Aren't those American companies (other than Samsung)? I mean, they're all global/multi-national like most big corps, so it's not as clean as that. But it seems like you're actually agreeing with the parent...
It's not just in America. Samsung has been caught with the same shenanigans in China and in Taiwan. The author is right about Samsung - it is the world's most dirty, unethical, and corrupt corporation, by far.
You are right to a certain extent! But lets not forget that Samsung is a huge company too and is registered as per US norms. So the American executives of Samsung would be very much comfortable referring to either of them.
Sure, Samsung comes across as an utterly immoral and venal company in this piece. Unless you object to the specifics of any of the allegations (which seem based mostly on court papers), you can't fault the writer for being "biased". There are innumerable ways to skin the "smartphone wars" story, and Kurt Eichenwald has chosen one. Instead of some standard Apple-did-this/Google-did-this/Samsung-did-this story, he's chosen to focus it mostly on Samsung.
Another reason why Samsung's behavior might seem egregious to many American/western HNers is because their economies have historically moved past the stage where such wanton copying & corruption was acceptable. Doesn't mean American companies haven't been guilty of equally venal - at times far worse - practices. But it would help to view Korean/Chinese companies trying to "catch up" on the global stage through relevant context.
Again, I'm not justifying what Samsung does here, just saying if they hadn't done much of what the article lays out, we might not have had such a competitive and disruptive smartphone/consumer electronics sector globally.
I wonder if this is coming from a position of ignorance... Samsung is among the companies of the world that might be producing negative externalities that weigh more than their positive contributions
Seems like the average complaints people have working at BigCo.
Compared to the kind of stuff that Microsoft, Apple have done in the past in the software world.
And I do not see how this is bad, maybe Samsung is trying to learn why 'Western' engineering is so much superior to 'Asian' engineering by this acquisition ?
Is Samsung at this point really _that_ different in terms of semantics from those examples though. Obviously they are all unique and Samsung's location makes a big impact on their culture but like they hire a similar intelligence echelon of people right? I don't know much about the internals of Samsung so maybe I'm missing something.
Good thing the article even says Samsung is a well oiled machine in many areas outside of the ones with issues discussed in this article. Almost like large companies can have varrying success and culture.
I don't claim to know the details of Samsung corp structure as much as hocuspocus does but all this internal competition makes sense. And kinda normal.
Few examples.
There's a lot of friendly and unfriendly competition between different branches of US armed forces.
During World War 2, Japanese Army and Navy absolutely hated each other. It was so bad that Japanese Army built a few naval carriers for their planes, all because Japanese Navy didn't want to cooperate readily with the army.
When an organization is big enough, such fracturing/competition within the organization seems inevitable...
Samsung seems to be a very 'American' company. Is there anything they do that a lot of big American companies don't do?
Their only crime seems to be being big enough to beat an American company at its own game. If Apple wants to compete it need to do better than competing on 'rounded corners'. Lets face it the iPhone's cachet is rooted more in media hype than any meaningful reality.
There is very little that is transparent about Samsung and their relatively recent history is pretty seedy. High level corruption, bribery etc. That the culture of deception flows down the company into actual products doesn't surprise me.
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