Acquisition of SmartThings: bitter smart home industry

According to foreign media reports, Samsung is currently negotiating with smart home platform SmartThings and plans to acquire the smart home-focused start-up at a cost of about 200 million U.S. dollars in order to enhance its strength in the field of smart home.

The technology media ReadWrite recently issued a document analysis of this article that the acquisition of SmartThings naturally for Samsung is a good thing, but for the smart home industry may be more harm than good. The following is the main content of the article.

"Smart Home" has become an important area for major technology giants in recent days, Samsung is no exception.

In April of this year, Samsung had externally portrayed what they saw as their smart home with smart TVs and applications as their control center. Now, this scenario looks like something subtle changes have taken place. According to tech blog TechCrunch, Samsung is currently in talks with smart home platform SmartThings and plans to acquire the latter for about $ 200 million.

SmartThings, a start-up from crowdfunding platform Kickstarter, has developed a home automation platform that makes it easy for Android and iOS users to control a wide range of home appliances and appliances, including lights, locks, Electronic products, home appliances and other smart home devices.

The acquisition of SmartThings for Samsung is naturally able to enhance their capabilities in the field of smart home, but for the entire smart home industry, it may not be a good thing.

Recently, Samsung's competitors are invariably acting in the field of smart home, which may also make it feel pressure.

At this year's WWDC Worldwide Developers Conference, Apple Inc. unveiled HomeKit, a smart home appliance that brings together smart appliances from users' homes and centrally controls them via the iPhone or iPad. Earlier this year, Google spent 3.2 billion US dollars to acquire the smart home maker Nest, is also in the process of buying security camera maker Dropcam, in addition, Google is also allegedly developing its own smart home network protocol.

As for Microsoft, which many years ago put forward the so-called "future home" concept, it also recently entered into a partnership with home automation equipment maker Insteon, both of which plan to introduce Microsoft voice assistant Cortana to Insteon WindowsPhone applications, so the future of Windows Phone users in the Insteon application by voice to control home lighting, thermostats and other smart home devices.

Samsung, which owns a large number of home appliances, should actually walk in front of the competitors in the field of smart home, but this is not the case. Even Samsung, which supports connectivity, has very limited capabilities in terms of intelligent control. Samsung tend to integrate these appliances with smart TVs, but also do not support other brands of home appliances, in addition to its television, mobile phones, tablet and smart watch products are equipped with operating systems are different, so in the field of smart home platform Progress is very slow.

For now, acquiring a smart home maker like SmartThings is a smart deal for Samsung that does not have to start developing its own smart home platform from scratch, while also making it easier for each of its product divisions to move smarter around SmartThings High cooperation.

SmartThings, which received $ 1.2 million in funding through Kickstarter in 2012 and $ 12.5 million from investors, later built the powerful SmartThings smart home platform that has brought together more than 5,000 developers , But also covers a large number of smart devices, including thermostats, smart lights, fitness tracker and smart audio, so the creative SmartThings is very suitable for the current Samsung.

However, Samsung has always been seemingly not good at software application development and management, Galaxy series smart phones, for example, although these phones in the hardware configuration and design are in the forefront of the industry, but the mobile phone system has built a large number of users is not Colds, including S Health, S Translator and S Voice and more. In addition, the "fragmentation" problem caused by the tactics adopted by Samsung in the field of mobile phones also allows its developers to devote most of their efforts to the compatibility of applications, which is also to a certain extent, compromising the team's software R & D and innovation capabilities.

From this point of view, if Samsung can successfully take SmartThings, the future may result in two results. The first is to combine SmartThings' innovation and developer's value with the brand owned by Samsung and its vast resources to help Samsung become Of course, it is a happy outcome as a powerful competitor in the field of smart home. But one of the more likely outcomes is that SmartThings, a creative team, will be assimilated by Samsung into a mediocre smart home division, and even worse, SmartThings may be on the wane Road, eventually disappeared from the field of smart home, it is probably the entire technology industry do not want to see.

Translator: Guangjun

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