Samsung Tizen operating system no longer in pursuit of operator support

Samsung Electronics, the world's largest smartphone maker, has invested heavily in a mobile operating system called "Tizen", hoping it will break the duopoly of Apple and Google (Weibo). But the ambitious effort of Samsung Electronics is not trustworthy.

While some of the world's largest wireless carriers are ready to start supporting handsets with Tizen operating systems, it is hard to attract the attention of large application developers, and mobile apps are becoming the center of the user experience. This has also led to a fledgling operating system that attracts only small, even unknown, app developers, such as Daniel Escobar, a 34-year-old developer in Atlanta, USA. Daniel Escobar.

Samsung Electronics currently supports Escobar's Maestro music sharing service, offering tens of thousands of dollars in cash incentives and technical support to develop similar applications for the Tizen operating system. But Maestro currently has only about 30,000 paid subscribers. For Samsung Electronics, it will be crucial to come up with a perfect mobile application and service strategy.

Lenovo, the Chinese smartphone maker, will not only pose a threat to the dominance of Samsung Electronics by introducing cheap smartphones to the market, but it will also squeeze profit margins on the hardware business. This will make software and services the main source of profit for the smartphone industry.

Increase income

Iffugen Yoo Boo-keun, Samsung's chief executive, said last month: "As consumers change over time, I feel that it is impossible for a company to take the lead in the market with a single focus on software or hardware." ”

Samsung's current best-selling smartphone is powered by Google's Android operating system, pre-installed with Gmail, Google Maps and Google search services from Google. The result is that Google can get a portion of the revenue from the App store every time it completes a payment. If Tizen can succeed, Samsung Electronics will also be able to earn revenue by selling Third-party applications, software, and services on the device.

The potential of this business is immense. including itunes and App Store, Apple won 16 billion dollars in revenue from software and services in the last fiscal year. Samsung Electronics Development Tizen operating system is supported by companies such as Intel. Today, the company invests billions of dollars a year in software development, and nearly 60% of its 67,000 developers work on software development. Samsung Electronics also plans to recruit 800 new software developers a year.

The long-term goal of Samsung Electronics for Tizen is to make it a unified operating system that coordinates all of Samsung's electronics-made devices, such as smartphones, refrigerators, televisions and washing machines, that consumers have.

Tizen device prototypes look and feel indistinguishable with devices that carry the Android operating system, and Android and Tizen use the same programming code base. However, participants in the Tizen project said that the Tizen prototype could not be considered a final product, and that the core of Android,tizen's attractiveness was to allow operators and manufacturers to have a greater level of custom user interface.

Operator exit

Even so, industry executives and analysts agree that Tizen's desire to succeed in the marketplace is very difficult. Japan's largest mobile operator, NTT DoCoMo, is one of Tizen's close partners, sources said. The company originally planned to launch the first smartphone to carry the Tizen operating system in mid-January this year, and the company's President Kato (Kaoru Kato) began preparing product launches one months earlier. But at the end of the day, NTT DoCoMo canceled the Tizen smartphone release program because of a lack of demand for products outside of Android and iOS devices in Japan's home market.

"Tizen will still be very important, but we will focus on global market trends to determine whether to release Tizen products," Kato said in a conference call to DoCoMo in NTT after two weeks. "NTT DoCoMo suddenly to Tizen face, undoubtedly to postpone a long time Tizen project and cast a shadow. Samsung Electronics has also developed an operating system called Bada, but has long been abandoned. The company originally planned to allow Tizen to be commercially available in 2012.

In the US market, mobile operator Sprint joined the "Tizen Federation" (Tizen Association Board) in May 2012. At the time, the company welcomed the Sprint's indication that the new operating system would give consumers more choice. But the source said that Sprint had been out of the "Tizen Union" last year and is now concentrating its resources on "products that can be released immediately." ”

Telefónica also withdrew from the Tizen consortium. The telecoms operator last year unveiled the first smartphone to launch the Mozilla Foundation's Firefox operating system. According to sources, Telefónica believes the Firefox operating system can better access the low-end mobile phone market in Latin America.

Orange, a French mobile operator who is also a member of the Tizen consortium, had planned to release the first Tizen smartphone with NTT DoCoMo. However, the company later said that Tizen's development rate "has not yet reached the maturity we had previously expected." ”

"Our strategy is to serve consumers, not to push consumers into something that is meaningful to us until the ecosystem has not yet prepared a rich service for consumers," said an orange spokeswoman. The spokesman said that in the company's current smart-phone line map, there is not a Tizen phone.

Samsung Electronics said the company will be with the French and Japanese mobile operators to assess the supply of products. Samsung Electronics says the company and its partners will provide a "preview" of the latest Tizen devices at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this month (Congress).

Fix relationships

The launch of Samsung Electronics into the market was Tizen when the company repaired tensions with Google through a series of moves. While Google and Samsung are talking openly about strengthening partnerships, the two companies ' businesses are increasingly tapping into each other's areas, forcing Samsung Electronics to accelerate development of Tizen.

"Google has experience in the mobile OS market, Samsung Electronics has no future in the market, and the Lajiv Changde is becoming a silent display company," said Rajeev Chand, managing director and research director at the San Francisco Investment Bank, Rutberg & Co, who specializes in the mobile industry. ”

Samsung Electronics and Google announced last week that two companies have reached a global patent cross licensing agreement covering two companies ' existing patents and patents for the next 10 years. Just three days later, Google announced the sale of its Motorola mobile phone manufacturing business to Lenovo Group, which is no longer a direct competitor to Samsung's Android smartphone.

It is unclear whether Samsung's recent Tizen with Google have been linked to a troubled relationship with the company. "We have a close relationship with Google and we will continue to be an important strategic partner," said a Samsung Electronics spokesman. However, the spokesman said Samsung Electronics would still support multiple operating systems.

Attract developers

Samsung Electronics attracts Third-party app developers based on two advantages: the company's influence and its huge cash reserves of $50 billion trillion. Samsung Electronics held its first developer conference in San Francisco last October in order to attract third party application developers. Last November, Samsung Electronics also held a Tizen developer conference in the South Korean capital Seoul.

Intel and Samsung Electronics held the Tizen Application development Challenge last July with a total bonus of $4 million trillion, with a single maximum bonus of $200,000. According to the game arrangement, third party developers can submit their Tizen application before November 1, the judgment work will be completed from November 4 to November 25, and the final winner and winners were announced in December.

Tizen is a major challenge for Samsung Electronics and Intel in the mobile internet era, and Samsung is hoping to get rid of its reliance on Google's Android operating system, and Intel wants to use an operating system to boost its sales of mobile chips. While Tizen is nominally open, Samsung Electronics and Intel are two leading companies.

While Samsung Electronics and Intel offer developers generous cash rewards, this is not enough to motivate large application developers to develop apps for Tizen that are still in their infancy. Samsung Electronics offered the company more than 100,000 dollars a few months ago, hoping the company would revise its popular Android apps to suit the Tizen operating system, according to an executive at an application developer. The bonuses are comparable to those offered by Microsoft. However, the executive said the company rejected Samsung's offer because of its previous resume in the software business, suggesting that it was unlikely that the company would allow Tizen to attract audiences.

"Software developers are only concerned about the number of handsets in the market," said Roy Sugimura, chairman of the Tizen Federation. He said that as of the end of December, Tizen only about 6,000 apps, far less than Apple iOS and Google Android Bai Wan. "Such an attitude is hard to make Tizen successful because no one has been using the operating system yet." ”

So far, Samsung Electronics has attracted small app developers like Escobar. Escobar said Samsung Electronics contacted him for the first time at the end of 2012, hoping he would develop Maestro applications for Tizen. Escobar, who has long been developing apps for iOS and Android, has previously been sceptical because he has never heard of Tizen. After Samsung Electronics agreed to pay for development costs, Escobar developed maestro applications for Tizen. He said he was impressed by the size of Samsung Electronics and the commitment to make Tizen successful.

"We're not talking about a small company," Escobar said. The company can sell hundreds of millions of handsets a year, which must not be ignored.