Adam Leach
Symbian builds firm Foundation for renewed market push
On Tuesday Symbian announced the formation of the Symbian Foundation: a not-for-profit organisation with the goal of making Symbian OS, plus its UI platforms, available royalty free (i.e. open source). Nokia is to acquire all shares in Symbian from the existing shareholders and then contribute all Symbian's software assets (including Symbian OS, S60, UIQ and MOAP-S) into the Symbian Foundation. Along with Symbian itself, the founding members are Nokia, AT&T, LG Electronics, Motorola, NTT DoCoMo, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, STMicroelectronics, Texas Instruments and Vodafone. Membership will then be open to all for an annual fee of $1,500. In a comment last year, Ovum argued that the most effective way for Sony Ericsson to increase adoption of UIQ would be to go open source. At the time some thought this a controversial point of view - but yesterday's announcement suggests that we didn't go far enough! Ovum believes that the formation of the Symbian Foundation is positive news for Symbian and for the industry. Open source principles are increasingly being used to establish standards in the mobile industry (see Ovum's recent report, Open source software in mobile phones, February 2008). The adoption of the Eclipse public licence by the Symbian Foundation will encourage adoption and collaboration. This is what the Symbian ecosystem needs to push its market penetration to the next level, going beyond Nokia's volumes. Fragmentation within the software platform market is the biggest single challenge in growing mobile data service usage. The two most promising candidates to make a real difference are, in Ovum's view, the LiMo Foundation and now the Symbian Foundation. Together with Microsoft's Windows Mobile, there is a real opportunity for the industry to coalesce its activities around these three platforms. The creation of the Symbian Foundation reflects the fact that Symbian's competitive landscape has changed rapidly over the past year, with new entrants and old competitors increasing their influence. Linux has become a real threat to Symbian's business, with two Linux initiatives gaining particular momentum - LiMO and Google's Open Handset Alliance. The model that Nokia and others have adopted for the Symbian Foundation is essentially the same as that of LiMo. This demonstrates that Nokia believes that LiMo's collaborative model is a key part of its success. With a common development model, complementary technology and common founding members, there is a strong possibility of collaboration between LiMo and the Symbian Foundation. In the longer term there is even a larger opportunity for the Symbian and Linux communities to converge; this would make a significantly positive impact on service providers' ability to make money from mobile services. In a sense, Nokia has nothing to lose. Symbian's commercial success to date has been driven by Nokia and its adoption of the Symbian OS as part of the S60 platform, which it has deployed widely within its device portfolio. Even if the Symbian Foundation fails in its goal, Nokia will still have a platform it can use in its own devices. If the foundation model is successful in the market, either from Symbian, LiMo, Android or another player, then this will certainly place pressure on Microsoft to revaluate its business model and approach to market for Windows Mobile. However, Ovum does not expect any radical changes from Redmond in the short term. For Google, this is a wake-up call. The Open Handset Alliance must start to show that it is delivering a real platform into real phones as soon as possible, or it will be outpaced by other initiatives.
