To see Tizen, view the incredible demo video of Tizen made by Samsung Executive Vice President Jong-deok Choi I posted on Page 3 of this thread. Also, see the video on that page that I posted of Tizen running Android apps. Tizen does everything Android does PLUS a lot of cool, new, amazing stuff Android will never be capable of. Tizen basically steals and co-opts the entire existing Android app ecosystem from underneath Google and then runs away with it.
Samsung owns and controls Tizen completely. From the recent Feb. 13, 2013, Korea Times article that says Samsung will announce its high-end Tizen phone at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona on Feb. 25-28: "Tizen is an open source, Linux-based OS like Android. Though it is a collaboration between Samsung and American technology giant Intel, the former owns the rights to the software development kit, or tools to work on the OS, the most valuable certificate of ownership."
Today, it is also reported that Google will open up in time for the holiday season a chain of its own retail stores, very similar to Apple's stores, that will sell all things Google: X-Phones, X-Tablets, Google Glass, Nexus 7 tablets, Google Cars, Google Delivery Mini-Drones, and whatever other exotic game-changing Google hardware products being developed in its labs.
In other words, Google is hell-bent on "going Apple" like Samsung and selling BOTH hardware and software in order to achieve Apple-like margins for its greedy shareholders. What's most interesting is that Google won't even try to put advertising on Google Glass, which will have margins much higher than the iPhone's. Google sees how Android hardware device sales have let Samsung's stock rise 9-fold in the past 5 years, giving it a market cap almost as big as Google's own, while Google's market cap today is roughly the same as it was 5 years ago. Google is jealous of Samsung's profiting off of Android and deeply desires to start making huge Android hardware profits itself since Android is its own baby.
Google won't be selling any Samsung Galaxy phones or tablets in its retail stores but only its own Google X-Phones, X-Tablets, Google Glass, etc. Google has seen the light and is moving into hardware and needs stores to show and sell its amazing, cool hardware. Apple's and Samsung's market cap together from selling mobile Internet devices is about $750 billion, or 3 times as big as Google's, whose market cap is 95% derived from advertising only.
Samsung is not pleased about the X-Phone and Google's new retail stores pushing the X-Phone and Google Glass, so it's putting Tizen on the Galaxy S4. It would be irresponsible for Samsung to do otherwise and pretend that Google is not serious about moving into mobile Internet devices like smartphones, which are Samsung's bread and butter and surged to 75% of its revenues in its latest quarter.
Samsung already has some stand-alone stores but will also start mimicing Apple and create its own retail stores in America. They already have such stores all over the place in Korea, selling everything from Samsung refrigerators to Galaxy Note 2s, so it won't be too hard for them to do the same in America to undermine Google's new retail threat to its Galaxy line.
Still, despite the fact the X-Phone may be cooler and superior technically to the Galaxy S4, Google's retail efforts will all fail because it lacks Samsung's manufacturing and marketing scale and won't be able to produce enough X-Phones to overtake Samsung's Galaxy line. Google is just not a hardware company, and its leaders would all have to be replaced by supply-chain experts like Tim Cook to even entertain the idea. Google's whole culture is not hardware-friendly and its top geeks actually look down on hardware techies with the utmost contempt. So Google's whole move into hardware is just one big waste of time. On the other hand, Samsung's the global manufacturing juggernaut without whom even Apple has difficulties producing enough of its products to meet demand, so Samsung will ultimately beat Google's new stores. But Samsung itself will fail on building a Tizen ecosystem because developing and leading an ecosystem is just not in its manufacturing-oriented DNA.
In the Google-Samsung divorce, they BOTH want to divorce as soon as possible and "go Apple" in their own separate ways, because each believes its own independent future is brighter and more profitable than its previously married past. Regardless of what the other feels, Samsung will pursue Tizen and its own ecosystem and Google will sell the X-Phone, X-Tablet, Google Glass, and other non-Samsung hardware in its own retail stores and, because of this, they'll necessarily compete with each other and become the fiercest of enemies.
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