How much of the 1.2 billion goes to SmartThings?

[SBDOBRESCU (Bobby)]

Ok, Samsung has announced big IoT spending. Wondering how much of this pie will ST get. Any, a lot, none? Thoughts…

Samsung Planning $1.2 Billion for U.S. Research and Development of IoT

[diehllane (Brian Diehl)]

I’m sure a lot will be spent on other Samsung hardware (connected kitchen devices and appliances will eat up a ton of money in development I can imagine).

[JDRoberts]

My guess is a lot goes into Artik and a big chunk goes into scaling their recent cloud services acquisition of Joyent. But obviously just a guess.

OMG you guys! Samsung just bought Joyent

“This acquisition is likely to bolster Samsung’s strategy around smart home devices, which often require the backing of cloud services like Joyent’s to store data, handle the heavy lifting of computation, and deliver data to smartphones and other gadgetry.”

[JDRoberts]

BTW, I really liked thisfrom the article:

At Samsung, putting people at the center of everything we do is our highest value,” said Kwon. “The same must be true for IoT if we want to realize its full transformative power. Today, IoT is changing individual lives – helping people to age in their own homes. But tomorrow, using IoT, we can give the same independence to millions of Americans. We can keep people out of hospitals and nursing homes. As our populations live longer, these benefits and cost savings for society cannot be ignored.”

However, as a medically fragile person, I have to say that SmartThings is a long way from this design philosophy. Even when nothing is broken, they push out updates which can take the system off-line for anywhere from 10 minutes to several hours. And they make platform changes which can introduce errors without notification.

Even with notification, if I can’t delay the update to a time which is convenient for me, I can’t use the system for those purposes where I would most need it – – substituting for asking someone else to operate devices in my home. Whether that’s opening the door, turning on a light, turning off the music, I just don’t have the same Plan B that able-bodied people do. And the same will be true for the group that the Samsung executive describes in the passage above.

If Samsung is serious about putting people first in IOT design, then the top priority has to be stability. Not just reliability, which is also obviously important, but being able to keep the system without any changes until we are ready to deal with them. I need to have other people do something as simple as a battery reset. So if the system is working well for me on Monday, I want it to keep working that way on Tuesday, until I am ready to look at the changes.

I’m not saying that SmartThings necessarily ever will adopt this philosophy. They might not. So far the biggest priority has always been versatility. That can be a successful marketing strategy. But it’s not a “people first” strategy when you are talking about people with physical disabilities, including the normal process of aging.

Just today I notified a company that I have done business with for a couple of years that I will drop their subscription service this month because their most recent update changed their mobile app so it can only display in portrait. My tablet is in a frame attached to my wheelchair. I need landscape. And I’m not the only one.

since somebody asked, that’s not me in the photo, just someone with the same kind of tablet mount.

Of course, other people need portrait orientation, or prefer being able to switch between them. Choice is good. But change can be disastrous, especially if it takes away choice.

I do agree very much with the quoted passage that there is a large market to be served with IOT. The percentage of people injured or killed in their homes due to falls as they age is horrendous in the US. I believe that IOT could greatly reduce that statistic. Just pathway lights that you can turn on or off after you’re in bed can be very helpful.

But for people like me, if we are going to use these systems, we are going to depend on them. They have to work almost all the time. And if there’s necessary scheduled maintenance, we have to be the ones who schedule it. Otherwise adoption rates will be much lower.

JMO as someone who lives with these issues every day.

[geko]

@JDRoberts

My tablet is in a frame attached to my wheelchair. I need landscape. And I’m not the only one.

Yes, this! It’s been asked for so many times. It baffles me that 2 years after the acquisition, SmartThings still have not been unable to allocate resources for such a trivial task. So much for “putting people at the center of everything we do”.

[red5 (Mike)]

@geko

Yes, this! It’s been asked for so many times. It baffles me that 2 years after the acquisition, SmartThings still have not been unable to allocate resources for such a trivial task. So much for “putting people at the center of everything we do”.

This is stunning. I wouldn’t say it’s a trivial task to make an app support landscape, but I’m pretty sure that’s part of the criteria for having a properly designed app that meets platform ux standards.