Consolidation and the Future of the Mobile OS

So I’ve found that running a startup and blogging is a difficult mix, but Nokia’s aquisition of the rest of Symbian and its new plans to go open source have brought me out of hibernation for a little commentary.

First off, this is great news, not because of the open source statement but because all of the Symbian variants are being melted down and re-cast under S60. The other variants weren’t really that interesting anyway. UIQ was semi-interesting, but there is so little interest in it by developers they had to cancel this year’s (U.S.) UIQ Developer Conference for lack of attendance. UIQ’s interface is also a love-it-or-hate-it thing, and it 3 softbutton design is one that I think can safely be tossed in the bin. Motorola nixed its 3 softbutton design a year or more ago in favor of the more traditional 2 button model due to the simple fact that if you want customers who currently carry other brands to pick up your shiny new ringer, its better if it at least feels familiar. UIQ of course had touch support as well, making it initially a bit ahead of its time but the new Nokia Tube will bring touch support to S60 anyway. The fact that DoCoMo is tossing in MOAP as well is also noteworthy, though that was a Japan-only variant.

As a developer trying to put content on all these variants, consolidation is a welcome occurrence. But what about SonyEricsson and Motorola and their roadmaps? Well, we should still see UIQ devices over the next 18 months as the device pipeline empties, but this consolidation I’m sure is welcome by those two companies as well. Why? Because clearly they’ve learned by now that the expense of building both the toolkit as well as trying to innovate on top of that toolkit (as well as support developers and their innovation) is extremely painful. Development on any of these Symbian variants is far from easy. Its low-level, tricky C code with a host of release variants and development is slow and expensive.

So that means we are now effectively down to RIM, iPhone, Windows Mobile, and S60 in terms of development platforms. I’ll get to Android in a second.  Some of you may note the lack of J2ME in that list given my background. Well its sad to say but I believe J2ME as a platform is dead - it is basically a gaming engine and will continue to amount to as much, but no host of new JSRs can fix the fundamental problems it has.

So what about Android? Ironically, the platform which is doing the most to push Google to prominence on mobile is the iPhone. Remember, Google is first and foremost, an advertising company. At this point they only do search and the rest of the things they do to make more money selling ads. Google needs the “mobile web” to be realized in order to grow their billboard space - go from 800 million PCs to 3 billion mobiles and Google has the runway it needs to continue growing revenues for a while to come. Google does not need Android to do this however. A few more quarters of touchy earnings and they will certainly be questioning the ROI on Android if they are not already doing so (as I understand it, this is already the case).

So what happens then? My hunch is that Dalvik, the application platform of Android will get contributed to LiMo and Google will wash its hands of the whole debacle altogether. LiMo is a Linux platform designed by mobile folks for mobile folks - but its major issue right now is the lack of a good application layer. Google should parlay the work they kickstarted with developers and simply turn them and Dalvik over to LiMo.

If that were to happen, we’d have Windows Mobile, S60, LiMo (Linux) , and of course RIM and iPhone. And what about all the legacy RTOS phones? Well, what we’re going to see there is the accelerated demise of the RTOS handset - even faster than any of the predictions I’ve seen so far. The obvious reason for this is the new price point for so-called “smartphones”. These phones are now free with a contract just like feature phones always have been. The thing that will seal the deal is the new experience that is going to be available on these smartphones versus the old RTOS phones - it will be an easy choice for the consumer and one which Retailers are incented to help them make.

The underlying driver for all of this is actually the content (not the operators or OEMs).  Go talk to any major brand or content owner and you’ll know exactly how completely broken mobile is. The pressure that is building up behind this is tremendous, and that pressure will eventually seek out a solution that will bypass any artificial blocks that stand in the way today (either from OEMs, or Operators, or what not). So-called “smart phones” go a long way to accomplish this, because they are open enough to develop and deploy applications on without Operator or OEM obstacles. Combine the low price point with a huge surge in availability of content and applications and I think the RTOS phones go the way of the dodo pretty quickly (alhtough I expect may enjoy a final gasp in the emerging markets).

So we’ll see, but as always, interesting times in the mobile space and this consolidation is fantastic.

Posted by Mark July 2008

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