Comment by jonnathanson
13 years ago
I work with a fair number of (awesome!) Korean engineers, and I can say that yes, Samsung has a lot of fanboys. It's sort of like the Apple of Korea. It's also been gaining a lot of admiration from A/V enthusiasts in the States, having easily supplanted Sony as the high-end consumer electronics maker of choice for TVs and such.
Samsung is a very impressive company. It doesn't use the Nike-esque marketing playbook Apple does, and as such, it doesn't inspire the hero worship or the fanaticism in the States. But it's been quietly building up a massive empire.
[Full disclosure: I say this as an Apple fanboy, and as the resident iOS 7 apologist at my office (everyone here's firmly on Team Android). I own plenty of Apple and Samsung devices, and I don't feel the need to declare absolute brand loyalty to any one provider.]
It always amuses me to see how much vitriol comes from anti-apple folks, when, if they were living in Korea and held the exact same standards, they would likely have equal hate for Samsung. Their vertical and horizontal control on their home turf dwarfs Apple's. But no, it's just a foreign company that has managed to do wonders somehow. As a chaebol, Samsung got where they are now thanks to very favorable government assistance, that, if occurred here, would be considered pretty controversial.
While I agree with a lot of your points, I'm a little puzzled by this one:
"It always amuses me to see how much vitriol comes from anti-apple folks..."
Was I the intended recipient of that description? I'd hardly call myself "anti-Apple," nor would I say I've engaged in "vitriol" directed at Apple. Almost the complete opposite, in fact. :)
Apologies if I'm misreading you.
In my reading that wasn't directed at you, but the general "wake up sheeple" type comments you often find directed at people making pro-apple comments.
You did a great job, summed up my thoughts. If I wasn't an Apple kind of guy, I'm sure I'd have an S4.
Wasn't directed at you, sorry about the confusion.
samsung is a lot like sony in the pre rootkit days. Most people knew they were there and bought their stuff because it was good. No marketing crap, no media circus or hype, they just churn out usable stuff in lots of industries.
Apple thrives on publicity and hype, its part of their image and its polarising.
WHAT? First, Samsung doesn't use a Nike-esque marketing playbook? Does Apple? I'm not even sure what Nike-esque means.
I'm sorry, it's Friday and I'm a little exhausted, so my sarcasm meter is on the fritz. Apologies if I'm inducing a facepalm in saying this, but...
Nike's playbook -- as made famous by Phil Knight in the 70s, 80s, and 90s -- was to market a lifestyle, not a shoe. Nike is an incredibly innovative marketing company, and Steve Jobs himself fondly referenced Phil Knight's work at Nike as inspiration for how he thought about marketing at Apple.
I didn't read the GP as sarcasm, and if it was your answer is still constructive, congrats.
Accounting for 20% of South Korea's GDP and having been involved in a number of bribery and wire tapping controversies with former Prime Ministers and government officials, Samsung is too big to fail and they know it.
They are the Goldman Sachs of the electronics industry. The Korean government and the Korean people will never let Samsung fail. Having such a sturdy safety net means they can take some very bold risks and those have really paid off for them.
Maybe that sort of government guarantee is the only way to compete in a field like semiconductors.
Building a fab and developing semi technologies requires a huge amount of capital, but if a competitor comes up with a better process you lose your lunch. That doesn't mean that in the next generation you won't be out ahead though.
Intel seem to do pretty well without a government to bail them out, but the other players are all deeply intertwined with their governments.
Maybe high tech manufacturing is an industry where it is hard for free market countries to compete, hence its flight from the west. Actually, a lot of technological success on the US is built on the back of its military industrial complex.
Is deep government involvement required for technological development? (Specifically the needs R&D and money, not the many small bets found here). If so, wouldn't it be nice if our engine for funding that wasn't built around war.
Intel has been a phenomenal success story without major government assistance (that I know of, at least). But I guarantee that the government would bail it out if it ever fell on hard times. We seem to be entering a new era of international protectionism, and I suspect that more subsidies, protections, and tariffs are on the way.
Whether government investment or assistance is necessary for deep technological R&D is a really interesting question. A preponderance of our hardware (and many of our software) advances, even in the private sector, were built on the back of major government R&D investment. As you've pointed out, a lot of this has come from the military-industrial complex.
Our major companies (other than Goldman Sachs and its peers) don't receive the same level of protection that the Korean chaebol, or the Japanese Big Four, or the Chinese or even French conglomerates do. But that may change in the near to distant future. It will depend upon our domestic firms' abilities to compete on an international playing field that is increasingly turning toward the chaebol model, and not so much the free-market model.