“I can’t innovate in software and get stuck on hardware.”
‘Phono Sapiens’ Choi Jae-bung “I have to be a teacher in the industry”… “In order to jump to the next level in the manufacturing industry, we need to put humanity and humanities into our products.”
(Seoul = Yonhap News) Reporter Jong-Hyun Kim = It is shocking to say that LG Electronics, the two pillars of Korea’s electronics industry together with Samsung Electronics, could quit the smartphone business, which had invested enormous resources through corporate-wide capabilities.
LG Electronics’ mobile phone business has a history of 26 years, and at one time ranked third in the world market share, but failed to respond properly to trend changes and lags behind in competition.
In the wave of the 4th industrial revolution, LG Electronics could not give up its smartphone, the hub of a hyper-connected society where all devices, data, and people connect and communicate with sensors, so it made every effort to normalize its business, but its market share gradually declined. The accumulated deficit reached 5 trillion won. Eventually, they lost the power and will to continue the business.
Why did this happen? In order to find out the cause and implications of the LG smartphone’s failure, I interviewed Choi Jae-bung, a professor of mechanical engineering at Sungkyunkwan University, who made a sensation with a book titled’Phono Sapiens (a new human being born of a smartphone)’ last year. Professor Choi is famous as a lecturer who convincingly explains how the digital revolution, which is dizzyingly unfolding through insights and data analysis that crosses humanities, design, and engineering, is changing the civilization of the times.
◇ “LG smartphone failure is software failure”
Professor Choi affirmed, “The LG smartphone’s failure is due to its failure to give consumers a’good experience’, and this is due to the lack of software, not hardware.”
He said that in these days, smartphones are not just a single device, but a part of the body, so they are not always carried around because they are good in shape, so they are always compared with other products. .
Professor Choi said, “Consumers’ experience comes from software, and LG smartphones neglected this and paid attention only to hardware innovation for a long time, and when they learned that this was wrong, they had already irreversibly lost their competitiveness.”
He said, of course, that LG is a leading manufacturing company in the world for batteries and home appliances, and has excellent technology in smartphone hardware, but this alone could not capture Phono Sapiens.
“Especially, the younger generation who are sensitive to smartphones have dual identities of real world and virtual reality,” he said. “The’good experience’ that will seduce them can be realized through the harmony of software and hardware, but only hardware can satisfy the needs of consumers. What I thought could be wrong is wrong,” he diagnosed. He analyzed that “Samsung Electronics built a software ecosystem well around the time the trend shifted from mobile phones to smartphones, but Nokia and LG Electronics made a decisive mistake here.”
He pointed out that this problem is not only LG Electronics’ smartphone, but a chronic disease of our manufacturing industry as a whole. Our manufacturers make things meticulous and convenient, but they tend to neglect the software that gives life to them, he stressed that this is an era where industrial competitiveness cannot be improved without innovation.
◇ To become a leading country, digital civilization must be standardized.
Professor Choi called our industry’spec economy’. For example, when the software team, hardware team, and design team set their specifications and present the target point of time when developing smartphones, they can quickly and elaborately create them within a given schedule, but they will have the best experience that will be given to consumers through cooperation and convergence. ‘When asked to create, he said it didn’t work because he was soaked in the hardware sensibility.
He said that in order for our manufacturing industry to jump one step further, we need to add humanity and humanities to our products. He said that the organization and thoughts should also change.
Apple doesn’t make semiconductors, the core of smartphones, and it lacks technology so that more than 20% of its parts are made in Korea, but becoming the world’s best company is a’good experience’ that impresses consumers with the sensibility of humanities and art in products He explained that it was because he gave him.
He said that in order for Korea to become the world’s leading country in the economy after Corona 19, it is urgent to accept a digital civilization as a standard civilization. .
“You have to learn in China. The Chinese Communist Party’s Central Committee has already promoted a shift to a digital state since 2010, and as a result, digital consumption last year reached 50 times that of the United States.” It is because China has already realized a digital powerhouse.”
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2021/01/22 06:00 sent