Nowadays technology lays an important basis for sustainable or explosive growth of many companies. There are infinite examples of explosive growth after a new technology has been successfully implemented. But many other times, a technology does not really work properly and fails to bring a company success. Many times the impact seems to be low, since a company hence a trial and error strategy. Other times, failure has big impact on a company.
Let’s have a look at a very recent example: Samsung’s Galaxy Note 7. It was meant to be Samsung’s next showpiece. A lot of time and money was invested to make this a new bestseller, in the race against Apple’s Iphone7 and other smartphones on the market. It had a much greater storage and was fully water resistant. It even had a Iris scan ability. It all sounded very promising.
But quite quickly after the launch of the Galaxy Note 7, on August 19th 2016, some incidents occurred. Pictures of burned and exploded batteries came online. The media picked it up quickly after that. A few weeks later, it even was not permitted to take the Galaxy Note 7 on an airplane, because there were risks that the battery would explode during the flight, having major consequences. Samsung announced recalls, but they did not work.
On October the 10th , they eventually decided to stop producing the Galaxy note 7. People had to stop using their device and they could choose a new one. Following to these announcements, Samsung’s share dropped over 10% that same day. It was estimated that the revenue of Samsung would decrease with at least 33% and the damage would be over 17 billion dollars. As you can see, the implementation of only a small piece, a battery, can have enormous consequences for (technological) firms.
Hey Joost,
Thank you for your article. I fully agree, one small fault and the whole operation goes down the well. We tend to see more and more of these failures with new devices nowadays. It can be argued that companies today are trying to cut cost and thus skip the rigorous testing process. As a result, the customers themselves have to discover these faults. The faults are sometimes minor and could be fixed with an update, but other times, as mentioned in the article, the faults can be big and cost the company billions in revenue and downgrade their image. I think the lesson to be learned here is never try to cut costs by skipping the testing process. This is a crucial development stage that should not be compromised. Recently, there was a similar incident with ExoMars Schiaparelli lander. Just minutes before the space shuttle could land on mars, European Space Agency lost contact with the shuttle and as a result it crashed. Billions have been invested in this project and yet due a failure of the software in the thrusters. This failure and the loss of billions of dollars could’ve been avoided if rigorous testing had been done.