By Andy Meek
BER
Mar 9th, 2020
As far as revealing anecdotes go, you’d be hard-pressed to find one that offers a more apt summation of the years-long battle between Samsung and Apple than one that Geoffrey Cain includes in his new book Samsung Rising which is set to be published next week.
As a kind of rally-the-troops move to remind Samsung who they should consider their Public Enemy #1, Samsung at one point resorted to delivering truckloads of apples to its various offices. Employees were then encouraged to grab an apple from the piles that were placed in breakrooms and to take a bite out of it as the company’s smartphone battle against the iPhone raged on. The physical act of taking a bite out of one Apple was meant to represent the never-ending quest to take a metaphorical bite out of another much bigger apple. “We had one objective,” an anonymous Samsung executive is quoted as saying in the book, which will be published March 17. “Beat Apple. I’m not kidding you.”
Samsung Rising: The Inside Story of the South Korean Giant That Set Out to Beat Apple and Conquer Tech is based on Cain’s reporting from South Korea for outlets including The Economist, The Wall Street Journal and Time. Hundreds of sources were interviewed for the book, an expert from which was published over the weekend by The Daily Mail. It focuses on the Ellen DeGeneres Oscars selfie and provides some color around that moment, presenting it as a kind of high-water mark in the company’s fight against Apple. (Fun fact: What many people didn’t know from the image of Ellen and the actors that shot around the world was that Samsung had to train Ellen how to, ah, actually use its phone.)
Read more about Geoffrey Cain’s new book, Samsung Rising at BER
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