Is Symbian dead? And if so, who killed it?

"We should declare victory and go home."
--Apocryphal quote attributed to George David Aiken

I hesitate to write anything about Symbian, because it's a great way to get branded a parochial American, or an Apple fanboi, or a "member of the US-protectionistic mobs braying for blood," to paraphrase a comment from a tech discussion forum in the UK this month.

But there's been a huge cloud of smoke and very little light in the recent online discussions of the changes at Symbian. Is Symbian dead? Is it stronger than ever? What's really going on? I wanted to see if I could make sense of the announcements. Besides, there are some important lessons from the Symbian experience, and I'd like to call those out.

Here's my take on what's happened: The business entity called Symbian was originally designed to prevent Microsoft from controlling the mobile OS standard, without having Symbian itself seize control over the mobile phone companies that funded it. In that task it succeeded. However, as a company run by a consortium, Symbian's governance was politicized and inefficient. This left Symbian woefully unequipped to compete with Apple and Google. A different approach was needed, and Nokia's new management has finally come to terms with that. As a result, Symbian as an organization is now defunct, and Symbian as an OS is becoming background infrastructure that has little relevance to the mobile platform wars.


To explain why I reached that conclusion, I have to start with a quick refresher on Symbian's history, for readers who haven't been following it closely...

There are two things named Symbian: Symbian the company and Symbian the OS. Some of the confusion this month was caused by people mixing up the two things. Symbian OS began as EPOC, the operating system used in Psion's handheld devices. EPOC was spun out of Psion in 1998 as a separate company called Symbian, co-owned by Psion and most of the leading mobile phone companies of the day, led by Nokia. The idea was that all of them would use the renamed Symbian OS in their smartphones, enabling them to put up a unified front against Microsoft, which they feared would rule the smartphone market.

Over time Nokia came to be the dominant manufacturer of Symbian OS phones outside of Japan, largely (in my opinion) because the Symbian phones made by other mobile phone companies didn't sell well. Eventually the other mobile phone companies no longer wanted to pay for a joint venture that was mostly just supplying software to Nokia. Linux was gaining momentum as a free, open source mobile OS, so the Symbian partners, led by Nokia, decided in 2008 to convert Symbian OS into an open source project. Nokia hired most of the Symbian engineers, and gave away their code through the foundation.

Symbian the company was replaced by the Symbian Foundation, a nonprofit tasked with managing the open source process and encouraging other companies to sign up to use the software. The idea was that Nokia, the other Symbian licensees, and a growing hoard of academics and developers would work on various parts of the OS, contributing back their modified code to the shared base. The move to open source kept some level of engagement from several other mobile phone companies, most notably Samsung and SonyEricsson.

But both companies continued to have poor sales for their Symbian phones, and this fall they announced that they had no further plans to use the OS. That left DoCoMo in Japan as the only other major user of Symbian. Nokia was stuck with an open source foundation that mostly just supplied its own software back to it. That wasn't going to be viable. So earlier this month, Nokia and Symbian announced three significant changes:

--The Symbian Foundation is being dramatically scaled back to "a legal entity responsible for licensing software and other intellectual property, such as the Symbian trademark." (link). In other words, it's just a shell. Symbian is now truly Nokia's OS. Nokia will plan, develop, and manage the Symbian code base, and distribute it directly to anyone who still wants it (presumably DoCoMo). You can read a biting commentary on the changes here.

--At the same time, Nokia reaffirmed an announcement it made in October that it is focusing all of its application development support on the Qt software layer that it purchased several years ago (link). Qt will now apparently be Nokia's one and only application layer, deployed on both Symbian and the upcoming MeeGo OS being codeveloped with Intel (link).

--The EU is putting 11 million Euros into a new organization, called Symbeose (which stands for "Symbian – the Embedded Operating System for Europe"), which will help fund the development of advanced Symbian OS features, including asymmetric multiprocessing, dev tools, memory management, image processing, video acceleration, speech to text, mobile payment, multimedia formats, and embedded systems beyond mobile. There are two semi-conflicting explanations of what Symbeose is all about. Some people say it's aimed at turning Symbian into an embedded OS that can run in all sorts of devices (why Europe needs that instead of Linux is unclear to me, but you can hear some discussion of the wrongheaded North American mobile paradigm here). Others say the intent is to resurrect Symbian OS as a smartphone OS used by companies other than Nokia. In a presentation, Symbian Foundation said the investment is intended to "combat mobile device and service homogeneity exemplified by Android and iOS" (link). Apparently taxpayer support is needed because Nokia isn't willing to pay for some infrastructure needed by other phone companies (link). A Symbian Foundation employee explained: "I would say that the main focus of the developments will be advancing existing, as well as building new tools and services relevant for smartphone manufacturing at the beginning of the manufacturing process. We want to make it easier for any manufacturer to take the Symbian codebase and develop new smartphones" (link).


What it means

Symbian isn't dead. It's just irrelevant. After the announcement, Nokia professed its strong support for Symbian OS (link). Nokia has no choice but to support the OS because it's built into the whole middle to top end of the Nokia product line. Given all of the legacy Nokia code written in Symbian OS, the Symbian-based phones still in development, and all of the Nokia development teams who are used to working in Symbian, it would probably take years to flush all of the Symbian code out of Nokia's products even if it wanted to. Symbian at Nokia is kind of like Cobol at IBM -- you're going to go on tasting that particular meal for a long time to come.

But the decision to focus on Qt for applications means that Symbian OS is effectively no longer an app development platform. It's embedded software; the background plumbing that powers Nokia's smartphones (and maybe other embedded systems, if the EU has its way). There's nothing wrong with that, but it makes Symbian irrelevant to most of the folks who talk about mobile technologies online. We don't spend much time online debating which OS kernel a device should use, and that's now the world Symbian lives in. The real competition for developer and smartphone user loyalty in most of the world is now Qt vs. iOS, Android, and RIM. Plus that Windows thing.


What it means for Nokia: Hope. Nokia's app recruitment efforts have been hamstrung for years by what I think was an incoherent software platform story. What should developers write their software on? Symbian native, S60, Silverlight, Qt, Adobe Air, Java...at one time or another Nokia romanced just about every mobile platform on the market. Nokia said that was a strength, but actually it was a sign of indecision and internal conflict. Developers crave predictability; they want to know that the platform they choose today will still be supported five years from now. By flitting from platform to platform like a butterfly, Nokia sent the unintentional signal that developing for it was dangerous.

Many developers did support Nokia anyway, especially in places where the Nokia brand and market share were so dominant that the decision was a no-brainer. But I think their loyalty did a disservice to Nokia in some ways, because it blinded the company to the shortcomings in its developer proposition. When Nokia had trouble recruiting developers in places like Silicon Valley, it seemed to think they were just biased against it. Time and again, I attended Nokia developer events in California where Nokia concentrated on telling people how big its installed base was, and showing off its latest hero device (N97, anyone?). I can see Nokia's logic -- after all, developers in Europe seemed happy. But the reality was that developers in Europe had given it the benefit of the doubt, despite its poor overall proposition.

So the decision to focus on Qt (pronounced "cute," get used to it) is a positive one, in my opinion. This is one of those cases where making any decision is better than the status quo. Qt isn't perfect, but if all of Nokia aligns behind it, any problems in it can be ironed out.

Unfortunately for Nokia, this is just the beginning of the changes it needs to make, rather than the end. Nokia's Qt development tools still reportedly need work (link). And app developers don't just need a coherent technical story, they also need a coherent business story. How do they make money? Although Nokia sells a huge number of Symbian-based smartphones, most of their users seem blissfully unaware that they can add applications. That's why Nokia has a much smaller base of applications than iPhone, even though its customer base is far larger.

To attract more developers, Nokia will need to do a lot of marketing, both in advertising and on the device, to make sure Qt users know they can get apps, and are stimulated to try them out. Nokia has the resources to do this, but once again it'll need consistent and well coordinated execution to make it happen, something that the company has failed to deliver in the past. (For example, spamming people with SMS messages telling them to try other features is probably not the right approach (link).)

To give you an idea of how much ground Nokia needs to make up, Apple iOS has 60 million users and 225,000 applications, a ratio of about 3.75 applications per thousand users. Android is close behind, with 3.5 apps per thousand users. In contrast, Symbian has 390 million users and 7,000 native apps, a ratio of about .02 apps per thousand users. (link). Yes, I know, there are additional Nokia apps written in Java, but that kind of proves the point that Symbian is plumbing rather than a platform.

All of these changes need to be carried out against a backdrop of cost cutting, as Nokia brings its expenses in line with its revenues. One of these days when I get the time I'll write more about Nokia's overall situation, but for now suffice it to say that Nokia is working off the after-effects of several years of growing expenses while revenue was stagnant. Nokia's circumstances aren't quite as bad as the California state budget (if you are in Europe, think Greece), but it's ugly enough to distract from all of the other things the company needs to fix.


What it means for developers: Wait. First, the bad news: The switch to Qt means that current Symbian OS developers who aren't already using Qt will need to rewrite their applications. This is the latest in a series of rewrites that Nokia and Symbian have forced on developers over the years. If they had more developers it probably would be causing a big ruckus right now. The fact that you don't hear a lot of screaming speaks volumes.

The good news is that Nokia may be getting its act together for developers at last. But if I were working on a mobile application today...wait a minute, I am working on a mobile application today. So here's what I'm doing about Nokia: I'm waiting. If Nokia creates a great business proposition for developers and sticks to it, our team would be delighted to support Qt aggressively. Who wouldn't want to sell to a base of 400 million users? But given Nokia's history of whipsawing its developers, we won't take anything for granted. In particular, we want to see if Qt is actually the exclusive development platform for MeeGo, rather than just a secondary option. You've got to show us the consistency, Nokia.


Oh, and ignore Symbeose. I don't know exactly how the Symbeose initiative got started, but to me it looks like the Symbian Foundation lobbied for it for a long time, prior to the recent changes in the Foundation. For the old Foundation, Symbeose made sense, because it was a clever way for a nonprofit to get some OS development done in areas that Nokia didn't care about. But with the Foundation mostly gone, Nokia has no incentive to turn Symbian into a general embedded OS, and in fact it says MeeGo is its OS for use in non-phones. In that situation, I can't picture a lot of other companies committing to build Symbian OS into their products.


Lessons from the Symbian Foundation's demise

I'm seeing a lot of interesting rationalization online about Symbian's fate. For example, Tim Ocock, a former Symbian employee, wrote a fantastic post (link) in which he argues that Symbian was very successful as an OS for phones with PDA features, but was never designed for running browsers and lots of applications. That's a pretty shocking statement, considering how many times I heard Symbian advocates boast about the sophistication of their modern, general purpose OS compared to clunky old PDA-centric Palm OS. Remember, this is a company that until very recently was bragging about its superior implementation of symmetric multiprocessing (link), hardly something you need for a PDA.

But I think Tim is dead-on in most of his analysis. He did a great job of detailing the technical and attitudinal flaws within Symbian itself, so I won't bother repeating them here. Instead, I want to talk about the flaws in Symbian's governance.

Did Symbian fail? The companies that founded Symbian had two goals in mind: to prevent Microsoft from dominating the market for smartphone software, and to prevent Symbian itself from becoming a power that could dictate to the phone companies that funded it. As a result, Symbian's governance structure was designed with a complex system of checks and balances that wouldn't apply to a normal company. To make major decisions, Symbian had to negotiate a consensus among its owners the mobile phone companies, who understood little about the management of a mobile platform and were suspicious of each other and of Symbian itself.

This bureaucratic, highly politicized oversight process repeatedly forced Symbian into blind alleys, and prevented it from doing things that a "normal" OS company would take for granted. When Symbian was founded, there was talk of an eventual IPO. The prospect of an IPO is an important recruitment tool -- it lets you use stock to hire ambitious engineers and managers. But the idea was eventually shot down by the owners; it would have made Symbian too independent.

Crippled by design. Once the threat from Microsoft receded, the owners' second goal for Symbian -- preventing it from competing with them -- seemed to dominate their treatment of Symbian. I'm not saying there was some central evil plan to hamstring Symbian; there wasn't. But everything the company planned to do had to be approved by the handset companies, and on a case by case basis they vetoed the things that sounded threatening to them. Over time, this forced Symbian away from initiatives and features that would cause users and developers to be loyal to the OS rather than the handset.

So Symbian didn't create an app store, and Symbian's developer relations were very confused because Nokia wanted to do a lot of that itself. But the most egregious example was user interface, which Symbian worked on from time to time, but was eventually forced out of by its owners. When I was at Palm, the Symbian project I feared most was "Quartz," the effort to create an icon-driven touchscreen UI for Symbian. Quartz looked very nice, and if it had survived Symbian would have had a dandy iPhone competitor on the market before the iPhone launched. But politics between Symbian's owners forced it completely out of the UI business, and Quartz was spun out into a separate company called UIQ, which went bankrupt in 2009.

You can get more details on the whole sad Quartz saga here.


Quartz circa 2001

An OS without a single consistent user interface is a nightmare for software developers, because they can't write apps that run across the installed base of devices.

Eventually, in the face of all the restrictions, the most ambitious, nonconformist people at Symbian -- the ones who drive innovation in any organization -- seemed to drift away in frustration or were forced out when they irritated the owners. Symbian itself retreated into focusing on technological esoterica like symmetric multiprocessing -- things that didn't really differentiate the platform to users, but that the licensees wouldn't object to.

From one perspective I guess you can say Symbian was a complete success, because it fulfilled the two negatives that its founders wanted: Microsoft didn't dominate mobile software, and Symbian itself didn't exercise any control over its founders.

However, the cumulative effect of the handset companies pursuing their short-term interest was that Symbian was utterly unready to respond when Apple and Google entered the market. I don't think either Nokia or Symbian really understood how the game had changed. Apple designs phones as integrated systems, with the software and hardware tightly coordinated. Nokia could never achieve that level of coordination with an operating system managed through standards committees.

And as for Android, Nokia apparently thought that open sourcing Symbian would create a level playing field with Google's free OS. But I think the structure of the Symbian Foundation made that impossible.

The fatal flaw of the Symbian Foundation. Although Android is a free product, it's supported by a for-profit corporation that has massive resources. The attraction of Android to phone companies isn't just its price, but its safety -- Google stands behind it with marketing and technical support.

In contrast, Symbian Foundation was designed as a rigorously noncommercial institution banned from any business activity. People at the Foundation told me Nokia was adamant about enforcing the ban on commercial activity because it was afraid the tax authorities might rule that the foundation wasn't a nonprofit, endangering the tax credit that Nokia got for donating its Symbian code base.

Most open source companies give away their software in order to make money from some other mechanism -- consulting, or support, or a for-fee version of the same code. Symbian Foundation was banned from making money on any of these activities, meaning it could never become financially self-supporting.

Forget about marketing support; Symbian couldn't even offer enhanced technical support to licensees who were begging to pay for it. That was especially crippling because Symbian OS is notoriously complex and difficult to program (link).

Consider this quote from Tim Ocock's article:

"The difficulty of writing good Symbian code was hugely beneficial to Symbian as a business in the early days. For many years, 80% of Symbian's revenues were earned through consulting for licensees....Symbian’s licensees...each had their own proprietary telephony chipsets that needed to be integrated and their own customisations to the platform in mind....Despite talk of Symbian enabling differentiation, the reality was licensees' budgets were squandered on hardware porting and making the core platform fit for purpose."

Picture yourself as a manager at a handset company, choosing an OS for your smartphone. The Symbian option has no advertising support, requires customization, is hard to program, has few third party consultants to support it, and the company licensing it won't help you do the programming. Meanwhile, Google Android is more modern, is based on Java and Linux so it's easy to find programmers, has lots of support, and has user-friendly features like an app store. Which one seems the safer bet?

How could the Symbian Foundation ever succeed in that situation?

Although people advocating for a "European" mobile OS often complain that Android had unfair financial advantages, the fact is that Symbian was ripe for the picking, a situation that was almost entirely self-inflicted.

The lesson for other tech companies: Open source is not magic pixie dust that you can sprinkle on a struggling product to turn it into a winner. Open source is a tactic, not a business strategy. It has to be paired with a business plan that says how you'll make money and drive innovation.


This is the end, my friend, of our elaborate plans

Like an army refighting the last war, Symbian was designed to defeat Windows Mobile, but never came to terms with its new adversaries Apple and Google. There's no shame in that for most of the folks who worked at Symbian; they did the best they could to navigate the politics of Nokia and all the other Symbian licensees. But radical change was necessary. I hope Nokia's Qt strategy will be successful. And I'm sure that Symbian code will continue to serve for years as the underlying technology for millions of Nokia smartphones. But except in the dreams of a few EU officials, Symbian OS is now just legacy plumbing.

It's time to move on.

I'm reading: Is Symbian dead? And if so, who killed it?

Google shoots itself in the foot in mobile

I wish I knew the inside story on Google's recent confrontation with the Chinese government. At first Google's announcement looked like a principled, well thought-out stand in a long behind-the-scenes dispute (link). But as more details have emerged, it has started to look as if Google didn't think through the consequences outside of its core search business. In the mobile market, those consequences could be significant. Here's why...

Google's Android OS has been gaining enormous support among mobile operators and handset vendors because it was viewed as the most feasible alternative to total domination by Apple. All of the other OS options had nasty baggage -- Microsoft was viewed as both controlling and unable to create demand, Symbian was seen as Nokia's pet, and the other flavors of Linux were all below critical mass.

In contrast, Google seemed technically competent, vendor-neutral, and capable of attracting users. (By the way, it says something about Apple's growing power in the mobile industry that a company as controlling as Google was seen as the safe partner; it's kind of like cozying up to a kodiak bear to escape a tiger.)

Google's dispute in China damages its image as a safe partner. A phone announcement in China involving Motorola, Samsung, and China Unicom has now been delayed because of the dispute, and it's not clear when it will be rescheduled. The public story on the delay is that Google demanded it (link), but I'm not sure I believe that. China Unicom is basically owned by the Chinese government, and I wouldn't be surprised if the delay was forced by them as a way to punish Google.

Either way, picture how this must feel to Motorola and Samsung. They have nothing to do with the dispute, but now they're trapped between Google and the Chinese government. That wouldn't be a big deal if we were talking about, say, the Cambodian phone market (no offense, Cambodia), but Samsung and Motorola both view China as a critical growth market. They can't afford to be pushed out of it.

Even aside from the political fears, real economic damage has already been done. Google's actions have delayed the imminent release of some major licensees' devices. Unless you have worked in a handset company, it's hard to understand how utterly unacceptable that is to them. Product launches are planned many months in advance, and are coordinated down to the day. Samsung and Motorola both have phone inventory waiting to be sold. There's cash tied up in that inventory, salespeople can't make their quotas, advertising was probably planned that now has to be rescheduled at additional cost, and so on. Plus, both companies now lose ground to competitors selling other devices. Most phones have a short lifetime anyway, so sales lost now probably can't be made up later. If you were a Motorola employee and you caused that sort of disruption, you'd probably get fired. But Motorola can't fire its OS supplier.

At least not immediately.

Because of problems like this, Google is now talking hopefully about retaining its business unit in China even if it closes down its search engine there (link). That raises the question of why Google threatened to completely pull out of China in the first place. If I were an official in the Chinese government, I'd view this flip-flop as a sign of vulnerability, and would be tempted to systematically go after targets like Android in an effort to put more pressure on Google. But for the moment the government appears to be moving cautiously, perhaps to avoid creating sympathy for Google.

Maybe in a week Google and the Chinese government will have come up with a neat, face-saving resolution to the whole problem. But even in that best-case scenario, Google's image as a supplier to the mobile industry has been damaged. The company has shown that its search business is more important to it (and more top-of-mind) than its mobile OS. Mobile operators outside of China won't care about this, but the handset vendors will. Some of them are based in China, and almost all manufacture there and sell into that market. Who's to say that Google won't end up in another dispute in China in another year? Add in Google's decision to start making its own phones in competition with licensees, and it now looks like a much less reliable OS supplier than it was six months ago.

To a Chinese phone company, relying on Android must now feel extremely uncomfortable. I bet Samsung went ballistic in private; it is completely intolerant of a supplier who's interested in anything other than making Samsung rich. I'd expect Samsung to put more emphasis on its other OS options in the future. And somewhere at Motorola, a harried executive is probably rolling his or her eyes and starting work on evaluating alternative smartphone operating systems, yet again.

The question is what alternative they'd choose. There's speculation that the LiMO alliance may be strengthened (link), and I could picture Chinese officials eventually trying to create a home-grown OS standard, just as they did in 3G (link). But the most straightforward alternative is Symbian, and I suspect it may get a quiet second look in many places -- although for the handset companies, that would feel like fleeing a tiger and a bear in order to hug an anaconda.

I'm reading: Google shoots itself in the foot in mobile

The OS is always greener...

In a report from a developer meeting, Nokia officials said they're moving to Maemo Linux as the OS for their high-end smartphones. That resulted in an entertaining little obituary in the Register by Andrew Orlowski (link). But then later in the day Nokia clarified that "we remain firmly committed to Symbian as our smartphone platform of choice" (link). That in turn led to a lively online debate about what Nokia actually said, and the challenges that Finnish people face when speaking English (check the comments here).

It's just one more chapter in the long and exquisitely awkward saga of Nokia and Symbian. From the outside I can't tell exactly what's going on at Nokia, and it's possible that Nokia itself doesn't know. It's a very large company, and various groups there can have conflicting agendas.

But I can't believe that there would be all of these repeated reports, leaks, and artfully-worded partial denials unless Nokia were de-emphasizing Symbian in the long run. The most prominent theory, which I believe based on things I hear through back channels, is that Nokia does indeed intend to move to Maemo at the high end. And, as we all know, in computing whatever's at the high end eventually ends up in the mainstream.

I'm sure Nokia has valid technical reasons for moving to another OS. Nokia has said that there are some things it wants to do with its smartphones that Symbian OS can't support. But still the change worries me. Nokia's biggest problem in the smartphone market isn't the OS it uses, it's the user experience and services layer in its smartphones. Moving to a new OS does almost nothing to fix that. It does force a lot of engineers to work on writing a lot of low-level infrastructure code that won't create visible value for users. It also forces Nokia to maintain two separate code bases, which will chew up even more engineers.

All of that investment could have gone into crafting some great solutions, the things that are the only way to pull customers away from Apple and RIM. At a minimum, it's a terrible shame that Nokia spent so much time and money on an OS that couldn't take it into the future.

(By the way, this focus on the OS doesn't apply only to Nokia. I hear a lot of buzz from operators and handset companies who believe that if they just pick the right OS they'll automatically end up with great smartphones. Android is the latest white knight for most of them, but of course Nokia's not going to depend on a technology from Google.)

There's an old joke in the tech industry about rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. I don't think that applies to Nokia because they haven't hit an iceberg by any means. But I do have a mental picture of a sweet old lady who spends all her time every day cleaning the bathroom while the food is spoiling in the refrigerator.

I'm reading: The OS is always greener...

Symbian: Evolving toward open

It's fascinating to watch the evolution as Symbian remakes itself from a traditional OS company into an open-source foundation. They've made enormous organizational changes (most of the management team is new), but the biggest change of all seems to be in mindset. A nonprofit foundation has a very different set of motivations and priorities than an OS corporation does. I get the feeling that the Symbian folks are still figuring out what that means. It's an interesting case study, but also a good example for companies looking to work with open source.

Symbian recently held a dinner with developers and bloggers in Silicon Valley, and I got to see some of those differences in action.

The first difference was the dinner itself. About six months ago, Symbian and Nokia held a conference and blogger dinner in San Francisco (link). It was interesting but pretty standard -- a day of presentations, followed by dinner at a large, long table at which Symbian and Nokia employees talked to us about what they're doing and how excited they are. The emphasis was on them informing us.

The recent dinner was structured very differently. The attendees were mostly developers rather than bloggers, and we were seated at smaller, circular tables that made conversation easier. They talked about their plans at the start, but most of the evening was devoted to asking our opinions, and they had a note-taker at each table. This had the effect of not just collecting feedback from us, but forcing us to notice that they were listening. That's important to any company, but it is critical to a nonprofit foundation that relies on others to do its OS programming. And it's essential for a company like Symbian, which has been ignored by most Silicon Valley developers.

So that's the first lesson about open source. The task of marketing is no longer to convince people how smart you are, it's to convince people how wonderful you are to work with. Instead of you as a performer and developers as the audience, the situation is flipped -- the developers are the center of attention and you're their most ardent fan.

It's an interesting contrast to Apple's relationship with developers, isn't it? It'll be fun to see how this evolves over time.

Here are my notes on the subjects Symbian discussed with us, along with some comments from me:


It takes time

Symbian said its goal is to have a lot of developers on the platform and making money, but that can't be achieved in three months. "In three years time," is what I wrote in my notes. That is simultaneously very honest and a little scary. It's honest because a foundation with its limited resources, working through phone companies with 24 month release cycles, simply can't make anything happen quickly. It's scary because competitors like Apple and RIM have so much momentum, and can act quickly. Still, in the current overused catchphrase of sports broadcasting, is what it is. An open-source company, based on trust, simply cannot afford to risk that trust by hyping or overpromising.

Speaking of Apple and RIM, Symbian made clear that it considers its adversary to be single-company ecosystems like Apple, RIM, and Microsoft. I didn't think to ask if Nokia's Ovi fits in that category, but that probably wouldn't have been a polite question anyway. Symbian also took some swipes at Google, citing the "lock in" deals they have supposedly made with some operators.

You get the feeling that Symbian is intensely annoyed by Google. It's one thing for a mobile phone newcomer like Apple to create a successful device; it's quite another for an Internet company to step into the OS business and take away Motorola as a Symbian licensee. I think one of Symbian's arguments against Android is going to be that Symbian is more properly and thoroughly open.

The question is whether anyone cares about that. Although the details of open source governance are intensely important to the community of free software advocates, I think that for most developers and handset companies the only "open" that they care about translates as, "open to me making a lot of money without someone else getting in the way." Thus the success of the Apple Store, even though Apple is one of the most proprietary companies in computing. Symbian's measure of success with developers will be whether it can help them get rich -- and I think the company knows that.


Licensees and devices

One step in helping developers make money is to get more devices with Symbian OS on them. Symbian said phones are coming from Chinese network equipment conglomerates Huawei and ZTE. They also said non- phone devices are in the works.

Licensees will be especially important if Nokia, as rumored, creates a line of phones based on its Maemo Linux platform. Lately some industry people I trust have talked about those phones as a sure thing rather than speculation, and analyst Richard Windsor is predicting big challenges for Symbian as a result:

"It seems that the clock is ticking for Symbian as technological limitations could lead to it being replaced in some high-end devices.... I suspect that the reality is that Symbian is not good enough for some of the functionality Nokia has planned over the medium term leaving Nokia with no choice but to move on."
Source: Richard Windsor, Industry Specialist, Nomura Securities

David Wood at Symbian responded that people should view Maemo as just Nokia's insurance in case something goes wrong with Symbian (link). But the point remains that Nokia is Symbian's main backer today. That is a strength, but also a big vulnerability. If Symbian wants developers to invest in it, I think it needs to demonstrate the ability to attract a more diverse set of strong supporters.


App Store envy

Another way to help developers is to, well, help them directly. Symbian said it's planning something tentatively called "Symbian Arena," in which it will select 100 Symbian applications to be featured in the application stores on Symbian phones. Symbian will promote the applications and perform other functions equivalent to a book publisher, including possibly giving the app author an advance on royalties.

The first five applications will be chosen by July, and featured on at least three Symbian smartphones (the Nokia N97, and phones from Samsung and Sony Ericsson).

The most interesting aspect of the program is that Symbian said its goal is to take no cut at all from app revenue for its services. Obviously that means the program can't scale to thousands of applications -- Symbian can't afford it. They said they'd like to evolve it into a much broader program in which they would provide publishing services for thousands of apps at cost. My guess is they could push the revenue cut down to well under 10% in that case, compared to the 30% Apple takes today.

It isn't clear to me if Symbian will produce the applications store itself, or work through others, or both. If it works through other stores, those stores might take a revenue cut of their own. But still, from a developer point of view it's nice to see an OS vendor trying to lower the cost of business for creating apps.

It's been interesting to see how many of the Palm Pre reviews this week have said that the iPhone application base is the main reason to prefer an iPhone over a Pre. I'm not sure how much purchase influence apps actually have -- at Palm, we had ten times the applications of Pocket PC, but they didn't seem to do anything for our sales. (On the other hand, Palm never had the wisdom and courage to advertise its apps base the way Apple has.)

--"Compared to the iPhone, the real missing pieces are those thousands of applications available on the App Store." Wired
--"Developer courting still seems like an area where Palm needs work. They've got a great OS to work with, but they have yet to really extend a hand to a wide selection of developers or help explain how working in webOS will be beneficial to their business. The platform is nothing without the support of creative and active partners." Engadget
--"The Pre's biggest disadvantage is its app store, the App Catalog. At launch, it has only about a dozen apps, compared with over 40,000 for the iPhone, and thousands each for the G1 and the modern BlackBerry models....It is thoughtfully designed, works well and could give the iPhone and BlackBerry strong competition -- but only if it fixes its app store and can attract third-party developers." Walt Mossberg

Anyway, if applications are the new competitive frontier between smart phones, mobile OS vendors should be competing to see who can do the most to improve life for developers. This is another area where Symbian's motives, as a foundation, differ from a traditional OS company. If you're trying to make money from an OS, harvesting some revenue from developers make sense. But as a nonprofit foundation, draining the revenue streams from your competitors is one of your best competitive weapons. Symbian has little reason to try to make a profit from developers, and a lot of reasons not to.


Driving Web standards

That idea came up again when we talked about web applications for mobile. As I've said before, I think the most valuable thing that could happen for mobile developers would be the creation of a universal runtime layer for mobile web apps -- software that would let them write an app once, host it online, and run it unmodified on any mobile OS. No commercial OS companies want to support that because it would commoditize their businesses and drain their revenues. But if Symbian's primary weapon is to remove revenue from other OS companies, a universal Web runtime might be the best way to do it. I asked them about this, and they said they're planning to use web standards in the OS "like Pre," and said they're interested in supporting universal web runtimes.

I'm intensely interested in seeing how the runtime situation develops. I think Symbian and Google are the only major mobile players with an interest in making it work, and Google so far hasn't been an effective leader in that space. I think Symbian might be able to pull it off, and become a major player in the rise of the metaplatform. But it'll take an active effort by them, such as choosing a runtime, building it into every copy Symbian OS, and making it available for other platforms. Passive endorsement of something is not enough to make a difference.


Other tidbits

Symbian said it's going to "radically simplify" the Symbian Signed app certification program, which may be very welcome news to developers, depending on the details. Many developers today complain bitterly about the cost and inconvenience of the signing program, and unless it's fixed it'll outweigh any of the benefits from Symbian Arena.

The QT software layer that Nokia bought as part of its Trolltech acquisition will be built into Symbian OS in the second half of 2010. I had been wondering if it would be an option or a standard part of the OS; apparently it'll be a standard.

Symbian plans to bring its developer conference to San Francisco in 2010, after which it will rotate to various locations around the world. This is part of an effort to increase Symbian's visibility in the US market. The company is creating a large office here, including two members of its exec staff. That makes sense for recruiting web developers, but it will be hard for the company to have a big impact in the US unless it gets a licensee who can market effectively here. In that vein, it must have been frustrating for everyone involved when Nokia announced the shipment of the N97 and it came in a distant third in coverage in the US (after the Palm Pre and the iPhone rumors).


What it all means

There are a lot of things that could kill the Symbian experiment:
--Nokia could decommit from the OS (or just waver long enough that developers lose faith).
--Symbian licensees could fail to produce interesting devices that keep pace with Apples, RIMs, and Palms of the world.
--Android could eat up all the attention of open source developers, leaving Symbian to wither technologically.
--The market might evolve faster than a foundation yoked to handset companies can adjust.

But still the Symbian foundation is worth watching. It has a different set of goals than every other mobile OS company out there, goals that potentially can align more closely with the interests of third party developers. It's still up to Symbian to deliver on that potential, but the company has an opportunity to challenge the mobile market in ways that it couldn't as a traditional company.

-----

Prof. Joel West of San Jose State was also at the Symbian meeting and posted some interesting comments about it. You can read them here.

Full disclosure: My employer, Rubicon Consulting, did a consulting project for Symbian a year ago. None of the analysis conducted in that project was used in this post. We currently have no ongoing, or planned, business relationship with Symbian.

I'm reading: Symbian: Evolving toward open

The ugliest logo ever, but maybe it makes sense

Logo creation is a thankless task. Almost all of the interesting shapes and doodles were trademarked years ago. Unless you have hundreds of thousands of dollars to spend on artists and lawyers, and a lot of time, you usually settle on using your company name with no artwork at all.

Or you can take the approach adopted by the newly-formed Symbian Foundation, keeper of the Symbian OS:



Yes, that's really the new Symbian logo. I guarantee no one's going to sue them for it, unless it's the producers of the movie Juno:



I've already gone through a couple of stages of reaction to the logo. The first was horror. Not only is the font something out of 1974, but the color is one of the least popular in the world (step outside and count how many yellow cars you can see, or click here or here). I know I've seen uglier logos in the past, but I can't remember where, probably because I tried to block out the memory.

The discussion on All About Symbian has been amusing (link).

Once I got over my reaction, I reminded myself that the folks at Symbian are smart and very deliberate. Let's assume they have a good reason for choosing this logo. What would it be, and what would it tell us about the company and its business strategy?

The new Symbian is an open source software project. They need to appeal to open source developers, many of whom have a reflexive hatred toward slick and calculated marketing. After all, these are the sort of folks who, when allowed to choose their own logos, spontaneously chose a fat, stoned-looking penguin and a drunken ox:



The GNU Gnu Head and Tux the Linux penguin (link)
Tux drawn by lewing@isc.tamu.edu. Gnu head reproduced under the copyleft license (link).

To the open source community, Symbian has historically been kind of an antichrist -- controlled by some of the biggest tech firms in the world, bureaucratic, closed, and incredibly complex. If you're going to win over the open source crowd, you have to overcompensate by being excessively informal, friendly and "childlike." (That's Symbian's word for it, not mine.)

Here's how Symbian explains the logo (link):

It is a brand that’s human and playful and friendly, where you feel the human hand. A brand that enables you to discover unlimited creative possibilities, that wants to share and talk A brand that’s fun, that isn’t fixed, but free to constantly evolve. A brand that’s owned by all the people that create and build with Symbian. A brand that celebrates new ideas and creativity in all forms. A brand that’s truly alive and refreshingly different, because it is! A brand that’s human to the core and that underneath beats a human heart.

In other words, the slick and calculated marketing approach is to give the company the most artless logo imaginable. And from that perspective, I think they succeeded.

I am wondering, though, what they'll do when it's time to use the logo for something other than just decorating a website. OS logos are generally used as compatibility marks. In that role they need to be displayed on screen, and preferably printed on the back of the phone, to let the user know that he or she can run Symbian applications on the device.

Picture a meeting where the folks at Symbian try to convince a product manager at Nokia or Samsung or SonyEricsson that they should print that logo on the backs of their phones, or that it should be displayed prominently on the screen. I don't think it'll go over very well. And even if they did agree to include the logo, the tiny details in the lettering won't show up well when reduced in size. The logo just isn't designed to travel.

So Symbian app developers should ask how they'll be able to market their applications when Symbian OS users don't even know what their OS is. Symbian has never had a good answer to that, and I think the new logo doesn't move them any closer to solving that problem.

Maybe the assumption is that all Symbian phones will have application stores built in, so developers won't need to communicate compatibility. Maybe, but that will still put a big marketing burden on an application developer to explain model by model which phones their apps work on.

The bottom line is that any logo artless enough to please the open source community would be problematic as a marketing tool. As is often the case in marketing, you can't please all your audiences, so you can either be universally bland or you can optimize for one audience. I think the folks at Symbian decided that open source street cred is the thing they need most.

And maybe they're right.

I'm reading: The ugliest logo ever, but maybe it makes sense

Nokia: Running in molasses

Every time I think about Nokia and Symbian, I can't help picturing a man knee-deep in molasses, running as fast as he can. He's working up a sweat, thrashing and stumbling forward, and proudly points out that for someone knee-deep in molasses he's making really good time.

That thought came to me several times during a briefing day that Nokia and the new Symbian Foundation held recently in San Francisco. A recurring theme was a deeply earnest discussion of how big and complex their business is, and how proud they are that despite the complexity they can make forward progress. For example:

Charles Davies, CTO of the new foundation, pointed out to us that Symbian OS has about 450,000 source files. That's right, half a million files. They're organized into 85 "packages," all of which have been charted out in a diagram that will be posted soon on the foundation's website. Davies was proud that the diagram is in SVG format, so you can zoom in on it and see that "this is an architecture that's not just a plateful of spaghetti."

The diagram looks a bit like a plateful of very colorful spaghetti (although in fairness to Charles, that's true of every OS architecture diagram I've ever seen). Anyway, the big takeaway was how huge the OS is.

Davies talked about the substantial challenges involved in open sourcing a code base that large. He said it will take up to another two years before all of the code is released under the Eclipse license. In the meantime, a majority of the code on launch day of the foundation will be in a more restrictive license that requires registration and a payment of $1,500 for access. There's also a small amount of third party copyrighted code within Symbian, and the foundation is trying to either get the rights to that code, or figure a way to make it available in binary format.

Those are all typical problems when a project is moving to open source, and the upshot of them is that Symbian won't be able to get the full benefits of its move to open source until quite a while after the foundation is launched. What slows the process down is the amount of code that Symbian and Nokia have to move. I believe that Symbian OS is probably the largest software project ever taken from closed to open source. If you've ever dealt with moving code to open source, you'll know how staggeringly complex the legal reviews are. What Nokia and Symbian are doing is heroic, scary, and incredibly tedious. It's like, well, running in molasses.

Lee Williams, Nokia's software platform SVP who is moving over to become head of the Symbian foundation, picked up on the theme of massiveness. He said the OS is on 200 million devices, with 200 device types shipped and another 100 in development. With support for five different baseband modems, seven different processor architectures, symmetric multiprocessing, and a broad set of displays, "your options are dramatic and huge."

This sort of infrastructure is needed, he said, because IT, telecom, and the Internet "have merged almost completely.... It's the perfect storm of convergence. There's almost nothing it can't eat or it won't use." He compared its importance to the creation of movable type, color palettes, and the Renaissance.

He noted that some people think the Symbian Foundation is a response to Android and other competitive moves, but said the company can't move that fast, and actually the change was in the works long before Google announced its software.

At dinner, I had a chance to chat with one of the Nokia managers. He was kind enough to let me play around with a pre-release N97 (more on that below), and the discussion gravitated to the iPhone. He told me how excited he is by the many new products Nokia has in the labs but can't talk about yet, and expressed some frustration that people don't understand why it takes time for Nokia to respond to changes in the market. He described Nokia as a giant ship. "It takes a long time to turn it, but when we do..." he said ominously, and then reminded me that Netscape once had a lead over Microsoft before it was crushed.

The problem with talking to the folks from Nokia is that you're never sure what they believe vs. what's the official story they're trying to put out in the market. They're disciplined enough that they can stay on message quite well, and in most conversations they focus on talking about what they're doing rather than asking for feedback or getting into a two-way conversation.

So I'll assume that Nokia was being serious. In that case, let's look at some financials from 1997 (Netscape vs. Microsoft) and 2007 (Apple vs. Nokia):


All figures in millions of dollars.

Don't worry too much about revenue and net income; those are usually tied up by the ongoing operations of each company. The line I want you to focus on is cash. That is your ammunition -- the extra resource available to fund a big marketing campaign, or a new product development program, or an acquisition of an innovative new technology. Microsoft had 46 times more cash than Netscape in 1997, and it wasn't seriously threatened in any of its other core businesses. It could, and did, spend Netscape into the ground.

Apple has about the same cash hoard as Nokia. Much more importantly, Apple can focus that cash on a narrower battlefront. Its situation relative to Windows is relatively safe. Although Microsoft can never be ignored, it is innovating so slowly that Apple can take some profit from its PC business to fund other things. The music player business is also stable; although it's not growing like it used to, no one has come close to matching the integration of the iPod and iTunes. So Apple is free to spend huge wads of cash to establish its new iPhone business. It can pick the countries and vertical usages it wants to dominate, and as long as it doesn't do too many things at once, it can outspend almost any competitor.

Nokia, on the other hand, has battlefields everywhere:
--In mobile phones it's fighting Samsung, LG, and SonyEricsson, and a badly wounded (therefore desperate) Motorola.
--In entertainment smartphones it's fighting Apple.
--In communicators it's fighting RIM.
--In OS it's fighting Google, Microsoft, etc.
--In online services it's fighting Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, etc.

As Nokia EVP Anssi Vanjoki put it recently (link):

There’s a company that says they can index the world; we are going to go deeper - we are going to coordinate the world.

Sweet! He calls out Google and says he'll beat them in their core business. It's a noble effort. I love the company's ambition. But does Nokia have the resources to fight all those battles at once?

If the folks at Nokia really think they are well positioned to crush Apple, they need to go re-read The Innovator's Dilemma. Being big is not a benefit in a rapidly-changing market with emerging segments. A big company can't respond nimbly to that sort of change, and the segments attacked by new entrants are usually too small to justify huge investment by an incumbent. So new challengers like Apple and RIM pop up all around you, you gradually shed little chunks of market share, and you complain that people don't understand how powerful your core business is.

I am not at all saying that Nokia is doomed. They are an outstanding company, with smart people, a great brand, and enormous strengths. But they need to understand that turning the battleship a little faster won't win the war. Nokia's smartphone competitors are not standing in molasses; they won't stay still long enough for the 16-inch guns to be pointed at them. More importantly, the competitors on the services side breed like vampire rabbits. By the time you blow away a clutch of them, three dozen more have hatched and are sucking blood from the other side of the ship.

To succeed in smartphones, I think Nokia needs to start creating the sort of integrated software + hardware solutions that the smartphone winners excel at. And on the services side, it needs to start breeding its own killer rabbits (small entrepreneurial experiments that move fast and die quickly if they fail). So far what I think I see looks like a more design-savvy version of the smartphone business of Samsung (throw hardware at the wall and see what sticks) coupled with an effort to create a 16-inch cannon of services.

That's probably not enough to win in the long run. Nokia still has a lot of time to get it right. But do they really understand what needs to change? I can't tell, because all I usually get from them is monologues on how big their business is and how much cool stuff they have in the lab.

=====

A few other tidbits from the day...

N97: Second cousin twice removed of the Revo. I got a chance to play with a pre-release N97, Nokia's upcoming qwerty phone. The screen slides sideways to reveal a little keyboard underneath.

The look and size of the device reminded me a little bit of the old Psion Revo, although it's a pretty distant echo. The sliding process of the screen has a very nice feel to it; it's the sort of physical detail that Nokia excels at. Even in a pre-release state, the phone felt nice and solid in my hand.

The software needs a lot more work, but they admitted that. It's a pre-release device. No worries at this point.

As for the keyboard, I thought it was mediocre. The keys, and especially the microscopic letters on them, are a little too small for my taste (I have big thumbs). Typing was slower than I expect on a thumb keyboard. I'd put it about on a par with the Blackberry Storm (that's the Blackberry with the on-screen keyboard). The Storm has bigger letters than the N97, and unlike David Pogue I like the tactile feedback when you tap on its screen, although it is not as good as a real keyboard.

So the N97 has real keys but they're too tiny, and the Storm has bigger keys but they're not real. The tiebreaker is the software -- the Storm is notoriously unstable (it took me about 40 seconds to crash it). I think neither product is ready for the market yet. Unfortunately for RIM, the Storm is already shipping.

The destiny of Trolltech. About a year ago, when Nokia purchased Trolltech, I wondered what they were going to do with it (link). Now we know -- Trolltech's Qt software layer is going to become a graphics layer for Symbian. No word on what happens to Trolltech's other products.

That's nice, but what's it good for? Symbian is adding symmetric multiprocessing to the OS. In a session discussing the change, a member of the audience asked what you'd use symmetric multiprocessing for on a mobile device.

Long pause. "Well, some games use it..." Another long pause.

This is the difficulty of taking a technology-only approach when talking to developers. Although software developers are technophiles, what they really care about is what sort of cool products you can enable them to build. If your feature doesn't let them do something cool, they won't care about it.

(By the way, according to an article here, the benefit will be in performance tuning and battery life -- critical to handset vendors, but sanitation issues to application developers.)

Some alternate opinions. Some other people briefed by Nokia are not as worried as me about the molasses thing. In the interest of balance, here are a few examples:

Commentary from SymbianOne (link).

Fabrizio over at Funambol (link).

SonyEricsson on the event (link). (Never mind, that was a report from 2003. I am so embarrassed.)

I'm reading: Nokia: Running in molasses

The end of the dream

No matter how it works out in the long run, the purchase of Symbian by Nokia marks the end of a dream -- the creation of a new independent OS company to be the mobile equivalent of Microsoft. Put a few beers into former Symbian employees and they'll get a little wistful about it, but the company they talk about most often is Psion, the PDA company that spawned Symbian.

Psion never got much attention in the US, but it was a pioneer in the PDA market in the UK, and even to this day I think the Psion Revo is one of the two coolest-looking PDAs ever made (the Palm V is the other one).


The Revo

Psion explored many ideas that eventually turned into major new consumer electronics categories, but it failed to follow up on them. The company was effectively dismembered when Symbian was formed, and many of its best people drifted off to other companies. Now Symbian itself is transitioning to something very different, with most of its people absorbed into Nokia. What the Psion veterans talk about wistfully is how many smart people worked at Psion, how many great ideas the company fumbled, and how successful many of the people have been in the tech industry post-Psion. In this sense, Psion is similar to many other tech pioneer companies that assembled staffs of very bright people, taught them how to work together, and then blew apart like exploding stars, scattering the elements of new companies across the industry. This process dates back at least to Fairchild Semiconductor, which trained the founders of many of the most prominent semiconductor companies (link). You can find similar networks of former employees from places like Apple, Netscape, and Palm. I think Yahoo is in the process of forming a network now, and some day there's going to be a dandy one made of former Googlers.

What makes the Psion story different is that many of the Psion veterans had to leave the UK, or join non-UK companies, in order to become successful. Some are in other parts of Europe, some are in the US, and some are in London but working for foreign companies. This is a source of intense frustration to the Psion folks I've talked with. They feel like not only their company failed, but their country failed to take advantage of the expertise they had built.

There's a big body of academic research on why Silicon Valley has been successful in sustaining itself, and part of the reason is that the Valley recycles companies very efficiently. Failing companies do not last long, but in the process the brightest people and ideas are rarely lost, they are just shuffled around into new configurations.

About a year ago, Andrew Orlowski of the Register wrote an amazing article on the history of Psion, and how company culture and government philosophy failed to take advantage of it to grow a new industry. It's the longest piece I've ever seen in the Register, almost the nucleus of a book, and it's well worth reading. It didn't get enough attention when it was published, and I'm embarrassed to say that I never posted a link to it. So I'm glad to remedy that now. If you want to understand the context what happened to Symbian, and learn a bit about how the tech industry works, go read it here.

If you want to hear more about what Symbian is morphing into, two of its executives have just started personal weblogs in which they are commenting on the migration to Symbian Foundation (among other things). It's an interesting move, and it seems symbolic of the transition they're trying to make into the open source world. Previously Symbian had a company blog that several execs contributed to; now the execs have personal blogs where they talk directly to the industry.

David Wood (Symbian's EVP of Research) link.
John Forsyth (Symbian's Strategy VP) link.

I'm reading: The end of the dream

Symbian changes everything, and nothing

[With a correction made on June 26.]

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. Symbian contacted me on June 26 with a correction: "Five Foundation board seats will be allocated to handset vendors on the basis of volumes shipped using the Symbian Foundation platform. There will be a maximum of one (1) board seat per company." So Nokia gets one board seat, and does not control the foundation.

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. Added June 26: Nokia has given other companies a formal say in the feature set, with less official control by Nokia than it had when it held about 50% of Symbian, but perhaps more practical influence because it now directly employs most of the people doing the engineering. So I think Nokia gave up the official veto it had over Symbian's actions, and replaced it with a practical one.


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.

I'm reading: Symbian changes everything, and nothing

Mobile applications, RIP

Summary: The business of making native apps for mobile devices is dying, crushed by a fragmented market and restrictive business practices. The problems are so bad that the mobile web, despite its many technical drawbacks, is now a better way to deliver new functionality to mobiles. I think this will drive a rapid rise in mobile web development, largely replacing the mobile app business. This has huge implications for mobile operators, handset companies, developers, and users.


The decline of the mobile software industry

Mobile computing is different from PC computing.

For the last decade, that has been the fundamental rule of the mobile data industry. It was the central insight of Palm Computing's "Zen of Palm" philosophy. Psion came up with similar ideas, and you can hear echoes of them from every other successful mobile computing firm: Mobile computers are used differently from PCs, and therefore must be designed differently.

We all assumed this also meant mobile devices needed a whole mobile-specific software stack, including an operating system and APIs designed specifically for mobility, and native third-party applications created from the ground up for mobile usage.

That's what we all believe, but I'm starting to think we got it wrong.

Back in 1999 when I joined Palm, it seemed we had the whole mobile ecosystem nailed. The market was literally exploding, with the installed base of devices doubling every year, and an incredible range of creative and useful software popping up all over. In a 22-month period, the number of registered Palm developers increased from 3,000 to over 130,000. The PalmSource conference was swamped, with people spilling out into the halls, and David Pogue took center stage at the close of the conference to tell us how brilliant we all were.

It felt like we were at the leading edge of a revolution, but in hindsight it was more like the high water mark of a flash flood. In the years that followed, the energy and momentum gradually drained out of the mobile applications market.

The problem wasn't just limited to Palm; the level of developer activity and creativity that we saw in the glory days of Palm OS hasn't reappeared on any mobile platform since. In fact, as the market shifted from handhelds to smartphones, the situation for mobile app developers has become substantially worse.

That came home to me very forcefully a few days ago, when I got a call from Elia Freedman. Elia is CEO of Infinity Softworks, which makes vertical market software for mobile devices (tasks like real estate valuation and financial services). He was one of the leaders of the Palm software market, with a ten year history in mobile applications.

I eventually moved on from Palm, and Elia branched out into other platforms such as Blackberry. But we've kept in touch, and so he called recently to tell me that he had given up on his mobile applications business.

Elia gave me a long explanation of why. I can't reproduce it word for word (I couldn't write that fast), but I've summarized it with his permission here:

Two problems have caused a decline the mobile apps business over the last few years. First, the business has become tougher technologically. Second, marketing and sales have also become harder.

From the technical perspective, there are a couple of big issues. One is the proliferation of operating systems. Back in the late 1990s there were two platforms we had to worry about, Pocket PC and Palm OS. Symbian was there too, but it was in Europe and few people here were paying attention. Now there are at least ten platforms. Microsoft alone has several -- two versions of Windows Mobile, Tablet PC, and so on. [Elia didn't mention it, but the fragmentation of Java makes this situation even worse.]

I call it three million platforms with a hundred users each (link).

The second technical issue is certification. The walls are being formed around devices in ways they never were before. Now I have to certify with both the OS and with each carrier, and it costs me thousands of dollars. So my costs are through the roof. On top of that, the adoption rate of mobile applications has gone down. So I have to pay more to sell less.

Then there's marketing. Here too there are two issues. The first is vertical marketing. Few mobile devices align with verticals, which makes it hard for a vertical application developer like us to partner with any particular device. For example, Palm even at its height had no more than 20% of real estate agents. To cover our development costs on 20% of target customer base, I had to charge more than the customers could pay. So I was forced to make my application work on more platforms, which pushed me back into the million platforms problem.

The other marketing problem is the disappearance of horizontal distribution. You used to have some resellers and free software sites on the web that promoted mobile shareware and commercial products at low or no charge. You could also work through the hardware vendors to get to customers. We were masters of this; at one point we were bundled on 85% of mobile computing devices. We had retail distribution too.

None of those avenues are available any more. Retail has gone away. The online resellers have gone from taking 20% of our revenue to taking 50-70%. The other day I went looking for the freeware sites where we used to promote, and they have disappeared. Hardware bundling has ended because carriers took that over and made it impossible for us to get on the device. Palm used to have a bonus CD and a flyer that they put in the box, where we could get promoted. The carriers shut down both of those. They do not care about vertical apps. It feels like they don't want any apps at all.

You can read more of Elia's commentary on his weblog (link).

Add it all up, and Elia can't make money in mobile applications any more. As he told me, "Mike, it's time for you to write the obituary for mobile apps." More on that later.

Although it's a very sad situation, if Elia's experience were an isolated story I'd probably just chalk it up to bad luck on the part of a single developer. But it mirrors what I've been hearing from a lot of mobile app developers on a lot of different operating systems for some time now. The combination of splintering platforms, shrinking distribution channels, and rising costs is making it harder and harder for a mobile application developer to succeed. Rather than getting better, the situation is getting worse.

I've always had faith that eventually we would solve these problems. We'd get the right OS vendor paired with a handset maker who understood the situation and an operator who was willing to give up some control, and a mobile platform would take off again. Maybe not Palm OS, but on somebody's platform we'd get it all right.

I don't believe that any more. I think it's too late.


The mistake we made

We told ourselves that the fundamental rule of our business was: Mobile is different. But we lost sight of an even more fundamental law that applies to any computing platform:

A platform that is technically flawed but has a good business model will always beat a platform that is elegant but has a poor business model.

Windows is the best example of inelegant tech paired with the right business model, but it has happened over and over again in the history of the tech world.

In the mobile world, what have we done? We created a series of elegant technology platforms optimized just for mobile computing. We figured out how to extend battery life, start up the system instantly, conserve precious wireless bandwidth, synchronize to computers all over the planet, and optimize the display of data on a tiny screen.

But we never figured out how to help developers make money. In fact, we paired our elegant platforms with a developer business model so deeply broken that it would take many years, and enormous political battles throughout the industry, to fix it -- if it can ever be fixed at all.

Meanwhile, there is now an alternative platform for mobile developers. It's horribly flawed technically, not at all optimized for mobile usage, and in fact was designed for a completely different form of computing. It would be hard to create a computing architecture more inappropriate for use over a cellular data network. But it has a business model that sweeps away all of the barriers in the mobile market. Mobile developers are starting to switch to it, a trickle that is soon going to grow. And this time I think the flash flood will last.

If you haven't figured it out yet, I'm talking about the Web. I think Web applications are going to destroy most native app development for mobiles. Not because the Web is a better technology for mobile, but because it has a better business model.

Think about it: If you're creating a website, you don't have to get permission from a carrier. You don't have to get anything certified by anyone. You don't have to beg for placement on the deck, and you don't have to pay half your revenue to a reseller. In fact, the operator, handset vendor, and OS vendor probably won't even be aware that you exist. It'll just be you and the user, communicating directly.

Until recently, a couple of barriers prevented this from working. The first was the absence of flat-rate data plans. They have been around for a while in the US, but in Europe they are only now appearing. Before flat-rate, users were very fearful of exploring the mobile web because they risked ending up with a thousand-Euro mobile bill. That fear is now receding. The second barrier was the extremely bad quality of mobile browsers. Many of them still stink, but the high quality of Apple's iPhone browser, coupled with Nokia's licensing of WebKit, points to a future in which most mobile browsers will be reasonably feature-complete. The market will force this -- mobile companies how have to ship a full browser in order to keep up with Apple, and operators have to give full access to it.

There are still huge problems with web apps on mobile, of course. Mobile web apps don't work when you're out of coverage, they're slow due to network latency, and they do not make efficient use of the wireless network. But I believe it will be easier to resolve or live with these technical drawbacks in the next few years than it will be to fix the fundamental structural and business problems in the native mobile app market.

In other words, app development on the mobile web sucks less than the alternative.

Here's a chart to help explain the situation. Imagine that we're giving a numerical score to a platform, rating its attractiveness to developers. Attractiveness is defined as the technical elegance of the platform multiplied by how easy it is for developers to make money from it. The attractiveness score for native mobile app development looks like this over time:



This is why mobile app developers are in trouble. Even though the base of smartphones has been growing, and the platforms themselves have become more powerful, the market barriers have been growing even faster. So attractiveness has been dropping.

Now add in mobile web development:



Based on what I'm hearing from mobile developers, the lines just crossed. The business advantages of mobile web development outweigh its technical limitations. More importantly, if you look at where the lines are going, the advantage of mobile web is going to grow rapidly in the future.

I'm not saying all native mobile development is dead. In fact, we're about to see the release of Apple's native development tools for the iPhone, and as Chris Dunphy just pointed out to me, they are sure to result in a surge of native development for that platform. But I think even a rapidly-growing base of iPhones can't compare to the weight of the whole mobile phone market getting onto a consistent base of browsers.


What it all means

If you're a mobile developer, you should consider stopping native app development and shifting to a mobile-optimized website. That's what Elia did, and he said it's amazing how much easier it is to get things done. Even mobile game developers, who you'd think would be the last to abandon native development, are looking at web distribution (link; thanks to Mike Rowehl for pointing it out).

See if you can create a dumbed-down version of your application that will run over the mobile web. If the answer is yes, do it. If the answer is no, try to figure out what technology changes would let you move to the web, and watch for those changes to happen.

There are exceptions to any rule, and I think it makes sense to keep doing native development if your app can't work effectively over the web, and it's a vertical application so popular that you can get about $50 or more in revenue per copy. In that situation, you probably have enough resources to stay native for the time being. But even you should be monitoring the situation to see when you can switch to the web, because it will cut your expenses.

If you're a mobile customer, make sure your next smartphone has a fully functional browser that can display standard web pages. And get the best deal you can on a flat-rate data plan; you'll need it.

If you're an operator or a handset vendor, get used to life as a dumb pipe. By trying to control your customers and make sure you extract most of the revenue from mobile data, all you've done is drive developers to the Web, which is even harder to control. You could have had a middle ground in which you and mobile developers worked together to share the profits, but instead you've handed the game to the Google crowd.

Congratulations.


Oh, about that obituary...

In loving memory of the mobile applications business. Adoring child of Java, Psion, Palm OS and Windows Mobile; doting parent of Symbian, Access Linux Platform, and S60; constant companion of Handango and Motricity. Scared the crap out of Microsoft in 2000. Passed away from strangulation at the hands of the mobile industry in 2008. Awaiting resurrection as a web service in 2009. In lieu of flowers, the family asks that you make a donation to the Yahoo takeover defense fund.

I'm reading: Mobile applications, RIP