Samsung Electronics have decided to move 500 Software Engineers out of their mobile phone development unit into other consumer electronics parts such as TVs, network, printer and its corporate software R&D divisions, according to various reports on the net.
Looking at the reaction on the Internet, the vast majority of tech sites see this as Samsung not having faith in their Smartphone business, and in Particular Tizen Smartphones. I disagree with this. There are lots of unknowns in this equation and without knowing their current Android development strategy, its not clear if these software engineers were even surplus to requirements.
“To further strengthen the company’s overall software prowess,” the company said in a statement. The focus will be “to enhance our competitive edge in the Internet of Things (IoT) industry and increase synergies for the Tizen platform,” it said [Samsung].
We have to keep in mind that these engineers will now be mainly refocused on TIZEN, and also Tizen R&D. Tizen is a Linux based OS, and to a certain extent any R&D efforts across Tizen consumer devices can strengthen the Tizen OS Platform as a whole, and this can only be a good thing for Tizen.
As of 2013, the world’s largest smartphone maker had a total of 40,506 software engineers, up from 33,449 in 2012 and 27,889 in 2011, according to the company. It didn’t provide a breakdown of engineers by unit.
Samsung have decided to release a budget Tizen Smartphone in what it considers as developing markets, and then hopefully we will see a high powered Smartphone like the Samsung Z emerge. Without an official roadmap, we can only speculate, pretty much like everyone else, but at point at lease we understand Operating Systems and their development 😉
