Samsung's Position On Tizen May Hurt Developer Recruitment 93
CowboyRobot sends in an article about how Samsung's constantly shifting plans for its smartwatches are making it hard for developers to commit to building apps. Quoting:
"Samsung's first smartwatch, released in October last year, ran a modified version of Google's Android platform. The device had access to about 80 apps at launch, all of which were managed by a central smartphone app. Samsung offered developers an SDK for the Galaxy Gear so they could create more apps. Developers obliged. Then Samsung changed direction. Samsung announced a new series of smartwatches in February: the Gear 2, Gear 2 Neo, and Gear Fit. Unlike the first device, these three run Samsung’s Tizen platform. ... This week, Samsung made things even more interesting. Speaking to Reuters, Yoon Han-kil, senior vice president of Samsung’s product strategy team, said the company is working on a watch that will use Google’s Android Wear platform. In other words, Samsung will bring three different watches to market with three different operating systems in under a year."
Worth noting (Score:5, Interesting)
It's most likely that the three different platforms mentioned were developed and evangelized by three different teams at Samsung that never talked to each other. Each team probably thinks their solution is *the* solution.
When I worked at Samsung, divisions were heavily siloed, and often the first time you heard about what they were doing was when you saw it on a news site. Even within the same platform, teams were heavily divided. Our software dev outreach teams didn't even have a way to talk to the hardware design teams.
IBM and SONY syndrome? (Score:4, Interesting)
Long ago IBM split itself in to 7 internal subdivisions that could to a certain extent compete. At the time all of IBM's equipment ran on chips made by IBM for IBM products. The florida area sub-unit which didn't actually make any computers, put one together from intel chips. It was dubbed the PC. The OS was contracted out to some kids from Seattle.
Sony's products division is constantly at war with it's content division, leading to the constant hedging on content protection that defeats their products by using non-standard formats with DRM.
Perhaps Samsung, which is really a humungously diverse set of industries, just has different competing segments within itself. Each has a strategy that is aimed at competing with the other divisions strategy but has to be distinctly different due to the internal politics, just like IBM's PC did.
Its not s strategy to do everything, that's just the result.