
Samsung could have bought Android first - treskot
http://www.phonearena.com/news/Did-you-know-Samsung-could-buy-Android-first-but-laughed-it-out-of-court_id52685
======
benihana
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.

~~~
hristov
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
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.

------
kristiandupont
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
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.

------
sampo
_" 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
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
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.

------
fidotron
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.

~~~
briandh
Out of genuine curiosity, in what respects do you think Google is allowing
Android to "stagnate"?

~~~
fidotron
A few large areas:

Data storage

The SQLite API is a mess (you end up with SQL polluting a frightening amount
of code once you start using it), along with associated content providers and
the way this stuff attaches to views. This is particularly noticeable around
the MediaStore, which is one of the truly horrendously fragmented areas of the
system. If I had more faith in the future of the platform this is what I'd
attack first as the potential for improvement for developers and end users is
immense.

UI framework

The very core of the layout algorithm (where it traverses the views for
information) is about as wrong as it can be while still appearing to function.
Using styling or animations results in a horrifying explosion of xml files
edited by the slowest xml editor in existence. They need a decent MVC UI
system (the Cocoa killer feature), not this hacked together mess. Whoever came
up with Fragments does deserve a medal though.

General API cleanup

The API has inconsistent naming and code style throughout. A lot of it is
clearly the work of people more comfortable in C or C++ writing Java for the
first time, but there are packages where NIH syndrome seems to have occurred
between different groups of the Android core team. One of the NS* API features
is even thoughTheNamesAreSoLongJavaCantCompete at least they understand the
benefit of consistency, whereas in Android every package feels unique. J2ME
was superior to Android in this respect, and the people designing it also knew
when to use primitives and when to use objects. Android uses too many objects
for things like touch events, resulting in far too big a load on the eternally
inadequate garbage collector.

Permissions

They need to actually launch the feature whereby you can install an app but
deny it permission for particular operations. I suspect once they proxy ad
stuff through Play Services they'll try to switch this on, as if they did it
right now 90% of the noise would be ad supported app devs complaining users
are disabling their network connections.

Finally, relatedly, the documentation is horrific. It's quite common to find
references in examples to methods that don't exist (and the examples written
in yet another bizarre coding style), or magic details are referred to but not
demonstrated or explained. I have got more useful info by reading the source
for the system itself. If you go and read the source for a project like
DashClock any reasonable developer goes and cries in a corner. That's PHP4
style development, not the way you preserve sanity over a long period of time.

At least the storage and UI could be added in a compatibility library, so the
fragmentation argument wouldn't apply. Kitkat has added superficial
improvements for some areas, but again it's just enough to allow users to not
notice the gaps with iOS, while leaving many Android devs spending a
disproportionate amount of time adding stupid hacks to paper over the
inadequacies of the platform.

~~~
colin_mccabe
I developed for Android a few years ago (I don't do it any more), and I didn't
find the documentation "horrific." There is JavaDoc for pretty much
everything. Like anything else, there are a few dark corners, but mostly there
are people discussing them online, so you can figure it out.

I didn't use the SQLite API, but isn't the point of that API to "pollute" your
code with SQL? I might be misunderstanding your complaint here-- do you
believe the API shouldn't exist at all? Or that it's overused? It seems like
there are a few cases where SQL is exactly what you need-- like building a
finance program or something.

With regard to the UI: I always saw the Layout classes as the View, the
Activity as the Controller, and the Model as the classes that implemented the
application itself. If anything, the big complaint people had seemed to be
that Android was _too_ structured, that it required you to do _too much_ work
before seeing anything on the screen. I agree that the XML files often seemed
clunky, but at least you could vertically center a text box without magic,
something that's apparently very difficult and unintuitive with HTML. Android
also planned ahead for different screen sizes and form factors. The real
"hack" (in the bad sense) is what Apple had to do when they made the iPad-- to
run iPhone apps with doubled, blocky pixels to preserve the aspect ratio.

Speaking of the "eternally inadequate GC", Android's GC has gotten better over
time. MUCH better. I remember back in the 1.0 days 100 ms pauses were common.
Now, the average is less than a tenth of that. The UI is still not as
responsive as iOS, but it's getting there. I see no reason why the GC couldn't
improve even more, with top people at Google working on it.

With regard to the permissions thing: I agree with you here. It would really
be nice to give users the ability to deny certain permissions to apps. As you
mention, they probably don't do this because they don't want to destroy the
business model of ad-supported apps that use the network. Hopefully some kind
of solution can be reached here.

I never actually developed for J2ME, but I knew a few folks who did, and they
hated it. I remember tales of being stuck with Java circa 1.4 (no generics),
ancient libraries, and even... ugh... Swing. I'm not that familiar with J2ME,
so again, maybe it improved later on? Also, do you really think that
delivering "100 different builds" (your words) is an easy thing for a company
to do? With Android, I only need to deliver one build, and I have a store that
can do most of the work for me. I think you are looking at the past through
some seriously rose-tinted glasses.

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

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

~~~
gvb
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
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.

------
yoha
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.

------
loceng
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
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

------
neals
But could Samsung have made Android this big?

~~~
higherpurpose
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
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.

------
frik
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.

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

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alexeisadeski3
It probably goes without saying, but here it is:

If Samsung had acquired Android, none of us today would own an Android
smartphone.

------
corresation
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.

