The Symbian Foundation announcement today is a fascinating change in business strategy, but I'm not sure if it will help or hurt Nokia in the long run. I think something like this was probably necessary just to clean up the mess in Symbian's ownership structure. If Nokia can make the new structure work, it'll be a milestone in the use of open source by large tech companies, but I'm not sure it helps Nokia win the smartphone war.
What happened--
Nokia is buying Symbian. Everyone currently working at Symbian becomes a Nokia employee after the deal closes. Nokia said it will spend the next six months deciding "how we will use the unique talent we are gaining."
[By the way, the buyout by Nokia is a change I said was possible two and a half years ago when it first became clear that some of Symbian's owners wanted out (
link). I am astounded that the change took so long. I looked back at my old post a few months ago and thought, "wow, I really got that one wrong." Now I am relieved to say that I was not wrong, I was merely
prematurely correct ;-) ]
--
Symbian OS will become free. Nokia's Symbian-related assets, including both Symbian OS and the S60 interface, will be contributed to the new Symbian Foundation, a nonprofit that will control the Symbian platform. So Nokia writes the code and then gives it to the foundation for free.
Founding members of the foundation include: AT&T, LG, Motorola, Nokia, DoCoMo, Samsung, SonyEricsson, ST Micro, TI, and Vodafone. It's very interesting to see some operators in the mix, especially AT&T.
The foundation will open source the new Symbian platform over a two year period. So eventually Symbian will be available for free.
The new Symbian Platform will have a broader scope than the current Symbian OS. It will include:
-An application suite (previously controlled by licensees)
-Runtimes (including Webkit, Flash, Silverlight, and Java; previously licensee-controlled)
-UI framework (formerly controlled by licensees)
-Middleware
-OS
-Tools, SDK, and application signing (previously shared between Symbian and licensees)
--
UIQ is dead. SonyEricsson's UIQ technology, and NTT DoCoMo's MOAP, both of which are user interface layers written on top of Symbian, will also be contributed to the foundation, which will incorporate pieces of them into S60. The new Symbian foundation partners said at the press conference, "We will reposition UIQ in the new ecosystem." That's seems to be a face-saving way of saying, "UIQ is dead." Confirming that, UIQ announced immediate plans to lay off more than half its employees (
link).
These are huge changes, even though they'll take a couple of years to implement. We won't get the first release of the new merged platform until 2010, although the partners say S60 and native Symbian apps will continue to run in the future, so they hope many more developers will create Symbian apps today in anticipation of future growth.
--
Nokia will continue to control Symbian development. This is my interpretation, not something they announced. Technically, control over Symbian and S60 passes to the new Symbian Foundation, with product plans controlled by a managing board and councils made up of foundation members. This makes Symbian sound independent. But Nokia will employ most of the people maintaining and extending Symbian and S60, and could divert them to other Nokia projects if it ever dislikes the direction of the foundation. More to the point, the whitepaper explaining the new foundation says, "device manufacturers will be eligible for seats based on number of Symbian Foundation platform-based devices shipped, with the other board members selected by election and contribution" (
link). So Nokia as the dominant shipper of Symbian devices gets the most seats, and can then control the election of additional board members.
The right phrase for this, I think, is puppet strings. But I don't mean that in a bad way; it would have been insane for Nokia to actually give up control over its smartphone OS. Just don't have any illusion that the strings have been cut. They've merely been relocated, and in fact I think Nokia now controls things more directly since it owns the Symbian development team.
What does it all mean?I don't know.
The announcement is so complex, and so many things are changing in the mobile market, that it's very difficult to predict how everything will turn out. Also, the whole thing depends on crisp implementation. Even the most brilliant strategy fails if you can't execute on it.
You can't say that Nokia lacks guts. The foundation members said at the announcement that it is one of the largest open source announcements ever, and I think that's true. It's a very interesting, aggressive move for Nokia, and I respect that. There are precedents for a big company acting as a sugar daddy for an open source software project, but I don't think it's ever been done with a project that is as central to the parent company's operations as Symbian is to Nokia. It will be fascinating to see if Nokia can really work effectively through the foundation model. I presume they have thought about this a lot and feel the risks are well controlled.
I'm having trouble seeing the big picture of how this changes the world, though. I suspect the announcement is actually half cleanup and half power move. The power move is that it challenges Android, and could help harness the energy of the open source community to support Symbian. The cleanup is that the ownership situation of Symbian was unstable and had to be changed eventually, and SonyEricsson clearly wanted to get out of the UIQ business. The creation of the foundation solves all of those problems at once. My guess is that since Nokia is paying most of the bills, the other foundation partners were willing to go along with it. The Symbian investors get some money from Nokia, and can sit back and wait to see what the foundation delivers.
Here are some other issues and questions that stand out to me:
Symbian gets its UI back. Years ago, Symbian took itself out of the user interface business, allowing Nokia and NTT DoCOMo to develop their own UIs, and spinning out the UIQ interface team. The company declared that it had been a mistake to ever go into the UI business. So it was amusing to hear Symbian at today's press conference saying how disruptive it was to have multiple user interfaces, and how great it is to have them unified.
The reality is that OS companies have traditionally created the UI along with the rest of the OS because they need to be coordinated closely, and because developers want to work with one consistent interface. So the real mistake was getting out of the UI business, and Symbian has now corrected that.
What will happen within Nokia? At the press conference, Nokia was asked what happens to its internal S60 development team (which is rumored to be larger than Symbian itself) once the merger is complete. Nokia said vaguely that it's going to spend six months working out all those integration issues, and what it will do with the multiple geographic locations. It's hard for me to believe that working out process won't result in some layoffs. I hope I'm wrong; I have friends at both Nokia and Symbian, and layoffs would be incredibly painful for the Symbian folks, many of whom have spent most of their careers there.
The fate of the people is just one of the open questions about what the merger means to Nokia. Another is the fate of Trolltech, the development tool that Nokia purchased recently and said would unify app development across Series 40 and S60. Will it be contributed to Symbian? And what does the open sourcing of Symbian mean for Nokia's use of Linux?
How does Nokia differentiate its software? The theory behind S60 was that Nokia would have its own user interface, helping to differentiate its phones from other Symbian vendors. Now that S60 will be given away, how will Nokia differentiate? The Symbian Foundation says licensees will be able to create a "differentiated experience" on its unified UI framework. Lord only knows what that means. Maybe Nokia has decided the UI is not a point of differentiation at all, and plans to focus on something else (web services, perhaps?)
Will the change in Symbian really drive more developers? As the Symbian partners pointed out repeatedly in the press conference, they have already sold 200 million phones. If that's not enough to excite developers, how will adding another 200 million -- or even 500 million -- do it? Although Symbian now has a nicer long term story, I don't think most developers were paying attention to that. They respond to user excitement and the chance to make lots of money. The new Symbian strategy doesn't directly drive either one.
What does it mean to Apple? I think it's probably good news. Although the Symbian partners could theoretically bleed Apple by sharing investments that Apple has to fund for itself, Apple competes on speed and elegance, not cost control. Nokia and Symbian will now spend the next six months sorting out how they'll integrate and rationalize their organizations. No matter how much they try to avoid it, this will slip schedules and force people to revisit plans. And the other Symbian licensees have to wait two years for the new OS. That gives Apple a long, long time to build up its iPhone business. The Register put it very bluntly in its commentary on the Symbian announcement (
link):
"Apple must now see a clear road ahead for world dominance...it's now Apple's business to lose."
Wow, from new entrant to industry leader in just a year. That sort of stuff must drive Nokia nuts.
Is Google happy or upset tonight? My first reaction is to say that Google should be worried because there's now another very credible operating system being given away for free in competition with Android (or there will be in two years). What's more, the leading mobile handset companies all participated in the Symbian Foundation announcement. That makes it harder for Android to get licensees. But the new open Symbian OS is two years away from shipment, giving Google lots of runway to get established (that's what I meant about execution determining the real impact of the announcement). Also, the governance system for Android is a lot simpler than Symbian's. While the Symbian committees must debate and agree on product plans, Google can just decide whatever features it wants to add, and toss them out there. In theory, Google should be able to move much faster.
Besides, there is the question of why Google really created Android. One school of thought says that Android was just a tool to bleed Microsoft and force openness in the mobile ecosystem. If that's the goal, then the opening up of Symbian is a kind of a triumph for Google. Nokia is, in many ways, doing Google's work for it. Which brings us to...
What happens to Microsoft? Here's the weird thought for the day: Microsoft is the last major company charging money for a mobile operating system. The throwback. The dinosaur. How many companies are going to want to pay for Windows Mobile when they can get Linux, Android, or Symbian for free? This is Microsoft's ultimate open source nightmare, becoming real.
Written by Prathik on June 25th, 2008 with no comments.
Read more articles on OS and Symbian and Windows Mobile and android and google and iPhone and nokia.
Okay, I'll admit in advance that this is going to be a pretty snarky post, but it never ceases to amaze me how badly Nokia handles itself in the US market. In Europe and most of the rest of the world, Nokia operates like a fighter jet, incredibly nimble and powerful. But in the US, it's more like a biplane. An old biplane. With holes in the wings. Nokia's market share in the US has dropped from 20% to 7% in the last two years (
link), and sometimes I wonder if it's trying for 1%.
Case in point: Nokia's "Open to Anything" ad campaign featuring people who have created software for Nokia N95 smartphones (
link).
It features, swear to God, a guy who created a self-hypnosis application for the N95, someone who created a bad breath detector, a man in the Witness Protection Program who created a location-aware app to track the hit men chasing him, a ditzy woman who uses the phone to track fertilizer schedules for her plants, a jealous wife who created a lie detector, and a flake Jewish photographer who glued together two n95s to create a 3D camera.
"You've never really seen a bris until you've seen a bris in 3D." --Nokia's website
They're all fantasy applications from obviously fake people, but beautifully animated in an elaborate Flash-driven site.
From time to time, I've talked with Nokia employees who were confused about why people don't buy more application software for their Nokia S60 smartphones. There are a lot of reasons -- lack of awareness that they can do it, lack of a built-in software store on the device, incompatibility between various versions of S60, etc. But one huge reason is because no one has ever made a compelling case to most users on why they should care about smartphone software.
The triumph of creativity over business senseThe Open to Anything campaign is a great example of how Nokia's hurting itself in the applications business, and in the US market in general. I'm sure Nokia's intent was to do something light-hearted to draw attention to the N95, and if you view the ads as standalone short films they are moderately witty. You see this a lot in online marketing lately -- a creative agency will create humorous websites (often with video) designed to draw traffic from bored web surfers. But unless the ads also align with your strategy, they don't drive sales. In Nokia's case, they actually do harm:
--Once again, Nokia is communicating that its users are freaks and morons, which in the US is not the way to build a loyal following. Nokia has a long habit in the US of positioning itself as the preferred phone of people who lack social skills. At least this time there aren't any sluts in the ad (
link).
--The benefit of an open phone is not that you can write your own apps, it's that you can buy applications created by others. Almost no one wants to create their own apps. So we're being told that N95 users are not only freaks and morons, but they are freaks and morons who have programming skills -- an even narrower demographic.
--Since the argument for why users should care about applications has not been made, showing a bunch of nonsensical applications actually makes people less likely to take an interest in mobile apps at all. It trivializes the whole idea of mobile software, at a time when Nokia claims it is trying to make itself into a computing company that can compete with Apple and Google.
Meanwhile, Apple's ads depict its users as smart and hip, it puts its CEO on stage with real developers showing lustworthy iPhone applications, and it plans a built-in software store for the iPhone. Care to guess which platform is going to get more user and developer loyalty?
I'm tempted to start taking bets on when the iPhone application base will be larger than S60's. Unless Nokia wises up quickly, it won't take long.
Written by Prathik on May 17th, 2008 with no comments.
Read more articles on Applications and N95 and iPhone and nokia and smartphones.
Nokia bought Trolltech for about $150 million, and there's all sorts of speculation online about what it means. Before I get to that, let me quickly summarize what Trolltech does:
Trolltech is a Norwegian company that makes development tools and Linux software. Its best-known products are Qt (a software layer and development tools for writing applications that run across multiple operating systems, including Windows, Mac, and Linux), Qtopia (a user interface and applications layer for Linux), and Qtopia Phone Edition (a Linux software environment for mobile phones).
In the mobile world, Qtopia Phone Edition has been the company's best-known product, although it hasn't exactly been a commercial success. Motorola uses a version of Qt in its Linux mobile phones, but not all of Qtopia. The Sony Mylo mobile device uses Qtopia, as did the Sharp Zaurus PDAs. But Trolltech had so much trouble getting a mainstream phone licensee for Qtopia that it created its own hardware prototype, the Greenphone. (Out of fairness, I should add that Trolltech has a lot of other tiny licensees you've never heard of; you can see the full list
here.)
The obvious assumption would be that Nokia bought Trolltech for its phone technology, but that's not what Nokia says. The company's
press release says Trolltech will help advance its "cross-platform software strategy for mobile devices and desktop applications, and...Internet services business. With Trolltech, Nokia and third party developers will be able to develop applications that work in the Internet, across Nokia's device portfolio and on PCs."
All About Symbian reinforced that message, reproducing a slide from the Nokia press briefing that showed Qt layered on top of Nokia Series 40, S60, and a variety of desktop PC operating systems (
link). The Guardian quoted a Nokia spokesperson as saying the emphasis of the deal is development tools: "This is about Trolltech's fantastic tools. You can much faster develop programmes which can work on multiple platforms." (
link).
Vnunet quoted an analyst saying that Nokia will use Qtopia to help deploy its Ovi Internet services cross-platform (
link). I don't really see the Internet connection; Qtopia has not been a contender in the net applications world the way that Flash and Silverlight are. But maybe Nokia wants to build it into a contender.
Other analysts suggested other motivations for the purchase. Some of the commentary on Slashdot suggested that Nokia is investing in Linux to counter Google Android (
link). ArsTechnica suggested that Nokia might be planning to replace S60 with Qt (
link), while others suggested that Nokia plans to use Linux instead of Symbian. Richard Windsor of Nomura pointed out in an e-mail analysis that the purchase of Qt rips the guts out of Motorola's Linux plans, although he guesses that's more of a happy side effect for Nokia than the primary motivation.
But an unsigned article on ZDNet UK had the most sweeping interpretation, basically saying that this spells certain death for all proprietary operating systems (
link):
Nokia's bet is that the sheer size of the Qt 4-based market will be a decisive inducement for everyone else, handset makers, operators, and pure applications players alike, and that the explosion in compatibility will amplify the market for everyone much as happened on the desktop when MS-DOS anointed the PC architecture. But unlike then, Qt 4 will break forever the idea that one part of the market can seal itself off as a profitable mini-universe, an idea as archaic in the 21st century as the feudalism it so closely resembles.
As we say here in California, I want some of what he's been smoking.
What does it really mean?We're all assuming that Nokia actually has a coherent master plan here. Although $150m is a lot of money to me personally, it's mouse nuts to Nokia. Maybe Nokia bought Trolltech just as an experiment, or to keep it from falling into some other company's hands. The fact that Nokia's going to continue to develop its Maemo version of Linux, which is not based on the Trolltech technology, suggests a certain amount of incoherence.
If you want to be really Machiavellian, you could speculate that this purchase is the Nokia mobile phone organization's answer to Maemo -- "you tablet guys keep your version of Linux, now we have our own."
But let's assume there really is a plan, and it's aimed at competitors. About six months ago, I wrote about Nokia's ambitions to be a computer company (
link). Now we see them dealing themselves into the operating system competition as well. No matter what you think Nokia's motives are, the fact is that it's now the owner of a respectable cross-platform software layer that runs on PCs and mobile devices. Nokia is now a software layer company, in very direct competition with other layer companies like Microsoft and Adobe and Sun. The deal also makes Nokia a much more important player in the open source community. And it puts Nokia in more direct opposition to the companies with their own operating systems -- Apple and Google and (once again) Microsoft.
That's a huge potential change. I say "potential" because Nokia has a lot more to do if it really wants to compete. The Trolltech team will need more investment (they have been losing money) and Nokia has a lot of work to do in developer evangelism and support to make the challenge real. But the potential is there.
I think that as the implications of the deal become clear, Nokia may have trouble continuing to partner with some of its new competitors. For example, it has spent a lot of time positioning itself as a partner to Adobe Air, but it's hard to see the evolved Qt as anything other than a competitor. Same thing for Google.
As for how this fits with all of Nokia's other products, I'm having a lot of trouble understanding how Qt will cohabit with S60 and Series 40. What exactly are developers supposed to develop for, and which user interface will the phones feature? If Nokia tries to keep all of them going, its phone software is going to look like a petit four, with layers stacked on layers stacked on layers. That makes for a nice pastry, but in a mobile phone it's a recipe for bad performance and short battery life. It's also a certain way to confuse developers.
So a lot depends on Nokia's next steps. Does Qt replace Series 40 and S60? I don't know which group within Nokia made the Trolltech deal, but I wonder if the biggest competitive battle might end up being the one inside the company, between its competing software standards.
Written by Prathik on January 29th, 2008 with no comments.
Read more articles on Air and Apollo and Windows Mobile and android and google and linux and nokia and web apps.
It's very difficult to say what's the best mobile device in a given year, because different people have different needs and desires. The ideal device for me might be repulsive to you, and vice-versa. But most of the computer publications try to make a call anyway. If you read the end-of-year reviews online, you'll probably conclude that the best mobile product of the year was the iPhone. It was cited by the
Washington Post,
Wired,
Business Week, and
Tech Republic (which strangely listed it as a business technology product, alongside Salesforce.com and LinkedIn).
Other mobile products getting mentions from major publications included the
Nokia n95,
iPod Touch,
Razr 2, and
Blackberry 8800. Amazon's Kindle was the only one that showed up on both best-of and worst-of lists. The best-ofs generally liked the wireless features and screen, while the worst-ofs disliked the closed business model and "eye-poking" industrial design.
I don't agree with any of those choices.
Since people have different needs, I think the best product of the year ought to be the one that best meets needs the needs of
a particular group of users. It should be utterly compelling to its own audience. There are several questions to ask:
How efficient is it? Since people use mobile devices on the go, it should do just what the user needs, without any confusion or unneeded features. But there can't be any critical features missing, either.
How well does it trade off size vs. power? Because it's carried on your person, where size and weight are at a premium, it should balance tiny size with reasonable battery life.
How does it look? Because it's effectively a part of your wardrobe, it must look great (or whatever the target customer thinks of as great).
By that standard, I think the best mobile device of 2007 -- in fact, one of the best mobile products of all time -- was the third generation iPod Nano.
Don't get me wrong, iPhone fans. The iPhone is a very interesting and provocative device. There are some beautiful features in the user interface, and I love the turmoil it's causing in the industry. Several years from now we may look back on it and call it the most
influential mobile device of its time. But that doesn't mean it's the best product.
To me, the iPhone is more an intriguing statement of direction than a completed product at this point. The lack of 3G is a huge compromise, and Apple obviously didn't think through the third party application thing. If you want a slow mobile browser that also plays music and videos and doubles as a somewhat awkward phone, then the iPhone is great. But for all of the cool highlights in the iPhone, I don't think it's enough to crush the phone industry in its current version. Future versions, maybe. We'll shortlist the iPhone III for product of the year in 2010.
The n95 is also a remarkable product in its own way, and I know it inspires a lot of technolust, especially in Europe. But in my opinion, it's just the latest Swiss Army Knife of the mobile world. Next year there will be another one from Nokia or Samsung or somebody else that has an even higher-resolution camera or maybe an electric toothpick or something, and people will be fawning all over that one. Like a lot of Japanese consumer electronics products, it's not a marvelous product as much as it is a marvelously ingenious bag of features.
By contrast, in third generation Nano is not just the latest model from Apple, it's an elegant culmination of the design work they've been doing for years.
The Nano doesn't look all that great in photographs. It's wider than its predecessor, which produced some criticism when it was announced (Engadget nicknamed it "fatty," which is asinine when you see it in person). In real life, the Nano's shape is compelling. It's much thinner than you'd expect from the pictures -- shockingly thin for something that has a color screen and plays videos. With its heavily rounded corners and brightly colored case, it feels a bit like a high tech chocolate wafer. You're almost tempted to take a bite out of it.
Physically, the Nano is almost all user interface -- the screen and thumbwheel take up the entire front of the device. Until we get flexible screens, the Nano is about as small as you can possibly make a device with its features. This is the endpoint, a form factor that's going to be with us for a while.
The biggest surprise to me about the Nano is the usability of video on it. When it was announced, I thought video was a throwaway feature -- who would ever want to watch video on a screen that small? But the reality is that when you're sitting down, you'll hold a Nano about 18 inches (45 cm) away from your face. At that distance, the screen is about the same apparent size as a 20-inch television (50 cm) at the other side of the living room. It's not like watching a flat panel monster screen, but it's very usable.
I'm not sure yet how much video will be used on the device, or what sorts of video, but that's a general question about mobile video rather than anything specific about the Nano. What I've observed so far is teenage girls using the Nano to watch music videos together, commenting on how cute the drummer is.
And that's just another sign that Apple made a great design for its target audience.
The new Nano doesn't have Bluetooth built into it, or Wi-Fi, or a camera, or a phone, or a hard drive. That probably accounts for why the technophiles online have been so dismissive of it (
link). But to me, it's an almost perfect balance of functionality and art. Come back in ten or twenty years and I think you'll find it in design museums, when most of today's mobile devices will be long-forgotten and mildly embarrassing.
What do you think? Do you agree with my choice? If not, what do you think was the best mobile device of 2007?
Written by Prathik on January 6th, 2008 with no comments.
Read more articles on Apple and BlackBerry and RIM and iPhone and kindle and nano and nokia.
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