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Comment by CountSessine

13 years ago

The two businesses that Samsung is in that are making almost all of their money right now are semiconductors (and only flash and SOCs) and mobile handsets. Take those two businesses away and Samsung starts to look more like the ponderous, government-sheltered behemoth that it is.

And someone is going to take away the handset business - everyone in asia is basically waiting for Huawei and ZTE to eat Samsung's lunch. Samsung can't compete with either of them on cost, and eventually they won't be able to pump more pixels into 400+ppi screens to keep customers from buying cheaper smartphones. And without unique software to offer consumers (like Apple), Samsung is extremely vulnerable in the handset market.

And in the meantime, Samsung is amortizing a fortune's worth of chips fabs that were mostly built to supply components for iDevices.

Yes, Samsung needs Apple's business.

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CountSessine

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Volpe  13 years ago

I think it's a bit more nuanced than you are making out.

Samsung do have their own Software (Tizen, and Bada(?), and a third 'unknown' base). They are pushing for an Android compatible linux, with strong hardware integration. Huawei and ZTE won't be able to compete with that. They could fail completely on that strategy, but they are doing more than just increasing PPI.

  • CountSessine  13 years ago

    Neither Tizen nor Bada are realistic competitors for Android outside of Korea. Certainly not anymore than Meego was an Android competitor - and Nokia actually had a lot of really great software engineers working for them. That's something that's hard to say about Samsung considering Touchwiz. And neither Bada nor Tizen has any significant ecosystem of apps.

    This isn't a competitive edge against Huawei and ZTE because no one buys Samsung phones for their software.

    • Volpe  13 years ago

      Tizen can run android apps. So they have the largest ecosystem. Samsung has a huge brand, they could easily make Tizen a competitor by deploying it on Galaxy Phone in the future. Consumers wouldn't know (or care).

      Not sure how you can judge a whole companies software engineers, based on one project (Touchwiz).

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