Monday, August 29, 2011
Samsung buying webOS? It makes sense
There are rumors floating around about Samsung considering an acquisition of HP/Palm webOS. I am not sure if Samsung is really evaluating or not, but it makes a lot of sense to me.
Samsung is doing just fine with Android. Actually, they are doing great. However, the acquisition of Motorola by Google has changed everything. As much as Google is trying to say that they did it just for the IP, I do not foresee them dumping 19,000 employees any time soon. It is obvious that the next great Android phone will come from Motorola, not from Samsung. The mythical Google phone, the one born to kill the iPhone (yeah, right), will be a Motorola device. Not Samsung.
Samsung is left with a 3rd party OS game, supporting Android and Microsoft, or/and a choice to take their future in their hands. They have done it already, remember: for feature phones, they have their own OS, Bada. It is doing quite well, actually. What they are missing is their own OS for the high end devices. WebOS could be just that.
Apparently, you need a stool with three legs to succeed in this market: a mobile device, a mobile OS and a mobile cloud. Apple has it. Google has it. Samsung has a mobile OS for low-end phones, but nothing on the high-end (and they have no cloud story, but I will leave it for another post ;-)
Now, it is a risky move. webOS still has no developers, which is the reason they did not make it. Samsung would have to build support on it, make it really cool and attractive for developers. Timing - for once - could be on their side. webOS has been built from the beginning with a web app model, rather than a native app model. They added an App Store late and it never really took off. But the market is moving towards web apps, even in mobile. If they time it right, they might have the right OS at the right time.
Should Samsung do it? I do not know, but it makes sense. If Google went to buy a mobile device, and Apple went for the iCloud, maybe it is time for Samsung to own a smartphone OS.
Posted by Fabrizio Capobianco at 12:07
8 Comments:
Very interesting thought and could make sense. It would really fragment their efforts and would be tough to build an ecosystem. While timing could be on their side, it could also work against them as the market is moving so quickly, and there would be some gap until phones could ship.
I could think of other interesting acquirers - FB, Amazon perhaps?
Comment Posted at 14:17
Alfredo said...
With do you say that Bada is for low-end devices? Maybe it's not mature enough to compete with iOS and Android, but it doesn't seem to me an os for low-end devices...
Comment Posted at 14:29
Fabrizio said...
Alfredo, yesterday's high-end devices are today's low-end devices ;-)
Comment Posted at 14:34
Will web based os the future? I have seen two cloud based web os under development by two top companies in China.
Comment Posted at 04:25
You forget that iOS was not a smartphone OS when the first iPhone shipped. Apple slid app support, and eventually a kludgey multitasking model, underneath a glitzy featurephone user interface. There is no reason that Bada can't be made to compete in the smartphone market for far less than the $1.2B that HP paid for Palm. Creating and ecosystem is the same amount of effort for Bada as it is for webOS... and Bada has much higher marketshare to start with.
Comment Posted at 14:11
Aaron said...
It's interesting you mention "no developers", because I know of a thriving community of them. Actually two. You still have an active community on the developer forums, and a enthusiastic homebrew community over at PreCentral. EA and Gameloft have made games available (in fact, people using the webOS PDK (C/C++ dev tools) say that it's very easy to port a game from iOS, and vice versa). And the javascript framework to build other apps (only Touchpad at the moment, coming to phones soon), Enyo, is probably the most intuitive programming I've ever done, desktop or mobile.
Comment Posted at 09:37
Fabrizio said...
Aaron, let me rephrase it: not enough developers ;-)
fabrizio
Comment Posted at 10:42
Bilbo Shwaggin's said...
Makes no sense. If Samsung needed their own OS they could just fork Android.
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