Samsung VP Gavin Kim departs to lead Microsoft's Windows Phone product management
Samsung's vice president of consumer and enterprise services Gavin Kim has left the company to join Microsoft as general manager of the Windows Phone team, BGR has exclusively learned.
Context & Ripple Effects
Gavin Kim leaves Samsung as vice president of consumer and enterprise services to become general manager of Microsoft's Windows Phone team, per BGR's exclusive. The timing matters: Samsung has just taken the top spot in IDC's Q3 2011 global smartphone rankings, and its AT&T Windows Phones — the Focus S and Focus Flash — are the devices carrying Microsoft's platform into U.S. stores this month.
So Microsoft is hiring a general manager out of the OEM whose hardware is doing the heaviest lifting for Windows Phone, pulling him from the services side of the house rather than the device side. The pickup by outlets including The Windows Blog shows how closely the Windows Phone ecosystem is watching its own staffing.
First-order effects
- Microsoft gains a GM with inside knowledge of Samsung's consumer and enterprise services strategy — the partner currently supplying its flagship Windows Phone hardware — at the exact moment the Focus S and Focus Flash hit AT&T.
- Samsung loses a sitting VP from its services organization while holding the number-one position in IDC's Q3 2011 global smartphone tally, creating an immediate backfill problem.
Second-order effects
- The hire tightens the Microsoft–Samsung axis around Windows Phone: Kim arrives knowing how the top smartphone vendor structures services and enterprise offerings, which shapes what Microsoft asks of its hardware partners next.
- Samsung and rival OEMs now face a talent market where the platform owner can bid directly for their executives, raising the retention cost of keeping senior product and services leaders.
Third-order effects
- If executive traffic between OS vendors and their handset partners keeps flowing in this direction, the mobile platform contest becomes as much a war for people as for shelf space — with the ecosystem that hires best gaining leverage over partners' roadmaps.
- A services executive crossing from the leading Android OEM to the challenger platform signals that differentiation is shifting toward software and services layers, where Microsoft needs credibility most.
The trend: The smartphone platform war is increasingly fought through cross-company executive poaching, as OS vendors hire directly out of the hardware partners they depend on.