Mobile Musings, Mostly

The announcement of the purchase of the rest of Symbian by Nokia and the concurrent launch of the Symbian Foundation attracted a lot of (web) ink in its immediate aftermath, including from yours truly.

Observers have commented on the implications of this announcement, but I would recommend a recent one from Andreas Constantinou on the VisionMobile blog. Andreas had done a good job of taking all the other events that have transpired over the past several months including the launch of the iPhone SDK, Android, Nokia’s acquisition of Trolltech, etc. and created a framework to think of the evolving landscape.

He states that there are now seven centres of gravity in mobile..

As the dust is clearing after the storm, a new landscape is unveiling in the mobile industry; one where the balance of power is concentrating around 7 centres of gravity: Adobe, Apple, Google, LiMo, Microsoft, Nokia and Qualcomm.

By focusing on what each of these entities brings to the table from a technical and commercial standpoint, Andreas has provided some much needed perspective and a framework with which to track the evolution of the mobile space. Of the 7 players in Andreas’ list, two of them have not yet shipped a single device yet in 2008 - Google and LiMo (yes there are devices with common stack objects from LiMo that have shipped). So it will be interesting to see how the Android device launch pans out this year.

However, he has interestingly left out RIM from this list. Although a niche player in the enterprise segment, trying to expand into the consumer space, RIM has to be treated as a contender. They have a developer environment, solid install base, and decent carrier GTM relationships. How that translates into their ability to deal with the scale and resources that the others can bring to the market is open.

As Philippe Winthrop points out in this entry on the Symbian Foundation announcement, currently there are six choices for mobile device platforms !!

Talk about too much choice - reminds me of the book ‘The Paradox of Choice‘ by Barry Schwartz. Although Schwartz focuses on how we become paralyzed when faced with the insane number of choices when it comes to choosing a pair of jeans, breakfast cereal, 401(k) plans, etc.;you could almost extend it to mobile device platforms as well.

Since monocultures are not necessarily a good thing whether it is agriculture or device operating systems, you want to have a reasonable choice as an application developer. As I mentioned in an earlier post, you pick the device platform based on a variety of factors. But right now, the learning curve when going across device platforms is not a trivial one - which forces developers to make some hard choices. And I am not talking just about a vanilla two-person developer outfit, it applies equally to large ISVs as well. To their credit, the Symbian Foundation in their announcement offered compatibility with Symbian 9 and S60 3rd edition.

Extending this further, Om Malik has a good writeup of the platform players and then offers up his odds on the eventual winners.

What is interesting in the coverage of the Symbian Foundation announcement is the near absence of any mention of Palm - used to be, they had a decent developer platform, program, and following not too long ago (at least, geologically speaking).

Some of you may have read this announcement yesterday, from Nokia to the effect that

• They have made a cash offer of approximately EUR 264 million to buy out the remaining 52% ownership of Symbian Ltd. they did not already own.

• This would be the first step in the creation of the Symbian Foundation to “provide royalty-free open platform and accelerate innovation“.

Parsing through the press releases, we learn that

1. The cash offer has been OK’ed by shareholders (Sony Ericsson, Ericsson, Panasonic, Siemens) who own close to 91% of Symbian Ltd.
2. Symbian Ltd. will be acquired by Nokia; the transaction is expected to close by Q408
3. The Symbian Foundation will unite the Symbian OS, and the various UIs that have sprung up, specifically - S60, UIQ, and MOAP(S). The Foundation will combine all these parts to create a new OS and UI.
4. When the Foundation launches (tentatively in first half of 2009), source code will be available for free to all Foundation members.
5. The intent is to move the entire platform to open source in two years.

So what does all this mean ? Well, here are some initial observations :

1. This is an attempt by Symbian to position itself as a compelling alternative to both Google and Apple. Although Symbian has been the leading mobile platform for quite some time (with Linux and Microsoft nipping at its heels), the past twelve months have seen this relatively stable landscape feel a pretty major earthquake with the launch of the iPhone and the Open Handset Alliance.
2. By going the open source route, the Foundation hopes to entice developers to its platform - The Symbian Foundation currently includes Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Motorola, NTT DoCoMo, AT&T, LG Electronics, Samsung Electronics, STMicroelectronics, Texas Instruments and Vodafone among others. A quick scan of the current membership of the Symbian Foundation, the Open Handset Alliance and the LiMo Foundation reveals some players who are in all three - Motorola, Samsung, LG.
3. Microsoft now has its work cut out as it tries to keep justifying the operating system cost of Windows Mobile to device OEMs, while also attracting developers who might feel that their odds of innovating (and making money) are better in less restrictive developer paradigms.
4. As a developer, this introduces more competition in the market at an interesting time - with Google running into some glitches in the launch of Android handsets as reported here and Apple getting its iPhone developer program in shape.
5. However, it doesn’t do anything to resolve the fragmentation in the mobile device platform space that makes application development painful to say the least.
6. My feeling is that developers like the rest of us will try to find the path of least resistance - going with platform that offers the most innovative ways to develop applications, provides access to broadest set of customers, and places the fewest constraints on my business model. Which seems to indicate that unless there are some changes to the Microsoft and Apple models, they might find it difficult to become the preferred developer platform on mobile devices.

Funnily enough, this announcement came out on Symbian’s tenth anniversary. Not to let that go, their website proclaims this announcement as “a nod to the past and a look to the future as the most significant transformation of the company since its inception is announced.“