Andy Rubin offered to sell his operating system to Samsung in late 2004, as
he told journalist Fred Vogelstein in the book Dogfight.
“You and what army are going to go and create this? You have six
people. Are you high?” was basically what the Android founders were told.
Rubin found himself butting up against the Korean company’s preference
for working with large corporations.
“They laughed me out of the boardroom. This happened two weeks
before Google acquired us.”
Google paid an estimated $50 million for Android. The operating
system would become the backbone of Google’s products on just about
every non-Apple smartphone. Google vice president David Lawee later
called it his company’s “best deal ever.”
What a missed opportunity for Samsung, employees thought. Samsung
now depended on Google to power the software on its phones.
In February 2013, seeing little progress in developing its own operating
system, Bada, Samsung quietly shut it down and transferred its efforts to a
new operating system, Tizen, co-designed with the struggling
microprocessing company Intel. According to T.J., the two realized they
needed to reboot some of their software projects and decided to team up.
The plans for Tizen were strategic. In addition to attempting to build an
ecosystem, Samsung’s new operating system was a hedge against Android.
If relations with Google deteriorated, Google could use Android as leverage
to win competitive concessions, hampering Samsung’s access to Google’s
prized open-source operating system. Tizen was Samsung’s plan B.
In October 2013, Samsung put on its first developers’ conference at San
Francisco’s St. Francis Hotel. Charging $299 a ticket, Samsung barely
avoided disaster.
“We arrive the morning of this workshop and the attendees start
downloading this stuff and it’s not working,” recalled an exasperated Hod
Greeley, a Samsung developer-relations director who helped set up the
event. “This is stuff that we’ve spent hours and hours and hours prepping
for and testing, and it’s ruined by this update.”
Samsung’s developers, it turned out, were writing new software code
without clearly communicating things to those outside their department, as
they raced to push out the apps, hardware style.
“Being in hardware,” he said, “they don’t do good [software] testing.”
Greeley’s struggles didn’t end there. As we sat together in a San