MeeGo survives in the form of Sailfish OS, doesn't it?
Not to mention Maemo, Moblin, Mer, etc. - for whatever reason, that project somehow became a zombie Voltron of other failed Linux mobile OS's, and involved big names: the Linux Foundation, Intel, Nokia, and all of these other companies (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MeeGo#Companies_supporting_the...).
It then got replaced by Tizen, which is a similar improbable survivor that was once backed by a bunch of big names and now lives on mostly in Samsung smartwatches.
Maybe it's proof that too many chefs spoil the broth. At least webOS now only has LG to look after it, rather than some sort of Linux-HP/Palm-LG consortium or whatever.
Tizen is about to be phased out of Samsung smartwatches. It's a bit unfortunate since battery life and a lot of other things are quite nice, but Samsung is really really really really bad at making developer friendly anything and pushing an open source firmware outside of their own borders which resulted in abysmal adoption and its ultimate demise.
Keep in mind that HP did the same with webOS, Sun with OpenSolaris etc. So, its not exclusive to Samsung, but rather big enterprise not understanding the outside world.
I actually blame apple. Essentially every one of those manufacturers wanted to replicate apples success in creating a walled garden instead of taking a different open approach. Essentially lack of visionary thinking.
As you said Samsung is terrible at DevRel, but Tizen OS itself is now pretty good. Tizen's survival in medium term is assured since it ships in Samsung TVs.
On the other hand, I am not sure even stellar DevRel would have saved Tizen. Yes, Sun was terrible with OpenSolaris, but wasn't Joyent stellar with SmartOS (which is the same codebase)? That didn't make SmartOS very successful.
They haven't learned the OS/2 lesson, making SmartOS great to run Linux based software doesn't make software shops go crazy to write with Solaris APIs.
Not to mention Maemo, Moblin, Mer, etc. - for whatever reason, that project somehow became a zombie Voltron of other failed Linux mobile OS's, and involved big names: the Linux Foundation, Intel, Nokia, and all of these other companies (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MeeGo#Companies_supporting_the...).
It then got replaced by Tizen, which is a similar improbable survivor that was once backed by a bunch of big names and now lives on mostly in Samsung smartwatches.
Maybe it's proof that too many chefs spoil the broth. At least webOS now only has LG to look after it, rather than some sort of Linux-HP/Palm-LG consortium or whatever.