acknowledging its failures. The company is moving in the right direction, but there is a high probability this is too little, too late,” says Chang Sea-jin, a business professor at Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology.
Whatever the case, it seems that Samsung’s days of dominated the Android market is well and truly behind them.
Source : Reuters
