Samsung beat Apple last quarter in overall sales. It regularly pulls in billions in profit. It is inarguably one of the biggest and most successful companies on Earth. So why does it spend so much money trolling the Internet and critics?
Samsung has been busted by the press repeatedly for everything from paying developers to plug it on forums to rigging benchmark tests it’d win anyway. And now they’ve got a new problem; trolling companies like HTC online:
[The Taiwanese Fair Trade Commission] says Samsung used a “large number of hired writers and designated employees” to post in Taiwanese forums. The commission does add that the company did this through a third-party marketing company, just as Samsung originally claimed. Two local marketing firms were fined a combined total of over $100,000 for their part in the marketing ploy.
What’s very weird about all this is that Samsung really doesn’t need to do this. HTC, one of the targets, is a competitor in a technical sense, but in reality, HTC is nowhere close to the financial giant Samsung is. Nobody comes close.
It’s a very weird and insecure thing to do, and worse, it lowers consumer confidence in Samsung’s products. It’s pretty easy to do this anywhere; you just need money and a lack of scruples. Quite a few “work-from-home” jobs essentially boil down to doing exactly this. So basically the only reliable word for many consumers will be their friends and family, because of course Samsung wouldn’t bribe them to lie to you directly… right?