Regardless of your skepticism, Tizen is being pushed by Samsung as a potential successor to Android and is being shipped well within the 3 years you estimated on.

However if we're talking about our personal thoughts, then I'm not convinced by Tizen either. Not because of the web-apps aspect (remember, Palm's / HP's WebOS is also powered by similar technologies (C++ for performance demanding apps and HTML/Javascript rapid development) and that seemed to work well (or at least, I never had a problem with it). Plus a lot of the time, mobile apps are essentially just frontends to websites anyway (albeit with a few features bolted on to get them past Apple's vetting procedure). And let's not forget that Tizen does support Dalvik as well.

The reason I'm not convinced by Tizen is because people don't really care what Tizen is. They just want their old phone but with better hardware. So Samsung would have be careful not to make such a big deal about Tizen being different to Android and then Samsung would need to make their Android support near to perfect otherwise there could be an uproar from disgruntled consumers claiming they were mislead into buying an incompatible handset. I couldn't see how else Samsung could use their Android market share to leverage a new OS.

But as I said before, I've been wrong in the past when trying to predict how consumers shop. So I'm no doubt wrong again here.

I happen to know a thing or two about the Android compatibility technologies available for Tizen. At least one of them is a port of the Dalvik bits from AOSP, so, inherently, compatibility is really very good. On top of that, one can even blend the Tizen "Home" and task switching with the Android back-stack and task management. That's tricky because "task" in Android doesn't necessarily map to one process. It's an interesting engineering problem and I hope, for entirely selfish reasons, Samsung makes a good choice there.

However, that doesn't make the resulting product a threat to Android. It would start on one or two handsets. It would lack Google's ecosystem, and building the right alliances in the right regions is a heck of a product marketing problem. It would have to be refined over multiple product generations.

Right now, RIM's whole business rests on 1% market share. That's a tall mountain to climb starting from zero.

So, what I'm saying is, even under optimal circumstances regarding Tizen, Google is rational to think they don't have to consider Samsung a threat this year, or for a few years.

Tizen has Android's ecosystem, which is nearly as good as having Google's ecosystem (let's be honest, it didn't really hurt Amazon much did it?)

> So, what I'm saying is, even under optimal circumstances regarding Tizen, Google is rational to think they don't have to consider Samsung a threat this year, or for a few years.

Not really. It will already be too late in a few years when Tizen has proven itself (assuming that it does). As the saying goes, "there's no point closing the stable door after the horse has bolted." And lets also remember that a threat doesn't mean actual damage - threats are warnings about the potential to do danger (and sometimes those warnings amount to little more than bluffs). So Tizen is already a threat, the question is whether Samsung manage to substantiate on that threat and carve a slice from Android's market share. And if Google want to ensure that doesn't happen then they need to already be acting rather than waiting until something does and then trying to react (just look at how well that strategy has worked out for Palm, Nokia, RIM/Blackberry and Microsoft).