7 ms·

Samsung could have bought Android first

53 points by treskot 13y ago

yoha 13y ago
It does not gratify my intellectual curiosity. We see this kind of article every now and then and they do not bring anything but couldas/shouldas/wouldas.
neals 13y ago
But could Samsung have made Android this big?
- higherpurpose 13y ago
  Going by what they achieved with Bada, I'd say no. To me it became obvious rather quickly after the iPhone started taking off that the only way to beat it as a platform was to create another platform that's supported by multiple OEMs, and not just one, because no single OEM could've become more popular than Apple using their own OS.
  - fidotron 13y ago
    Nokia or Sony could have done it, if they weren't being run by idiots. The hardware was very close, but Symbian had been off in a land developing stuff for their own amusement with no connection to end users for too long. Some of the software written behind closed doors on Sony hardware in around 2006 looked a lot like a modern games console UI. The problem was the US was largely an incompatible market (brew) so you had to pay for this stuff just with Europe, so it remained a niche. The modern mobile industry view of history is hilariously US centric, when until 2007 it was one of the moat backwards markets around.
  - ZeroGravitas 13y ago
    Symbian was a shared platform. Maemo was too. As was Windows Mobile. It's not clear if Android was offered to Samsung as a base for a shared platform (it's often mentioned that this is the fundamental reason for Android existing, but people seem to assume Samsung wanted their own OS, and the Android folk may have been desperate enough for cash to go that way) but if so it wouldn't have been a particularly crazy idea. And even Samsung's Bada shared elements of Linux and HTML5 platforms, so it's not a total silo.
nasmorn 13y ago
Google actually had and more importantly could hire the army of engineers. I think Samsung was correct
- gvb 13y ago
  I disagree. Going to Google was good for Android, but not good for Samsung. While it is not clear that Android under Samsung would have become big (likely not), it would have been an effective blocking move for Samsung, delaying and possibly thwarting Google's dominance in the smartphone market. Samsung had an opportunity to control Android (and possibly kill it). Instead, Android went to Google who built it into a major powerhouse... and now (a) Samsung is heavily dependent on that powerhouse and (b) has very little control over that powerhouse.
  - mseebach 13y ago
    Samsung could have bought and suffocated Android, but it's not obvious that they could have killed the movement towards and open platform(1). It's not like the idea of an open smartphone OS was unique or even new at the time. I don't think Android as it stood in 2005 was something Google could not have re-built from scratch in a few month if they decided it was the way to go - in other words, wasn't it more of an aquihire? 1: Let's skip the discussion as to whether Android is actually free and open source and instead remember how much more open Android is compared to what was before.
  - Consultant32452 13y ago
    Google was clearly in the market for a phone OS. If they hadn't purchased Android they would've likely purchased something else. Android was likely not the only phone OS they looked at and may not have even been their first choice. That's just the way it goes sometimes, semi-random chance.
benihana 13y ago
Sounds like Samsung made the exact right move then. They let google eat all the cost of launching and maintaing the OS, and they just sell hardware. They're the only company other than Apple making money off smartphones, so while it's fun to use hindsight to make fun of Samsung's missed opportunity, they're actually doing okay from this.
- balladeer 13y ago
  OTOH, Samsung's software r&d prowess, even today, is far from the standard needed to maintain a top class (mobile) OS, leave alone creating or polishing it. You can imagine where it would have been at that time. So yeah, they made the right move knowing their strength and weakness.
- hristov 13y ago
  Google makes plenty of profits out of smartphones. They just don't make it from selling hardware. But a big part of their revenue comes from mobile (they do not tell you what part, unfortunately) and android is very profitable for them as it assures them access to that revenue without having to pay traffic acquisition costs.
  - adventured 13y ago
    And critically keeps them from being locked out of the mobile market by a dominate Samsung / Apple / Microsoft / whomever / combination of. Which is exactly what it was meant to accomplish and why Google was willing to destroy their relationship with Apple to move forward with Android. People like to claim Google doesn't make money with Android, which is a very shallow conclusion: if they had been locked out of the mobile market, it could have buried the company entirely, stranding their future on a languishing desktop.
- yashg 13y ago
  Also I think Android spread like wildfire because it was owned by Google who allowed all manufacturers to use it for free, or may be at a lower price (I don't know). The key point is Android being available to various hardware makers contributed big to its success. If it had been owned by Samsung it would not have been different from Symbian or other manufacturer specific operating systems.
rbanffy 13y ago
Android would have become a Samsung proprietary technology either merged with Bada or replacing it. It would be completely irrelevant today.
loceng 13y ago
Google should have been developing high-quality phones in conjunction with developing Android. I thought perhaps this was the point of buying Motorola (albeit late to the party), though it seems it didn't play out that way; They're going for the being the platform and sourcing the technology from multiple vendors.
- fennecfoxen 13y ago
  Google's forays into hardware and phones have been covered and analyzed elsewhere, and the main takeaway I got is that they tried to do phones with the typical Google-ish mindset combining a "build it and they will come" mentality with zero customer support. And it didn't work too well, probably because people have different attitudes to fancy smartphones that cost money than they do to free email. :P
kristiandupont 13y ago
Speaking as a European, one thing I love about Americans is the understanding of how fast business moves. I've had conversations with people way above my "level" treat me like an equal. I believe this has to do with the fact that they realize that in two years, I could be in a completely different position (granted, there are other, less cynical factors as well). In Europe, talking to the CEO of a big company is much more likely to leave you feeling like a peasant addressing royalty in ancient times. I don't have the experience to back this up but I believe it's like this and worse in many Asian countries. It's related to the concept of Power Distance by Geert Hofstede (http://geert-hofstede.com/dimensions.html http://geert-hofstede.com/dimensions.html), but it's not exactly that. Denmark, where I am from, has extremely low power distance (even lower than the US: http://geert-hofstede.com/denmark.html http://geert-hofstede.com/denmark.html) which means your seniors will treat you like and equal but in a polite sort of way. There isn't the sense of you-might-be-in-my-shoes-tomorrow or at least that's how it feels to me.
- talmand 13y ago
  As an American, I've had both experiences. One job I had, I was hired by the owner of a multi-million dollar a year company at his kitchen table with his wife and their kids were making a racket upstairs playing. He was always approachable and a friendly guy. One of the best jobs I ever had. Years later he sold the company to some venture capitalist outfit out of Boston (I think it was Boston) that had hopes of expanding the business he created. Everybody at the top of that thing acted as if they were more special than anyone else in the room (including some high level people) not realizing they were just that somewhat interesting white speck on top of chicken shit. Once it became clear there was no interest in continuing the successful path of the previous owner, I left. Something like 75% of my department (including some high level people) thought the same and left as well. I put in my notice to my boss a day after he had put in his notice. That was a fun final two weeks.
- ulfw 13y ago
  Often in America this is just the outward appearance, because the way people talk is very informal. But when it comes down to business, there is a clear and distinct separation between levels there too.
corresation 13y ago
You can't change one part of history and everything else remains the same: In the early days the single and only reason Android had any hope at all was that it was the concerted push of a dozen+ once major manufacturers in the face of what was an obvious oncoming Apple hegemony. Google could be the fair player that brought them together precisely because they weren't in hardware, and offered the data side that the others didn't have. And even then Android went through a two year or so period where it was incredibly perilous, and is surprising it didn't perish. Had Samsung bought Android it would have been a footnote in history. If I had to guess we'd be looking at a 90s-Microsoft-like dominance of smartphones by Apple.
sampo 13y ago
"The year is 2005. There are no smartphones" In Europe, we had Nokia Communicator smartphones since 1996. They had web browsers, and you could install apps. They never took the market by storm like the iPhone, but they were smartphones allright.
- sampo 13y ago
  Also the Japanese had very advanced mobile networks from very early on, so I assume there were some pretty smart devices (for their time) much before smartphones got popular in the USA.
  - at-fates-hands 13y ago
    As far as I know, they had 3G networks way back in 2001. They were the harbinger of profit for carriers here in the US. I remember the carriers were not enthusiastic about putting billions into upgrading their networks to support the faster speeds unless there was some way to monetize it. Thankfully, when news started coming in that NTT DoCoMo was making tons of cash off of data streaming and text messaging, then the carriers were all in.
- cygwin98 13y ago
  Palm's Treo series were pretty good smartphones back then. Though some braindead CEOs split the company into one hardware and one software company, while neither had the sufficient resources to put a new generation of smartphone OS through.
- dexen 13y ago
  Sony Ericsson P910i released in 2004 [1]. It had pretty much all the functionality of iPhone, including touch based browser, unified app for SMS/email/MMS, and vibrant software scene. Sprorted handy text inputs -- handwritten recognition, on-screen and detachable hardware keyboard. Granted its camera was pretty awful, but hey! can't have /everything/... I really hate this `Apple invented smartphone' nonsense; it reeks of `The Party had invented helicopter, aeroplanes -- and gradually eveything else' straight from Orwell's 1984. Are we /really/ that gullible? [1] building on P900 (2003) and P800 (2002), which were pretty smart on their own.
frik 13y ago
Samsung could release a Galaxy S5 with TouchWiz on Tizen (Bada v3) and the average consumer would buy it. At least in Europe they buy smartphones with the Samsung logo, not because it comes with Android. Though there was some license agreement between Google and Samsung in the same week as Google sold Motorola, so this may not happen.
fidotron 13y ago
So, this is a related rant that's been brewing . . . Historical revisionism is a wonderful thing, apparently. Reviewing where Android was when it launched, a good few years after these events, and you can only conclude Samsung were 100% right. Android had a slow VM (far slower than the others already in the market) very high system requirements, and represented a whole new incompatible ecosystem. Much of the world had moved on to J2ME's MIDP 2.0, with Japan and the US the notable exceptions with i-mode and Qualcomm's C based Brew platform respectively. As later happened with Android the fragmentation problems of J2ME were greatly exaggerated by a whole mini industry of companies reliant on the illusion. J2ME certainly had problems, but if you were delivering more than 100 different builds (I'm aware of groups pushing 1000) then you were completely and absolutely insane. It might sound like creating 100 different builds would be a big problem, but the differences were really fairly trivial, and not much worse than Android today which primarily benefits from most of the OS having been written by one group, except for the driver layers, whereas previously a lot more was on the OEM. I'm a fairly loud proponent of the merits of Android, but what is even more widely ignored is that J2ME was in many ways superior to it, most obviously in the way it handled application permissions. For those that have dug into the platform it's amazingly clear that without the iPhone coming along and spurring Google on to greater things Android would have been a complete non-event at launch, especially with the dire performance of the early devices. The concern for Android developers today is that now Google have done just enough to edge out the iPhone in the market (though not in terms of developer experience, thanks to the giant incoherent mess of an API) they're leaving the platform to stagnate. Perversely the best thing for Android devs right now would be if Apple or MS produce an absolutely killer version of their respective OS's forcing Google to invest where it's needed to stay in contention. So I certainly wouldn't rate Samsung as a software outfit, they're notably terrible, but Google have caught many of the old MS diseases, especially when it comes to doing only enough to destroy competitors and then leaving it hanging. If you compare the iOS and Android APIs you can't escape the conclusion that the iOS team have pride in their work, and the Android team are constantly having to make excuses for what a rush they were in. Both groups drove the other to greater heights, but the impact both eventually had in the market is only thanks to the other having driven them to get there.
- RyanMcGreal 13y ago
smallegan 13y ago
What does this have to do with court? The article says this was in a board room not a courtroom.
alexeisadeski3 13y ago
It probably goes without saying, but here it is: If Samsung had acquired Android, none of us today would own an Android smartphone.

53 points by treskot 13y ago

yoha 13y ago

It does not gratify my intellectual curiosity. We see this kind of article every now and then and they do not bring anything but couldas/shouldas/wouldas.

neals 13y ago

But could Samsung have made Android this big?

higherpurpose 13y ago
Going by what they achieved with Bada, I'd say no. To me it became obvious rather quickly after the iPhone started taking off that the only way to beat it as a platform was to create another platform that's supported by multiple OEMs, and not just one, because no single OEM could've become more popular than Apple using their own OS.
- fidotron 13y ago
  Nokia or Sony could have done it, if they weren't being run by idiots. The hardware was very close, but Symbian had been off in a land developing stuff for their own amusement with no connection to end users for too long. Some of the software written behind closed doors on Sony hardware in around 2006 looked a lot like a modern games console UI. The problem was the US was largely an incompatible market (brew) so you had to pay for this stuff just with Europe, so it remained a niche. The modern mobile industry view of history is hilariously US centric, when until 2007 it was one of the moat backwards markets around.
- ZeroGravitas 13y ago
  Symbian was a shared platform. Maemo was too. As was Windows Mobile. It's not clear if Android was offered to Samsung as a base for a shared platform (it's often mentioned that this is the fundamental reason for Android existing, but people seem to assume Samsung wanted their own OS, and the Android folk may have been desperate enough for cash to go that way) but if so it wouldn't have been a particularly crazy idea. And even Samsung's Bada shared elements of Linux and HTML5 platforms, so it's not a total silo.

nasmorn 13y ago

Google actually had and more importantly could hire the army of engineers. I think Samsung was correct

gvb 13y ago
I disagree. Going to Google was good for Android, but not good for Samsung. While it is not clear that Android under Samsung would have become big (likely not), it would have been an effective blocking move for Samsung, delaying and possibly thwarting Google's dominance in the smartphone market. Samsung had an opportunity to control Android (and possibly kill it). Instead, Android went to Google who built it into a major powerhouse... and now (a) Samsung is heavily dependent on that powerhouse and (b) has very little control over that powerhouse.
- mseebach 13y ago
  Samsung could have bought and suffocated Android, but it's not obvious that they could have killed the movement towards and open platform(1). It's not like the idea of an open smartphone OS was unique or even new at the time. I don't think Android as it stood in 2005 was something Google could not have re-built from scratch in a few month if they decided it was the way to go - in other words, wasn't it more of an aquihire? 1: Let's skip the discussion as to whether Android is actually free and open source and instead remember how much more open Android is compared to what was before.
- Consultant32452 13y ago
  Google was clearly in the market for a phone OS. If they hadn't purchased Android they would've likely purchased something else. Android was likely not the only phone OS they looked at and may not have even been their first choice. That's just the way it goes sometimes, semi-random chance.

benihana 13y ago

Sounds like Samsung made the exact right move then. They let google eat all the cost of launching and maintaing the OS, and they just sell hardware. They're the only company other than Apple making money off smartphones, so while it's fun to use hindsight to make fun of Samsung's missed opportunity, they're actually doing okay from this.

balladeer 13y ago
OTOH, Samsung's software r&d prowess, even today, is far from the standard needed to maintain a top class (mobile) OS, leave alone creating or polishing it. You can imagine where it would have been at that time. So yeah, they made the right move knowing their strength and weakness.
hristov 13y ago
Google makes plenty of profits out of smartphones. They just don't make it from selling hardware. But a big part of their revenue comes from mobile (they do not tell you what part, unfortunately) and android is very profitable for them as it assures them access to that revenue without having to pay traffic acquisition costs.
- adventured 13y ago
  And critically keeps them from being locked out of the mobile market by a dominate Samsung / Apple / Microsoft / whomever / combination of. Which is exactly what it was meant to accomplish and why Google was willing to destroy their relationship with Apple to move forward with Android. People like to claim Google doesn't make money with Android, which is a very shallow conclusion: if they had been locked out of the mobile market, it could have buried the company entirely, stranding their future on a languishing desktop.
yashg 13y ago
Also I think Android spread like wildfire because it was owned by Google who allowed all manufacturers to use it for free, or may be at a lower price (I don't know). The key point is Android being available to various hardware makers contributed big to its success. If it had been owned by Samsung it would not have been different from Symbian or other manufacturer specific operating systems.

rbanffy 13y ago

Android would have become a Samsung proprietary technology either merged with Bada or replacing it. It would be completely irrelevant today.

loceng 13y ago

Google should have been developing high-quality phones in conjunction with developing Android. I thought perhaps this was the point of buying Motorola (albeit late to the party), though it seems it didn't play out that way; They're going for the being the platform and sourcing the technology from multiple vendors.

fennecfoxen 13y ago
Google's forays into hardware and phones have been covered and analyzed elsewhere, and the main takeaway I got is that they tried to do phones with the typical Google-ish mindset combining a "build it and they will come" mentality with zero customer support. And it didn't work too well, probably because people have different attitudes to fancy smartphones that cost money than they do to free email. :P

kristiandupont 13y ago

Speaking as a European, one thing I love about Americans is the understanding of how fast business moves. I've had conversations with people way above my "level" treat me like an equal. I believe this has to do with the fact that they realize that in two years, I could be in a completely different position (granted, there are other, less cynical factors as well). In Europe, talking to the CEO of a big company is much more likely to leave you feeling like a peasant addressing royalty in ancient times. I don't have the experience to back this up but I believe it's like this and worse in many Asian countries. It's related to the concept of Power Distance by Geert Hofstede (http://geert-hofstede.com/dimensions.html http://geert-hofstede.com/dimensions.html), but it's not exactly that. Denmark, where I am from, has extremely low power distance (even lower than the US: http://geert-hofstede.com/denmark.html http://geert-hofstede.com/denmark.html) which means your seniors will treat you like and equal but in a polite sort of way. There isn't the sense of you-might-be-in-my-shoes-tomorrow or at least that's how it feels to me.

talmand 13y ago
As an American, I've had both experiences. One job I had, I was hired by the owner of a multi-million dollar a year company at his kitchen table with his wife and their kids were making a racket upstairs playing. He was always approachable and a friendly guy. One of the best jobs I ever had. Years later he sold the company to some venture capitalist outfit out of Boston (I think it was Boston) that had hopes of expanding the business he created. Everybody at the top of that thing acted as if they were more special than anyone else in the room (including some high level people) not realizing they were just that somewhat interesting white speck on top of chicken shit. Once it became clear there was no interest in continuing the successful path of the previous owner, I left. Something like 75% of my department (including some high level people) thought the same and left as well. I put in my notice to my boss a day after he had put in his notice. That was a fun final two weeks.
ulfw 13y ago
Often in America this is just the outward appearance, because the way people talk is very informal. But when it comes down to business, there is a clear and distinct separation between levels there too.

corresation 13y ago

You can't change one part of history and everything else remains the same: In the early days the single and only reason Android had any hope at all was that it was the concerted push of a dozen+ once major manufacturers in the face of what was an obvious oncoming Apple hegemony. Google could be the fair player that brought them together precisely because they weren't in hardware, and offered the data side that the others didn't have. And even then Android went through a two year or so period where it was incredibly perilous, and is surprising it didn't perish. Had Samsung bought Android it would have been a footnote in history. If I had to guess we'd be looking at a 90s-Microsoft-like dominance of smartphones by Apple.

sampo 13y ago

"The year is 2005. There are no smartphones" In Europe, we had Nokia Communicator smartphones since 1996. They had web browsers, and you could install apps. They never took the market by storm like the iPhone, but they were smartphones allright.

sampo 13y ago
Also the Japanese had very advanced mobile networks from very early on, so I assume there were some pretty smart devices (for their time) much before smartphones got popular in the USA.
- at-fates-hands 13y ago
  As far as I know, they had 3G networks way back in 2001. They were the harbinger of profit for carriers here in the US. I remember the carriers were not enthusiastic about putting billions into upgrading their networks to support the faster speeds unless there was some way to monetize it. Thankfully, when news started coming in that NTT DoCoMo was making tons of cash off of data streaming and text messaging, then the carriers were all in.
cygwin98 13y ago
Palm's Treo series were pretty good smartphones back then. Though some braindead CEOs split the company into one hardware and one software company, while neither had the sufficient resources to put a new generation of smartphone OS through.
dexen 13y ago
Sony Ericsson P910i released in 2004 [1]. It had pretty much all the functionality of iPhone, including touch based browser, unified app for SMS/email/MMS, and vibrant software scene. Sprorted handy text inputs -- handwritten recognition, on-screen and detachable hardware keyboard. Granted its camera was pretty awful, but hey! can't have /everything/... I really hate this `Apple invented smartphone' nonsense; it reeks of `The Party had invented helicopter, aeroplanes -- and gradually eveything else' straight from Orwell's 1984. Are we /really/ that gullible? [1] building on P900 (2003) and P800 (2002), which were pretty smart on their own.

frik 13y ago

Samsung could release a Galaxy S5 with TouchWiz on Tizen (Bada v3) and the average consumer would buy it. At least in Europe they buy smartphones with the Samsung logo, not because it comes with Android. Though there was some license agreement between Google and Samsung in the same week as Google sold Motorola, so this may not happen.

fidotron 13y ago

So, this is a related rant that's been brewing . . . Historical revisionism is a wonderful thing, apparently. Reviewing where Android was when it launched, a good few years after these events, and you can only conclude Samsung were 100% right. Android had a slow VM (far slower than the others already in the market) very high system requirements, and represented a whole new incompatible ecosystem. Much of the world had moved on to J2ME's MIDP 2.0, with Japan and the US the notable exceptions with i-mode and Qualcomm's C based Brew platform respectively. As later happened with Android the fragmentation problems of J2ME were greatly exaggerated by a whole mini industry of companies reliant on the illusion. J2ME certainly had problems, but if you were delivering more than 100 different builds (I'm aware of groups pushing 1000) then you were completely and absolutely insane. It might sound like creating 100 different builds would be a big problem, but the differences were really fairly trivial, and not much worse than Android today which primarily benefits from most of the OS having been written by one group, except for the driver layers, whereas previously a lot more was on the OEM. I'm a fairly loud proponent of the merits of Android, but what is even more widely ignored is that J2ME was in many ways superior to it, most obviously in the way it handled application permissions. For those that have dug into the platform it's amazingly clear that without the iPhone coming along and spurring Google on to greater things Android would have been a complete non-event at launch, especially with the dire performance of the early devices. The concern for Android developers today is that now Google have done just enough to edge out the iPhone in the market (though not in terms of developer experience, thanks to the giant incoherent mess of an API) they're leaving the platform to stagnate. Perversely the best thing for Android devs right now would be if Apple or MS produce an absolutely killer version of their respective OS's forcing Google to invest where it's needed to stay in contention. So I certainly wouldn't rate Samsung as a software outfit, they're notably terrible, but Google have caught many of the old MS diseases, especially when it comes to doing only enough to destroy competitors and then leaving it hanging. If you compare the iOS and Android APIs you can't escape the conclusion that the iOS team have pride in their work, and the Android team are constantly having to make excuses for what a rush they were in. Both groups drove the other to greater heights, but the impact both eventually had in the market is only thanks to the other having driven them to get there.

RyanMcGreal 13y ago

smallegan 13y ago

What does this have to do with court? The article says this was in a board room not a courtroom.

alexeisadeski3 13y ago

It probably goes without saying, but here it is: If Samsung had acquired Android, none of us today would own an Android smartphone.