I have worked for Samsung, elbeit in software division. Company culture is such that if a high level manager promised to deliver he will pressure his people to meet the deadline no matter if the product has flaws. And every step of the organisation will do the same. There is also little flow of bad information up the chain, every level will use multiple tactics to make impression everything is fine even if the building is on fire.

This has a lot to do with korean culture where keeping face and loyalty for his employer are two most important things in the life of a corporate drone.

It's interesting that such company culture can achieve pretty amazing things, yet fail at very simple and obvious stuff.

This reminds me of a cool analogy: big companies behave like artifical general intelligence, very smart, but very unlike human intelligence.

And this, I think is how AI already has, and will gain, traction. Already lots of decision making in large companies is made with the aid of software tools.

The GP’s description sounds much more human ego driven than AI. There’s likely common use of gaslighting and lying in a company where impressions matter more than delivery.

when you say 'gain traction', can you clarify this a little?

Nothing deep, just how it will inch it’s way into our decision processes without us really thinking much of it.

That's a silicon valley term for "get used." They are saying that AI will get used to make corporate decisions. It comes from the startup scene where until your product is being used you're floundering on a frictionless surface.

get traction is definitely not a silicon valley, or product specific phrase.

I think he wanted to know how on earth 'AI' will solve this. People will claim AI can solve anything...

It seems Hyundai doesn’t suffer from these problems, at least now. Is this just a difference in the priorities and expectations of leadership there? FWIW their reliability is generally considered to be nearly on par with Toyota and Honda now

> where keeping face and loyalty for his employer are two most important things in the life of a corporate drone.

But surely, preventing a PR and product release disaster would count as being loyal to the company and helping the company to keep face.

This explains Bada and Samsung telling to the users that Bada 2.0 update was coming the next month.

You could call it a thousand yes's for every no.

Samsung has a history of shipping crappy products just for the sake of being the first to do it. Their product line has always been a sprawling mess of overly-specialized niche products. It seems like they have a strategy of throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks.

Well, thankfully they do also ship many products that are the first to do something useful, so as a normal consumer that isn't a first-adopter for most things I appreciate that they create a market for many random innovations.

Samsung has a history of squirting out over fifty new phone models each year, hoping that a production rate in excess of 1.0 per week will be sufficient to cause at least one of those 50+ models to stick.

At least, they hope it will stick for a little while, long enough for them to find the next random thing that will stick for a little while.

True but they also occasionally put out really nice products. The S10e is a great phone, for example. In many ways it shows an attention to detail that used to be the province of a famous fruit branded company.

Their approach to product design seems pretty chaotic but that doesn't necessarily mean it's wrong.

It depends on the market segment maybe? I like my (older) Samsung TV and love my Samsung fridge. But those are not exactly contested markets that heavily impact stock performance.

Probably considered a win as long as it isn't banned from airplanes. (re: exploding S7 batteries)

s7 -> Note 7

It's not always the latest. It could be that they are able to move faster than all the other companies by being willing to take much higher risk.

I bought two mid range Samsung phones and they were terrible to the point I suspected they were fake. Then I bought a Samsung refrigerator that broke down often. It's not niche or anything, they just make everything quite hacky.

Kind of like Sony. Instead of an extensive line of phones, Sony offers an extensive line of media formats.

Not every company can be a copycat that throws polish on things and shitloads of marketing. Some have to do the hard work first.

The hard work should include making sure the product is safe, secure and works as advertised. Things Samsung has a track record of not bothering with.

> Some have to do the hard work first

Sure. First as in before they launch a deeply flawed product? Sometimes a half-assed launch is worse that a delayed one. I'm having a hard time touching any bleeding edge tech from Samsung when I know they're willing to dump this kind of stuff on the customer.

Do the hard work, then charge full price when it's done and ready.

> Was this a classic case of dysfunctional corporate culture meaning nobody wanted to give the bosses bad news?

I don't think Samsung would have done something like this for a mass consumer device, take for instance their recent S10. So no.

Galaxy Folds are different though. They are not 100% ready yet -- I'm pretty sure they knew about some of the shortcomings -- but this is still a major leap in mobile display technology and the Fold's release is anything, but, a typical, or 'classical' release. Based on their announcement on bold pricing, limited availability by reservation only, with different support and service model, it is fairly evident that the release is targeting those self-selected tech-savvy folks who want access to the incomplete product just to get a glimpse into the future. And, I'm surprised by the bold move that Samsung is willing to serve such niche group of customers.

That being said, I've never been so excited about a mobile device since I got my first iPhone in 2008. If I had a couple of grands to spare, I would be more than happy to sign up, just to see what it's like.

This is the first thing that came to my mind as well. There is no way this was tested properly if all these reviewer units are failing immediately. There hasn’t even been time for pocket lint and dust to accumulate which will make it so much worse. A proper product would have been tested in all these conditions over and over and not released at all if the failure rate was this high. Feels like management blindness on this went all the way to the top and now they will reap the PR fallout and ridicule that they should. In a proper work environment that punished stupidity like this, some management heads should roll. Engineering heads should roll too but I suspect they told management that it wouldn’t work and management said to “just make it work.” Turns out the laws of physics are hard to rewrite.

Huawei stole their ip and put it in the mate x. Samsung panicked and pushed out a prototype to catch the hype wave

>I'm more interested in how Samsung ever got so far down the road with a such an apparently flawed design.

Companies other than Apple do this all the time. That's what most "X beat Apple at innovation bringing Y to market" amount for.

For all the BS lip service about "innovation" (in an industry where few do any), Jobs Apple was thoroughly evolutionary. Each subsequent iPod iteration added something small but substantial, each iPhone iteration ditto.

There was no huge revolutionary steps between releases -- the product itself, and being well thought out and usable and good was the revolution.

The product idea wasn't revolutionary either (there were touch smartphones before the iPhone, and mp3 players before the iPod, tables before the iPad and so on -- the key wasn't that it was the revolutionary, but it was the first finally decent all-rounder -- as opposed to the first thrown-together mis-mash that works if you have low expectations and love tinkering as a "power user").

That said, Apple has increasingly been doing the same "pre-announce/release half-though BS" themselves past 2015 or so (e.g. the butterfly keyboard, the can Mac Pro, the touch strip, the wireless charger that never materialized, the 2+ years in the making Mac Pro replacement, etc).

Pretty sure they just wanted to be first in history to release a folding phone. No way someone at the top didn’t know.

I am sure it’s very simple. Maybe someone had a financial incentive to push it through.

not sure how Samsung would profit from selling a limited early adopter edition (by reservation) of experimental product?

This isn't a mass consumer product. Samsung had explained that their customers would receive different kind of support and services, which means more cost to Samsung.

I think they were referring to management performance bonuses and things of that nature.

And you get what you measure.

It feels like they didn't do any real-world testing at all, but I'm not sure that's even possible.

If the primary issue is "don't remove the protective screen" then I think that might be easy to overlook - to assume that educating the user will take the problem away, for example.

But that isn’t the only problem. The part of the screen behind the hinge is exposed. It’s easy for junk to get between the screen and hinge. Then, when opening and closing the dirt presses against the screen and damages it. Once damaged the screen seems to quickly fail.

Wonder if some hot glue on the gaps of the screen behind the hinge would solve the initial problem?

eg stop dirt getting in