5 ms·

There was nothing like Android for music players. Samsung is not a software platform company in any way.

bsaul 13y ago
Samsung is definitely a software plaform company. It had Bada that it used in its Wave product line (which surely accounts for a small percentage of their profit) and it will soon have Tizen. Android is definitely one reason, and one could say that samsung AND google won against Apple. That what i meant when i said the business is much more complicated as it requires to be excellent and competitive both in hardware and software.
- randallu 13y ago
  Bada is dead, Tizen looks likely to be DOA. By software platform company I meant a company that can sustain software platforms. It's really easy to ship a new platform every year; no third parties want that though. I agree with your point that Samsung really upped the ante on Android hardware. The GS1 and GS2 were a tipping point on Android hardware performance and quality -- now that Qualcomm is making high performance parts and everyone is doing competitive product design Samsung are less necessary to Android (but still dominating).
rsynnott 13y ago
Microsoft PlaysForSure was a (failed) attempt, though it was later killed off in favour of the (also-failed) Zune.
- randallu 13y ago
  I worked on one of the biggest selling music players that used PlaysForSure, and every other piece of hardware was junk taking seconds to start playing DRM'd tracks, etc. Janus/PlaysForSure was just a library that vendors like Creative/etc dumped into the low perf, crappy design "music player reference code" they got from the SoC vendor and hacked up on. The media player guys didn't own their technology in any meaningful way. Zune could have been amazing! They had a nice big screen, a hardware accelerated UI with rich transitions. They were lightyears ahead of Apple/iPod on technology. Obviously they completely bombed in the market, but imagine if they had found success because of their better technology -- it would have been really hard for Apple to respond since the iPod OS was such a low level affair (plus Apple never would have made a brown iPod!).

bsaul 13y ago

Samsung is definitely a software plaform company. It had Bada that it used in its Wave product line (which surely accounts for a small percentage of their profit) and it will soon have Tizen. Android is definitely one reason, and one could say that samsung AND google won against Apple. That what i meant when i said the business is much more complicated as it requires to be excellent and competitive both in hardware and software.

randallu 13y ago
Bada is dead, Tizen looks likely to be DOA. By software platform company I meant a company that can sustain software platforms. It's really easy to ship a new platform every year; no third parties want that though. I agree with your point that Samsung really upped the ante on Android hardware. The GS1 and GS2 were a tipping point on Android hardware performance and quality -- now that Qualcomm is making high performance parts and everyone is doing competitive product design Samsung are less necessary to Android (but still dominating).

rsynnott 13y ago

Microsoft PlaysForSure was a (failed) attempt, though it was later killed off in favour of the (also-failed) Zune.

randallu 13y ago
I worked on one of the biggest selling music players that used PlaysForSure, and every other piece of hardware was junk taking seconds to start playing DRM'd tracks, etc. Janus/PlaysForSure was just a library that vendors like Creative/etc dumped into the low perf, crappy design "music player reference code" they got from the SoC vendor and hacked up on. The media player guys didn't own their technology in any meaningful way. Zune could have been amazing! They had a nice big screen, a hardware accelerated UI with rich transitions. They were lightyears ahead of Apple/iPod on technology. Obviously they completely bombed in the market, but imagine if they had found success because of their better technology -- it would have been really hard for Apple to respond since the iPod OS was such a low level affair (plus Apple never would have made a brown iPod!).