Samsung Electronics very quietly announced that it would be shutting down its Artik business, back in December – so quietly in fact that the only report was in Business Korea. It’s a decision that shows that even the largest technology firms are not able to hit home runs for IoT projects, and it does prompt questions about the longevity of Samsung’s SmartThings platform. There had been a significant lack of enthusiasm for Artik. Reports of outages and bugs were concerning, and the silicon seemed well suited for prototyping but not so much for commercialization. Back in October 2017, Samsung merged SmartThings, Samsung Connect and Artik Cloud into one new service, called SmartThings Cloud, which was the source of quite a…