Samsung announced its own developer conference for the end of October. The company said it will hold the event at the Westin St. Francis Union Square in San Francisco, though it's not yet clear what the conference will focus on. My question is, why?
The company made the announcement by launching a website that would be the envy of any industrial laser calibration tool manufacturer. If this was 2001. You can see the entirety of that site below. It's slick, right?
Samsung's Developer Conference Website
Samsung hasn't announced the specific focus of the conference other than to say that developers will be able to “Engage with industry leaders. Collaborate with fellow developers. Learn about new Samsung tools and SDKs.”
Samsung makes computer running Windows and Chrome OS, and smartphones that run Windows Phone, Android, and a few that run its own Bada OS. Samsung is also working on a Linux-based mobile operating system called Tizen that isn't yet shipping.
Odds are that this developer conference will be aimed at developers who want to learn more about taking advantage of Samsung-specific hardware and software features in the company's Galaxy S4 smartphone that runs Android, and perhaps other devices that may be introduced in time for the holidays.
I wrote a piece in May accusing Samsung of having delusions of relevance. The heart of that piece is that software matters, and original software innovation matters more. Google, Microsoft, and Apple all have developers conference for their respective platforms because they control the heart of those platforms, the operating system.
A developer conference for device-specific SDKs? Seems like you could that as a webinar, but that's just me.