Have you heard of bada? Unless you come from technology circles, the likely answer is no.
Bada (screenshot below) was Samsung’s first attempt to ‘do a Tizen’ and make a break for software independence. At the time the company seemed to have no other choice. It was 2008, the first generation iPhone had caught the imagination of the world and Samsung’s only options were Microsoft’s decrepit Windows Phone and Google’s brand new (and decidedly unfinished) Android.
Today Samsung launched the first Tizen phone and it is a beast. It was a long awaited move. A carefully planned tactical counterstrike against Google GOOGL -2.12% in a bid to jump up the food chain. But Google is not the only target.Microsoft MSFT +0.05%, Apple AAPL -0.89%, every smartphone, tablet, smartwatch and smart TV maker are also in Samsung’s sights. And with Tizen Samsung is willing to bet the company on victory .
Development was rushed. Apple had worked on iOS for five years before launching the iPhone but in just two years Samsung announced its first phone, the Wave S8500, running bada. It went on sale in June, developers got access to the SDK (software development kit) just a month earlier.
Despite promises of bada phones, tablets and smart televisions (sound familiar?) it bombed. Technically the OS lives on to this day with a 0.4% share of the handset market, but in 2012 Samsung announced bada would be folded into Tizen. This would wipe out a dreadful mistake, but it was a strategy Samsung had already promised to repeat. And this time the risk it planned to take would be far bigger.
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