It was a nondescript bar in the American Midwest, the sort of place where working men drop in at the end of the day to unwind before they head home. You wouldn't expect to find two senior business executives there, and as I sat in the empty bar at midday I wondered if maybe my contact had given me a bad lead. But then the door opened and a general manager from one of the leading web companies walked in, followed by a senior VP from one of the US's biggest mobile network operators. I hunched down in the shadows of a corner booth and typed notes quietly as they settled in at the bar.
Bartender: What'll you have?
Telecom executive: Michelob Light.
Web executive: I'll have a Sierra Nevada Kellerweis.
Bartender: Keller-what?
Web executive: Um, Michelob Light.
Telecom executive: Thanks for coming. Did you have any trouble finding the place?
Web executive: All I can say is thank God for GPS. I've never even been on the ground before between Denver and New York.
Telecom executive: I wanted to find someplace nondescript, so we wouldn't be seen together. The pressure from the FCC is bad enough already, without someone accusing us of colluding.
Web executive: No worries, my staff thinks I'm paragliding in Mexico this weekend. What's your cover story?
Telecom executive: Sailboat off Montauk.
Web executive: Sweet. So, you wanted to talk about this data capacity problem you have on your network...
Telecom executive: No, it's a data capacity problem we all have. Your websites are flooding our network with trivia. The world's wireless infrastructure is on the verge of collapse because your users have nothing better to do all day than watch videos of a drunk guy buying beer.
Web executive: Welcome to the Internet. The people rule. If you didn't want to play, you shouldn't have run the ads. Remember the promises you made? "Instantly download files. Browse the Web just like at home. Stream HD videos. Laugh at an online video or movie trailer while travelling in the family car."
Telecom executive: That was our marketing guys. They don't always talk to the capacity planners. Besides, who could have known that the marketing campaign would actually work?
Web executive: Don't look at me. I've never done a marketing campaign in my life. I think you should just blame it on A--
Telecom executive: You promised, no using the A-word.
Web executive: Sorry. But I still don't see why this is a problem. Just add some more towers and servers and stuff.
Telecom executive: It's not that simple. The network isn't designed to handle this sort of data, and especially not at these volumes. Right now our biggest problem is backhaul capacity -- the traffic coming from the cell towers to our central servers. But when we fix that, the cell towers themselves will get saturated. Fix the towers and the servers will fall over somewhere. It's like squeezing a balloon. We have to rebuild the whole network. It's incredibly expensive.
Web executive: So? That's what your users pay you for.
Telecom executive: But most of them are on fixed-rate data plans. So when we add capacity, we don't necessarily get additional revenue. It's all expense and no profit. At some point in the not-too-distant future, we'll end up losing money on mobile data.
Web executive: Bummer.
Telecom executive: More like mortal threat. Fortunately, we've figured out how to solve the problem. The top five percent of our users produce about 50% of the network's total traffic. So we're just going to cap their accounts and charge more when they go over.
Web executive: Woah! Hold on, those are our most important customers you're talking about. You can't just shut them down.
Telecom executive: The hell we can't. They're leeches using up the network capacity that everyone else needs.
Web executive: Consumers will never let you impose caps. You told them they had unlimited data plans, that's the expectation you set. You can't go back now and tell them that their plans are limited. They won't understand -- and they won't forgive you.
Telecom executive: First of all, the plans were never really unlimited in the first place. There's always been fine print.
Web executive: Which no one read.
Telecom executive: Off the record, you may have a point. On the record, the fact is that you can retrain users. Look, you grew up in California, right?
Web executive: What does that have to do with anything?
Telecom executive: Once upon a time, there weren't any water meters in California. Now most of the major cities have them, and they'll be required everywhere in a couple of years. Something that was once unlimited became limited, and people learned to conserve.
Web executive: The difference is, I can read my water meter. You make a ton of money when people exceed their minutes or message limits, and you don't warn them before they do it. If you play the same game with Internet traffic, it'll scare people away from using the mobile web -- or worse yet you'll invite in the government. Look what happened with roaming charges in Europe.
Telecom executive: Jeez, don't even think about that. Okay, so we'll need to add some sort of traffic meter so people will know how much data they're using when they load a page.
Web executive: Great, that'll discourage people from using Yahoo.
Telecom executive: Huh?
Web executive: Oops, did I say that out loud?
Telecom executive: Then there's the issue of dealing with websites and apps that misuse the network.
Web executive: Not this again.
Telecom executive: I'm not talking about completely blocking anything, just prioritizing the traffic a little. Surely you agree that 911 calls should get top priority on the network, right?
Web executive: Of course.
Telecom executive: And that voice calls should take priority over data?
Web executive: I don't know about that.
Telecom executive: Oh come on, what good is a telecom network if you can't make calls on it?
Web executive: (sighs) Yeah, okay.
Telecom executive: So then what's wrong with us prioritizing, say, e-mail delivery over video?
Web executive: Because when you start arbitrarily throttling traffic, I can't manage the user experience. My website will work great on Vodafone's network but not on yours, or my site will work fine on some days and not on others. How do you think the customers will feel about that?
Telecom executive: Not as angry as they will be if the entire network falls over. Listen, we're already installing the software to prioritize different sorts of data packets. We could be throttling traffic today and you wouldn't even know it.
Web executive: But people will eventually figure it out. They'll compare notes on which networks work best and they'll migrate to the ones that don't mess with their applications. Heck, we'll help them figure it out. And if that's not enough, there's always the regulatory option. The Republicans are out of office. They can't protect you on net neutrality any more.
Telecom executive: You think you're better at lobbying the government than we are? We've been doing it for 100 years, pal. Besides, we have a right to protect our network.
Web executive: You mean to protect your own services from competition!
Telecom executive: Parasite!
Web executive: Monopolist!
Telecom executive: That's it! It's go time!
They both stood. The telecom guy grabbed a beer bottle and broke it against the bar, while the web guy raised a bar stool over his head. Then the bartender pulled out a shotgun and pointed it at both of them.
Bartender: Enough! I'm sick of listening to you two. Telecom guy, you're crazy if you think people will put up with someone telling them what they can and can't do on the Internet. The Chinese government can't make that stick, and unlike them you have competitors.
Web executive: See? I told you!
Bartender: Shut up, web guy! You keep pretending that the wireless network is infinite when you know it isn't. If you really think user experience is important, you need to start taking the capabilities of the network into account when you design your apps.
Web executive: Hey, he started it.
Telecom executive: I did not!
Bartender: I don't care who started it! Telecom guy, you need to expose some APIs that will let a website know how much capacity is available at a particular moment, so they can adjust their products. And web guy, you need to participate in those standards and use them. Plus you both need to agree on ways to communicate to a user how much bandwidth they're using, so they can make their own decisions on which apps they want to use. That plus tiered pricing will solve your whole problem.
Telecom executive: Signaling capacity too. Don't forget signaling.
Bartender: That's exactly the sort of detail you shouldn't confuse users with. Work it out between yourselves and figure out a simple way to communicate it to users. Okay?
Web executive: I guess.
Telecom executive: Yeah, okay.
Bartender. Good. Now sit down and start over by talking about something you can cooperate on.
Telecom executive: All right. Hey, what's that guy doing in the corner? Is that a netbook?
Web executive: He's a blogger!
Bartender: There's no blogging allowed in here!
Telecom executive and web executive: Get him!
I ran. Fortunately, the bar had a back door. Even more fortunately, the web guy and the telecom guy got into an argument over who would go through the door first, and I was able to make my escape.
So I don't know how the conversation ended. But I do know that I wish that bartender was running the FCC.
Thursday, 29 October 2009
Sunday, 13 September 2009
Is Apple too powerful?
The new iPod nano is a tour de force, the Swiss Army Knife of mobile entertainment. I'm sure there's some obscure gadget from Japan that packs more features per cubic millimeter, but I've never heard of it, and chances are neither have you. This one's a major consumer product, just in time for stimulating the economy this holiday season. Speaking as a technophile, I want one of the new nanos for the same reason I want a Dremel with 300 different bits: just because.
I'm also impressed by the new price point on the iPod Touch. Apple frequently overhypes its announcements, but the $199 price point in the US truly is a milestone that should lead to much higher sales. The improvements to iTunes and the App Store look promising as well, and I'm especially intrigued by Apple's effort to make paid apps more prominent. More on that in a future post.
But the thing that surprised me the most about Apple's announcement wasn't the features of the new products, or the absence of a tablet or an iPhone Lite. It was something Steve Jobs said when he talked about the video camera in the nano:
"We've seen video explode in the last few years," he said, showing a picture of a Flip video camera. "Here's one, a very popular one, four gigabytes of memory, $149, and this market has really exploded, and we want to get in on this."
Think about that for a minute. "There's a big new market, and we want in." Not, "we're creating something new" or "we can vastly improve this category." Just, "we want a cut."
It sounds like something Don Corleone would say. Or Steve Ballmer. But it's not what I expected from Apple.
Now, it's logical for Apple to put video cameras into iPods. A friend of mine worked at one of the companies producing cameras-on-a-chip, and he's passionate about the potential for building vision into every consumer product. It's not just an imaging issue; when the device can see the user, you can create all sorts of interesting gesture-based controls that don't require you to ever even touch the device. Instead of point and click, the interface is just...point.
So it's been inevitable that video cameras would eventually be built into things like the nano. For Pure Digital, the makers of the Flip, this ought to be a tough but normal competitive challenge. The first step is to make sure your camera works better than theirs (check). Next, since music players are becoming cameras, you might want to build a camera that can also play music.
But that's where the situation becomes abnormal. Because even though Pure Digital was recently purchased by Cisco, giving it almost limitless financial resources, it's more or less impossible for its products to become equivalent to the iPods as music players. Not because they can't play music, but because they aren't allowed to seamlessly sync with the iTunes music application.
The issue of access to iTunes has already been simmering in the background between Apple and Palm, with Palm engineering the Pre to access the full functionality of iTunes, Apple blocking that access, and Palm breaking back in. To date I've viewed it as kind of an amusing sideshow, and I didn't really care who won. I figured the folks at Palm had plenty of time in the past to build their own music management ecosystem, but they (including me) didn't bother, so there wasn't any particular moral reason why they should have access to Apple's system.
Apple the predator
The situation with Pure Digital is vastly different, in my opinion. Pure Digital pioneered the market for simple video cameras. It identified an opportunity no one else had seen, and built that market from scratch. In a declining economy, it created new jobs and new wealth, and made millions of consumers happy. It's incredibly difficult to get a new hardware startup funded in Silicon Valley, let alone make it successful. For the good of the economy, we ought to be encouraging more companies like Pure Digital to exist.
But there's no way for a small startup like that to also create a whole music ecosystem equivalent to iTunes. Yes, third party products can access iTunes music. But not as seamlessly as Apple's own products, and as we've seen over and over in the mobile market, small differences in usability can make a big difference in sales. So Apple gets a unique advantage in the video camera market not because it makes a better camera, but because it can connect its camera more easily to a proprietary music ecosystem.
In other words, iTunes is no longer just a tool for Apple to defend its iPod sales; it's now a tool to help Apple take over new markets.
In the legal system they call this sort of thing "tying," and it is sometimes illegal. For decades, Apple complained that Microsoft competed unfairly by tying its products together -- Office works best with Windows, Microsoft's file formats are often proprietary so you can't easily create a substitute for their apps, and so on. I was heavily involved in the Apple-Microsoft lawsuits when I worked at Apple in the 1990s, so I know how passionately we believed that Microsoft's tactics were not just unethical, but also harmful to computer users and the overall economy.
So it's very disappointing to see Apple using tactics it once bitterly denounced, and declaring that it's decided to take over a market because "we want to get in." If Apple can use iTunes as a weapon against Pure Digital and Palm, what's to stop it from rolling up every new category of mobile entertainment product? Where's the incentive for other companies to invest?
I saw first-hand the stifling effect that Microsoft and Intel's duopoly control had on personal computer innovation. PC hardware companies learned not to bother with new features, because Microsoft and Intel would insist that anything new they created be made available to every other cloner. And software investments were restrained by the belief that Microsoft would use its leverage to take over any new application category that was developed.
Good fences make good neighbors
There's a danger that Apple's behavior will have the same chilling effect in mobile electronics. So I believe Apple should allow any device to sync with iTunes content, the same as an iPod. But not because it's morally right or even because it's legally required, but because it's the best thing to do for Apple. Here's why:
The two biggest threats to a very successful company are complacency and consistency. Complacency is more common -- a company that's very successful starts to relax and loses the hunger and drive that made it a winner. I think we can safely assume that won't happen to Apple as long as Steve is around. But the second risk, consistency, is more insidious -- behavior that's appropriate and accepted for a spunky startup gets punished when a big company does it.
This is what tripped up Microsoft. The same aggressiveness that served it well against IBM got it a series of lawsuits and intense government scrutiny a decade later. Even though Microsoft eventually won those suits, its execs were distracted for years, and it was forced to dramatically change its behavior. It has never been the same company since. I think Microsoft would have been much better off had it proactively adjusted its own behavior just enough to pre-empt legal action.
That's where Apple is today. It has to realize that it's no longer the underdog. It's the dominant company in mobile entertainment, and the fastest-growing major firm in mobile phones. It's already under a lot of legal scrutiny for the way it manages the iPhone App Store. If it also leverages iTunes to take out small competitors, and especially if it's dumb enough to say things like "we want in," it will guarantee unfriendly attention from government regulators -- a group of people who actually have more power to hurt Apple than do most of its competitors.
The Obama administration in the US is making noises about enforcing competition law more vigorously, and look at how the EU is picking on details in the Oracle-Sun merger, allegedly to protect local companies (link). If they'll do all that to help SAP and Bull, what will they do to protect Nokia?
Apple, you don't need the special connection with iTunes to keep on winning. You've already proven that you're much better at systems design than almost any other company on Earth. The huge iPhone apps base is exclusive to you, and that won't change. By opening up iTunes, you take away an easy excuse for regulators to pick apart your business, a process that would be distracting, expensive, and could result in much more dramatic restrictions on your actions.
Ease up a little on the gas pedal, Steve. It's the best way to keep moving fast.
I'm also impressed by the new price point on the iPod Touch. Apple frequently overhypes its announcements, but the $199 price point in the US truly is a milestone that should lead to much higher sales. The improvements to iTunes and the App Store look promising as well, and I'm especially intrigued by Apple's effort to make paid apps more prominent. More on that in a future post.
But the thing that surprised me the most about Apple's announcement wasn't the features of the new products, or the absence of a tablet or an iPhone Lite. It was something Steve Jobs said when he talked about the video camera in the nano:
"We've seen video explode in the last few years," he said, showing a picture of a Flip video camera. "Here's one, a very popular one, four gigabytes of memory, $149, and this market has really exploded, and we want to get in on this."
Think about that for a minute. "There's a big new market, and we want in." Not, "we're creating something new" or "we can vastly improve this category." Just, "we want a cut."
It sounds like something Don Corleone would say. Or Steve Ballmer. But it's not what I expected from Apple.
Now, it's logical for Apple to put video cameras into iPods. A friend of mine worked at one of the companies producing cameras-on-a-chip, and he's passionate about the potential for building vision into every consumer product. It's not just an imaging issue; when the device can see the user, you can create all sorts of interesting gesture-based controls that don't require you to ever even touch the device. Instead of point and click, the interface is just...point.
So it's been inevitable that video cameras would eventually be built into things like the nano. For Pure Digital, the makers of the Flip, this ought to be a tough but normal competitive challenge. The first step is to make sure your camera works better than theirs (check). Next, since music players are becoming cameras, you might want to build a camera that can also play music.
But that's where the situation becomes abnormal. Because even though Pure Digital was recently purchased by Cisco, giving it almost limitless financial resources, it's more or less impossible for its products to become equivalent to the iPods as music players. Not because they can't play music, but because they aren't allowed to seamlessly sync with the iTunes music application.
The issue of access to iTunes has already been simmering in the background between Apple and Palm, with Palm engineering the Pre to access the full functionality of iTunes, Apple blocking that access, and Palm breaking back in. To date I've viewed it as kind of an amusing sideshow, and I didn't really care who won. I figured the folks at Palm had plenty of time in the past to build their own music management ecosystem, but they (including me) didn't bother, so there wasn't any particular moral reason why they should have access to Apple's system.
Apple the predator
The situation with Pure Digital is vastly different, in my opinion. Pure Digital pioneered the market for simple video cameras. It identified an opportunity no one else had seen, and built that market from scratch. In a declining economy, it created new jobs and new wealth, and made millions of consumers happy. It's incredibly difficult to get a new hardware startup funded in Silicon Valley, let alone make it successful. For the good of the economy, we ought to be encouraging more companies like Pure Digital to exist.
But there's no way for a small startup like that to also create a whole music ecosystem equivalent to iTunes. Yes, third party products can access iTunes music. But not as seamlessly as Apple's own products, and as we've seen over and over in the mobile market, small differences in usability can make a big difference in sales. So Apple gets a unique advantage in the video camera market not because it makes a better camera, but because it can connect its camera more easily to a proprietary music ecosystem.
In other words, iTunes is no longer just a tool for Apple to defend its iPod sales; it's now a tool to help Apple take over new markets.
In the legal system they call this sort of thing "tying," and it is sometimes illegal. For decades, Apple complained that Microsoft competed unfairly by tying its products together -- Office works best with Windows, Microsoft's file formats are often proprietary so you can't easily create a substitute for their apps, and so on. I was heavily involved in the Apple-Microsoft lawsuits when I worked at Apple in the 1990s, so I know how passionately we believed that Microsoft's tactics were not just unethical, but also harmful to computer users and the overall economy.
So it's very disappointing to see Apple using tactics it once bitterly denounced, and declaring that it's decided to take over a market because "we want to get in." If Apple can use iTunes as a weapon against Pure Digital and Palm, what's to stop it from rolling up every new category of mobile entertainment product? Where's the incentive for other companies to invest?
I saw first-hand the stifling effect that Microsoft and Intel's duopoly control had on personal computer innovation. PC hardware companies learned not to bother with new features, because Microsoft and Intel would insist that anything new they created be made available to every other cloner. And software investments were restrained by the belief that Microsoft would use its leverage to take over any new application category that was developed.
Good fences make good neighbors
There's a danger that Apple's behavior will have the same chilling effect in mobile electronics. So I believe Apple should allow any device to sync with iTunes content, the same as an iPod. But not because it's morally right or even because it's legally required, but because it's the best thing to do for Apple. Here's why:
The two biggest threats to a very successful company are complacency and consistency. Complacency is more common -- a company that's very successful starts to relax and loses the hunger and drive that made it a winner. I think we can safely assume that won't happen to Apple as long as Steve is around. But the second risk, consistency, is more insidious -- behavior that's appropriate and accepted for a spunky startup gets punished when a big company does it.
This is what tripped up Microsoft. The same aggressiveness that served it well against IBM got it a series of lawsuits and intense government scrutiny a decade later. Even though Microsoft eventually won those suits, its execs were distracted for years, and it was forced to dramatically change its behavior. It has never been the same company since. I think Microsoft would have been much better off had it proactively adjusted its own behavior just enough to pre-empt legal action.
That's where Apple is today. It has to realize that it's no longer the underdog. It's the dominant company in mobile entertainment, and the fastest-growing major firm in mobile phones. It's already under a lot of legal scrutiny for the way it manages the iPhone App Store. If it also leverages iTunes to take out small competitors, and especially if it's dumb enough to say things like "we want in," it will guarantee unfriendly attention from government regulators -- a group of people who actually have more power to hurt Apple than do most of its competitors.
The Obama administration in the US is making noises about enforcing competition law more vigorously, and look at how the EU is picking on details in the Oracle-Sun merger, allegedly to protect local companies (link). If they'll do all that to help SAP and Bull, what will they do to protect Nokia?
Apple, you don't need the special connection with iTunes to keep on winning. You've already proven that you're much better at systems design than almost any other company on Earth. The huge iPhone apps base is exclusive to you, and that won't change. By opening up iTunes, you take away an easy excuse for regulators to pick apart your business, a process that would be distracting, expensive, and could result in much more dramatic restrictions on your actions.
Ease up a little on the gas pedal, Steve. It's the best way to keep moving fast.
Thursday, 13 August 2009
Four questions about the Microsoft-Nokia alliance
The Microsoft-Nokia alliance turned out to be a lot more interesting than the pre-announcement rumors made it out to be. Rather than just a bundling deal for mobile Office, the press release says they'll also be co-developing "a range of new user experiences" for Nokia phones, aimed at enterprises. Those will include mobile Office, enterprise IM and conferencing, access to portals built on SharePoint, and device management.
Of those items, the IM and conferencing ideas sound the most promising to me. Office, as I explained in my last post, is not much of a purchase-driver on mobile phones. And I think Microsoft would have needed to provide Nokia compatibility in its mobile portal and device management products anyway.
I understand the logic behind the alliance. Nokia has never been able to get much traction for its e-series business phones, and Microsoft hasn't been able to kick RIM out of enterprise. So if they get together, maybe they can make progress. But it's easy to make a sweeping corporate alliance announcement, and very hard to make it actually work, especially when the partners are as big and high-ego as Microsoft and Nokia. This alliance will live or die based on execution, and on a lot of details that we don't know about yet.
Here are four questions I'd love to see answered:
What specifically are those "new user experiences"?
If Nokia and Microsoft can come up with some truly useful functionality that RIM can't copy, they might be able to win share. But the emphasis in the press release on enterprise mobility worries me. The core users for RIM are communication-hungry professionals. If you want to eat away at RIM's base, you need to excite those communicator users, and I'm not sure if either company has the right ideas to do that. As Microsoft has already proven, pleasing IT managers won't drive a ton of mobile phone purchases.
Will Microsoft really follow through?
Microsoft has been hinting for the last decade that it was were willing to decouple mobile Office from the operating system, but they never had the courage to follow through. Now they have announced something that sounds pretty definitive, but the real test will be whether they put their best engineers on the Nokia products. If Microsoft assigns its C players to the alliance, or tries to make its Nokia products inferior to their Windows Mobile versions, the alliance won't go anywhere interesting.
What does this do to Microsoft's relationships with other handset companies?
Imagine for a moment that you are the CEO of Samsung. Actually, imagine that for several moments. You aren't exclusive with Microsoft, but you've done a lot of phones with Windows Mobile on them. Now all of a sudden Microsoft makes a deal with a company that you think of as the Antichrist.
How do you feel about that?
I can tell you that Samsung is not the most trusting and nurturing company to do business with even in the best of times. So I think you make two phone calls. The first is to Steve Ballmer, asking very pointedly if you can get the same software as Nokia, on the same terms, at the same time. If you don't like the answer to that question, your next call is to Google, regarding increasing your range of Android phones.
Maybe the reality is that Microsoft has given up on Windows Mobile and doesn't care what Samsung does. But that itself would be interesting news.
I would love to know how those phone calls went today.
What does RIM do about this?
It has been putting a lot of effort into Apple-competitive features like multimedia and a software store. Does it have enough bandwidth to also fight Nokia-Microsoft? What happens to its core business if Microsoft and Nokia do come up with some cool functions that RIM doesn't have? Are there any partners that could be a counterweight to Microsoft and Nokia? If I'm working at RIM, I start to think about alliances with companies like Oracle and SAP. And I wonder if Google is interested in doing some enterprise work together.
Of those items, the IM and conferencing ideas sound the most promising to me. Office, as I explained in my last post, is not much of a purchase-driver on mobile phones. And I think Microsoft would have needed to provide Nokia compatibility in its mobile portal and device management products anyway.
I understand the logic behind the alliance. Nokia has never been able to get much traction for its e-series business phones, and Microsoft hasn't been able to kick RIM out of enterprise. So if they get together, maybe they can make progress. But it's easy to make a sweeping corporate alliance announcement, and very hard to make it actually work, especially when the partners are as big and high-ego as Microsoft and Nokia. This alliance will live or die based on execution, and on a lot of details that we don't know about yet.
Here are four questions I'd love to see answered:
What specifically are those "new user experiences"?
If Nokia and Microsoft can come up with some truly useful functionality that RIM can't copy, they might be able to win share. But the emphasis in the press release on enterprise mobility worries me. The core users for RIM are communication-hungry professionals. If you want to eat away at RIM's base, you need to excite those communicator users, and I'm not sure if either company has the right ideas to do that. As Microsoft has already proven, pleasing IT managers won't drive a ton of mobile phone purchases.
Will Microsoft really follow through?
Microsoft has been hinting for the last decade that it was were willing to decouple mobile Office from the operating system, but they never had the courage to follow through. Now they have announced something that sounds pretty definitive, but the real test will be whether they put their best engineers on the Nokia products. If Microsoft assigns its C players to the alliance, or tries to make its Nokia products inferior to their Windows Mobile versions, the alliance won't go anywhere interesting.
What does this do to Microsoft's relationships with other handset companies?
Imagine for a moment that you are the CEO of Samsung. Actually, imagine that for several moments. You aren't exclusive with Microsoft, but you've done a lot of phones with Windows Mobile on them. Now all of a sudden Microsoft makes a deal with a company that you think of as the Antichrist.
How do you feel about that?
I can tell you that Samsung is not the most trusting and nurturing company to do business with even in the best of times. So I think you make two phone calls. The first is to Steve Ballmer, asking very pointedly if you can get the same software as Nokia, on the same terms, at the same time. If you don't like the answer to that question, your next call is to Google, regarding increasing your range of Android phones.
Maybe the reality is that Microsoft has given up on Windows Mobile and doesn't care what Samsung does. But that itself would be interesting news.
I would love to know how those phone calls went today.
What does RIM do about this?
It has been putting a lot of effort into Apple-competitive features like multimedia and a software store. Does it have enough bandwidth to also fight Nokia-Microsoft? What happens to its core business if Microsoft and Nokia do come up with some cool functions that RIM doesn't have? Are there any partners that could be a counterweight to Microsoft and Nokia? If I'm working at RIM, I start to think about alliances with companies like Oracle and SAP. And I wonder if Google is interested in doing some enterprise work together.
Tuesday, 11 August 2009
Nokia and Microsoft, sittin' in a tree...
Multiple sources are reporting that Nokia is hedging its bets on mobile phone software:
-- The New York Times says Microsoft and Nokia will announce Wednesday that Microsoft is porting Office to Nokia's Symbian S60 phones (link).
--TechCrunch, quoting the Financial Times in Germany, claims Nokia is planning to dump Symbian in favor of its Maemo Linux operating system (link).
--Om Malik says he asked Nokia about it, and the company denied plans to dump Symbian. But the company also said, "recognizing that the value we bring to the consumer is increasingly represented through software, there is logically not just one software environment that fits all consumer and market needs." In other words, we have an open marriage with Symbian (link).
In one sense, this is absolutely not news for Nokia. It has been playing the field for years, trying to prevent any single company from gaining control over mobile software (and thereby imposing a standard on Nokia). The change is that in the past, most of that energy was aimed against Microsoft.
Microsoft too seems to be bending its standards. With the exception of the Mac, Microsoft has been extremely reluctant to license Office for other operating systems. In the past, if Nokia wanted Office, it would have been expected to license Windows Mobile.
But now both companies feel threatened by Apple and Google, and all of a sudden that ugly person across the dance floor looks a lot cuter.
The real question that no one seems to be asking is whether most customers will care about any of this stuff. Most Nokia smartphone users are blissfully unaware that their phones have an operating system, let alone whether it's Symbian or Maemo. They just want the phone to work well.
And speaking as a former Palm guy who dealt with the mobile market for years, putting Microsoft Office on a smartphone is like putting wings on a giraffe -- it may get you some attention, but it's not very practical.
Don't get me wrong, I like and admire QuickOffice, which is probably the leading Office-equivalent app in the mobile space today. It's a cool product, but for most people the screens of smartphones are too small for serious spreadsheet and word processing activity. It works, but it's awkward and produces eyestrain. Most people who have a serious need for Office on the go will just carry a netbook.
So Nokia and Microsoft will both get some nice publicity, but the announcements mean very little to the average user. What both Microsoft and Nokia need to do is create compelling new mobile functionality that's better than the stuff being produced by Apple and RIM. Until they do that, all the strategic alliances in the world won't make a significant difference.
=====
Update: The announcement this morning was more subtle and perhaps far-reaching than what was reported yesterday. I think the strategic situation is still the same as what I described above, but there might be more value for users than I expected. More thoughts after I have a chance to digest the announcement.
-- The New York Times says Microsoft and Nokia will announce Wednesday that Microsoft is porting Office to Nokia's Symbian S60 phones (link).
--TechCrunch, quoting the Financial Times in Germany, claims Nokia is planning to dump Symbian in favor of its Maemo Linux operating system (link).
--Om Malik says he asked Nokia about it, and the company denied plans to dump Symbian. But the company also said, "recognizing that the value we bring to the consumer is increasingly represented through software, there is logically not just one software environment that fits all consumer and market needs." In other words, we have an open marriage with Symbian (link).
In one sense, this is absolutely not news for Nokia. It has been playing the field for years, trying to prevent any single company from gaining control over mobile software (and thereby imposing a standard on Nokia). The change is that in the past, most of that energy was aimed against Microsoft.
Microsoft too seems to be bending its standards. With the exception of the Mac, Microsoft has been extremely reluctant to license Office for other operating systems. In the past, if Nokia wanted Office, it would have been expected to license Windows Mobile.
But now both companies feel threatened by Apple and Google, and all of a sudden that ugly person across the dance floor looks a lot cuter.
The real question that no one seems to be asking is whether most customers will care about any of this stuff. Most Nokia smartphone users are blissfully unaware that their phones have an operating system, let alone whether it's Symbian or Maemo. They just want the phone to work well.
And speaking as a former Palm guy who dealt with the mobile market for years, putting Microsoft Office on a smartphone is like putting wings on a giraffe -- it may get you some attention, but it's not very practical.
Don't get me wrong, I like and admire QuickOffice, which is probably the leading Office-equivalent app in the mobile space today. It's a cool product, but for most people the screens of smartphones are too small for serious spreadsheet and word processing activity. It works, but it's awkward and produces eyestrain. Most people who have a serious need for Office on the go will just carry a netbook.
So Nokia and Microsoft will both get some nice publicity, but the announcements mean very little to the average user. What both Microsoft and Nokia need to do is create compelling new mobile functionality that's better than the stuff being produced by Apple and RIM. Until they do that, all the strategic alliances in the world won't make a significant difference.
=====
Update: The announcement this morning was more subtle and perhaps far-reaching than what was reported yesterday. I think the strategic situation is still the same as what I described above, but there might be more value for users than I expected. More thoughts after I have a chance to digest the announcement.
Wednesday, 8 July 2009
Google Chrome OS: Opening a vein in Redmond
I need to study it some more, but here's my first take on Google's Chrome OS announcement (link). I think what they’re really saying is:
"We want to bleed Microsoft to death, and we've decided that the best way to do that is give away equivalents to their products. By creating a free OS for netbooks (the only part of the PC market that's really growing) we hope to force Microsoft into a Clayton Christensen-style dilemma. It can either cut the price of Windows in order to compete with us, or it can gradually surrender OS share.
"By using Chrome to set a standard for web applications, we also help to make the Windows APIs less relevant. So even if Microsoft manages to hold share in PCs, its OS franchise becomes less and less meaningful over time."
That helps to explain why Google would be pushing both Chrome and Android at the same time. If you're really serious about running a logical OS program in its own right, you'd try to rationalize those two things. But if your top priority is to commoditize Microsoft, then you don't mind pushing out a couple of overlapping initiatives. The more free options, the more pain caused.
The next question we should all ask is whether Chrome-based netbooks will take off. I'm skeptical, especially in the near term. Most people buy netbooks to run PC applications. Linux already failed in the netbook market because it can't run PC apps, and Chrome OS won't run PC applications either.
But in the meantime, Google can put more price pressure on Microsoft, and maybe that's the real point.
"We want to bleed Microsoft to death, and we've decided that the best way to do that is give away equivalents to their products. By creating a free OS for netbooks (the only part of the PC market that's really growing) we hope to force Microsoft into a Clayton Christensen-style dilemma. It can either cut the price of Windows in order to compete with us, or it can gradually surrender OS share.
"By using Chrome to set a standard for web applications, we also help to make the Windows APIs less relevant. So even if Microsoft manages to hold share in PCs, its OS franchise becomes less and less meaningful over time."
That helps to explain why Google would be pushing both Chrome and Android at the same time. If you're really serious about running a logical OS program in its own right, you'd try to rationalize those two things. But if your top priority is to commoditize Microsoft, then you don't mind pushing out a couple of overlapping initiatives. The more free options, the more pain caused.
The next question we should all ask is whether Chrome-based netbooks will take off. I'm skeptical, especially in the near term. Most people buy netbooks to run PC applications. Linux already failed in the netbook market because it can't run PC apps, and Chrome OS won't run PC applications either.
But in the meantime, Google can put more price pressure on Microsoft, and maybe that's the real point.
Tuesday, 23 June 2009
Two videos for mobile app developers
Just a quick note to let you know about a couple of informational resources for mobile developers.
--Motorola is starting the online publicity for its upcoming Android-based smartphones. They did a brief interview with me, asking how mobile app developers can distribute their software (link).
--Elia Freedman of Infinity Softworks did a great presentation on his experiences selling through the iPhone App Store, and the lessons he has learned. It’s well worth watching the video here.
It's best to watch both of these, and think about them, before you develop your mobile app.
--Motorola is starting the online publicity for its upcoming Android-based smartphones. They did a brief interview with me, asking how mobile app developers can distribute their software (link).
--Elia Freedman of Infinity Softworks did a great presentation on his experiences selling through the iPhone App Store, and the lessons he has learned. It’s well worth watching the video here.
It's best to watch both of these, and think about them, before you develop your mobile app.
Monday, 8 June 2009
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:
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.)
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.
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.
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