Samsung swipes 95 percent of total industry profits earned from Android phones
digitaltrends.com
digitaltrends.com
Purchase of Motorola was one step. The day Google announces the buy, the next day Samsung announced a big strategic partnership with MS[1] and the CEO clearly said in the press conference they were not aware of the deal.
Samsung realized if they play by Google's rules they will be reduced to Google's puppets and the string could be pulled at any time. Like releasing the code later than others for e.g. their own Motorola.
Another thing was Once the phone was sold, Samsung provided support, updates without any additional income - whereas Google kept on earning money through content alone.
Samsung is too big to be just another OEM, though it will need need a HUUUGE culture (work culture, hierarchy, their senior-junior obedience mechanism) to be a software and content provider success. Because the oldies are not going to make new things.
[1] Can just be co-incidence as well.
I can't see any significant way that it is worse for Google for people to have their software rather than Samsung's.
Although neither S4 justifies the price jump from a cheap Nexus 4 for me.
And assuming some people want a high end "Nexus Experience" phone, Samsung gets more customers this way, than if Google went with HTC.
Samsung - in-line with their conventional shot-gun "catch-all" product portfolio strategy.
That's exactly why I think it is a bad idea :) Why drive the Android device market towards a monopoly? It ties both Google's business and Android's success to a single player.
Of course, I've never even heard of ITV Player until that deal became public and it is a two-star app on the app store, so I'm not sure that matters much in the great scheme of things.
"ITV says it's offering the app exclusively to Samsung "for an initial period while we endeavor to optimize and improve the experience before releasing to other device manufacturers.""
http://www.engadget.com/2013/05/09/samsung-itv-player-androi...
ITV is one of the biggest TV stations in the UK and their mobile player being Samsung only is pretty aggravating:
"Our intention is to extend this supported device list to as many Samsung devices as we can and to that end, we would appreciate your feedback."
Am I now a second-class citizen on android for having an (LG) Nexus device?
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=air.ITVMobileP...
Samsung takes all the profits because they have both vertical integration and scale. That's the same thing they did to the PC business, except Intel keeps the CPU profit.
I don't know what Google can do about that, or, for that matter, why they should do anything about it at all. Where is the rush of OEMs to Windows Phone? Nobody is offering a better technology at a better price than Google.
I hope there are more viable mobile OSs to help prevent stagnation. But I don't see any of the current crop of contenders knocking anyone out.
I wouldn't be so quick to jump to conclusions as Samsung already have a replacement OS called 'Tizen'. It's already themed like TouchWiz (Samsung's bastardization of Android) and it already supports Android apps. What's more, Tizen handsets are set to hit the shelves this year[1].
[1] http://www.osnews.com/story/26865/Samsung_s_future_is_Tizen_...
As to whether consumers would ever make the switch to Tizen: I'd imagine some might without realising it - not everyone is tech-savvy about these things. But I wouldn't like to comment on the masses. I've tried to predict popular trends before and have been wrong and given how fickle the smartphone market is, I really wouldn't like to make any future predictions just yet.
My point was just that Samsung are, at best, attempting to supplement their Android market, or at worst, trying to replace Android entirely. And that they've already reached the point where they're ready to put their competing OS to market.
I do agree with you though that we can't really predict future trends, and I guess Samsung are really uniquely positioned as producers of mass market big selling Android products to know what works in Android and what doesn't.
Tizen development is split between Samsung and Intel, and I have observed instances where they do not communicate well. I think that puts Tizen at a disadvantage relative to Firefox OS. I am also skeptical that Web apps on mobile devices will become as refined and as power and CPU efficient as native apps.
However if we're talking about our personal thoughts, then I'm not convinced by Tizen either. Not because of the web-apps aspect (remember, Palm's / HP's WebOS is also powered by similar technologies (C++ for performance demanding apps and HTML/Javascript rapid development) and that seemed to work well (or at least, I never had a problem with it). Plus a lot of the time, mobile apps are essentially just frontends to websites anyway (albeit with a few features bolted on to get them past Apple's vetting procedure). And let's not forget that Tizen does support Dalvik as well.
The reason I'm not convinced by Tizen is because people don't really care what Tizen is. They just want their old phone but with better hardware. So Samsung would have be careful not to make such a big deal about Tizen being different to Android and then Samsung would need to make their Android support near to perfect otherwise there could be an uproar from disgruntled consumers claiming they were mislead into buying an incompatible handset. I couldn't see how else Samsung could use their Android market share to leverage a new OS.
But as I said before, I've been wrong in the past when trying to predict how consumers shop. So I'm no doubt wrong again here.
However, that doesn't make the resulting product a threat to Android. It would start on one or two handsets. It would lack Google's ecosystem, and building the right alliances in the right regions is a heck of a product marketing problem. It would have to be refined over multiple product generations.
Right now, RIM's whole business rests on 1% market share. That's a tall mountain to climb starting from zero.
So, what I'm saying is, even under optimal circumstances regarding Tizen, Google is rational to think they don't have to consider Samsung a threat this year, or for a few years.
> So, what I'm saying is, even under optimal circumstances regarding Tizen, Google is rational to think they don't have to consider Samsung a threat this year, or for a few years.
Not really. It will already be too late in a few years when Tizen has proven itself (assuming that it does). As the saying goes, "there's no point closing the stable door after the horse has bolted." And lets also remember that a threat doesn't mean actual damage - threats are warnings about the potential to do danger (and sometimes those warnings amount to little more than bluffs). So Tizen is already a threat, the question is whether Samsung manage to substantiate on that threat and carve a slice from Android's market share. And if Google want to ensure that doesn't happen then they need to already be acting rather than waiting until something does and then trying to react (just look at how well that strategy has worked out for Palm, Nokia, RIM/Blackberry and Microsoft).