When I think of a big company like Samsung the adage “Jack of all trades master of none” comes to mind. Samsung sells TV’s, smart phones, washers & dryers to name a few.
From what I understand SmartThings was originally started with Kickstarter campaign. How have things changed since being taken over by Samsung? Is the core development team that originally built SmartThings still in the mix?
Some are, but the big change was the hiring a few months ago of Robert Parker, formally a director of engineering at Amazon, to be the new head of engineering for SmartThings. That was an important positive step towards a consumer – friendly, scalable, reliable system.
It appears that Samsung mostly left SmartThings alone except for some priority shifts for about the first year, until the V2 hub was released. But with the ongoing reliability issues through March 2016, clearly a shift was required. Certainly in technology, probably in engineering leadership. And that’s when Parker was brought in.
Speaking as an engineer, I would give Parker a year to turn things around, but my guess is that Samsung won’t wait that long. They announced the Samsung TV integration just before CES 2016 and it’s still not ready.
https://blog.smartthings.com/news/smartthings-updates/samsung-tvs-will-be-connected-with-the-smartthings-platform/
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https://support.smartthings.com/hc/en-us/articles/208327136-Samsung-SmartThings-Extend-FAQ
My guess, and it’s purely a guess based on nothing at all except my own professional intuition, is that Parker was brought in to shepherd the TV project to completion. But we’ll see.