After staging the true and false "true return", Luo Yonghao's return to the science and technology circle now seems to be almost a foregone conclusion. However, after Mr. Luo "turned over" by the east wind of live streaming with goods, Hammer Technology, which was acquired by ByteDance, was in a state of struggle. Following the release of the "Announcement on the Downline of the Hammer Forum" by SmartisanOS in mid-October last year, SmartisanOS announced that it was about to return after a long period of silence.
SmartisanOS said in a long post posted on social platforms, "Although we bid farewell to mobile phones for the time being, we have not stopped exploring the innovative form of SmartisanOS, nor have we put down the pursuit of product experience", and "In today's living room, when occasional guest appearances in the office and classroom or even more roles are needed, a huge screen is ignored." It could have taken advantage of the size advantage to occupy an important position, but it could not play a value because of its single function and simple interaction. ”
At the same time, Konka TV also released a countdown poster on the same day, with an accompanying text saying, "We have some new ideas about interaction." Combined with the obvious hammer technology logo added to the new product release countdown poster, Konka's new cooperation with SmartisanOS is likely to be a smart TV.
Although SmartisanOS and Konka have not had any contact before, the two sides actually have a basis for cooperation. As a veteran TV manufacturer, Konka now not only has to face the challenges of overseas giants such as Sony, LG, and Samsung, but also needs to face cross-border competition from mobile phone manufacturers such as Xiaomi, Huawei, Honor, and OPPO, which also means that they need to introduce strong reinforcements. And SmartisanOS also has to find a "way out" for itself, yes, the current position of SmartisanOS in the ByteDance system is actually quite embarrassing.
After stopping the mobile phone business, the outside world originally thought that SmartisanOS would disappear silently in the long river of time like other participants who could not keep up with the rhythm of market competition, but what they did not expect was that SmartisanOS was not willing to disappear. In the past, based on the hammer mobile phone, the relationship between SmartisanOS and the former can be said to be a win and a loss, after Lao Luo brought the hammer mobile phone to the trough, ByteDance took over the relevant technical assets and personnel of Hammer Technology at a price of 300 million yuan, and based on this team, the New Stone Laboratory was formed as its hardware middle office.
In fact, ByteDance has never hidden its true intention to acquire Hammer Technology, that is, to enter the education hardware market based on this team, and the mobile phone business is only incidental. But the problem is that whether it is the mobile phone business or education hardware, New Stone Laboratory is not doing a good job today.
So far, New Stone Labs has only brought two smartphone products, nut Pro3 and nut R2, and a Smartisan TNT go extension, but the sales of these devices have not been satisfactory. After a brief test of the mobile phone industry, ByteDance announced its withdrawal, and New Stone Laboratory was also incorporated into the education hardware team, no longer developing products such as nut mobile phones and TNT displays, which also made Luo Yonghao's dream of "making the best mobile phone in the Eastern Hemisphere" completely extinguished.
After losing the core carrier of the smartphone, SmartisanOS seems to have no place to play. According to byteDance's idea at that time, New Stone Lab will become the team responsible for education hardware under Vigorous Education, but although the education hardware is hardware, it is essentially an educational content based on hardware.
Looking at the current market performance of education hardware products, basically not BBK, which has existed for many years, or sub-brands of various mature educational institutions. And what is even worse is that the strong supervision that began last year has also led to the comprehensive contraction of vigorous education, and to this day, the education hardware products of the official website of vigorous education are only the powerful table lamps.
So, what is the state of SmartisanOS today? Wu Dezhou, president of New Stone Lab, chose to leave after ByteDance gave up the mobile phone business, and Zhu Haizhou, product manager of SmartisanOS, who had to "continue to explore system innovation opportunities", also left to GOPO, and the departure of the two elders also made SmartisanOS almost lose its main backbone.
This is not the end, because whether it is pressing the pause button of the mobile phone business at ByteDance or the downline of the hammer forum after that, SmartisanOS has always said that it will continue to provide services to users. But this is very "troublesome", after all, in the past two years, the New Stone Lab behind SmartisanOS has not only not launched new hardware, but also needs to maintain old products, which means that it has become a pure cost department in ByteDance's system.
When the market is bullish, maintaining a cost department like SmartisanOS to earn word of mouth is obviously harmless, but today is different from the past, and the situation in the Internet industry today is that major manufacturers are "fattening and thinning", "open source and throttling", and maintaining a team that can only earn face is not so timely. After the banner of "no idle people" of Internet manufacturers was erected, the SmartisanOS team naturally needed to find a place to realize its own value, and choosing to cooperate with Konka and other manufacturers was obviously an attempt to solve their own embarrassing situation.
In turn, for traditional TV manufacturers such as Konka, because the intelligence of the product has become the mainstream, but it lacks relevant technical reserves, which leads to the need to find a partner. At present, the operating system of smart TVs, like smartphones, is usually based on Google's Android system, so this is also the basis for SmartisanOS to develop a smart TV system for Konka. However, the operation of smart phones is based on touch logic, while smart TVs are voice and remote controls, so this also means that the operating system of smart TVs and mobile phone operating systems cannot be seamlessly connected, and need to be adapted to local conditions.
And no matter how controversial the hammer phone itself is, as a ROM that has appeared since 2013 and lasted until 2022, the design of SmartisanOS itself and the step, big bang and other quite versatile, or experienced the test of the market, and even became the industry fashion. More critically, SmartisanOS itself is still "clean" enough, and it is not like MIUI or Hongmeng that has Xiaomi and Huawei's smart home ecology behind it, it is only software and no ecology, so Konka does not have to worry about its own products being assimilated after using SmartisanOS.
As for what kind of "new species" SmartisanOS and Konka will make in the field of smart TVs, it can only wait for the conference in a few days to be revealed. But I have to say, "The history of human-computer interaction has jumped many times, from keyboard and mouse to touch to voice, why should TV endure tedious operations?" Such a statement is actually very reasonable.
Because the functional complexity of smart TVs is several steps higher than that of traditional TVs, and the main audience of TVs is the middle-aged and elderly user groups, there is indeed a certain separation between the interaction of smart TVs and user groups, and this may be the problem that SmartisanOS wants to solve.
As a veteran fan who has seen Hammer Technology rise and fall, I only hope that the SmartisanOS team will not repeat the scenes such as "Long live Sister Li" and "You noisy that I used TNT" at the Bird's Nest Conference that year.
【The picture of this article comes from the network】