Earlier this week the Symbian foundation announced through a blogpost called “Euromillions for the Symbian ecosystem” that it has received a substantial injection of funds granted by the EC and a consortium called SYMBEOSE, who each will provide 11 million Euros to the Symbian foundation. Which is the reason of such move? As the blogpost says, SYMBEOSE stands for “Symbian – the Embedded Operating System for Europe”. Who is behind Symbeose? That is still to be found out. There isn’t a website, and according to “the Register” they have been told not to expect to see a page anytime soon.
So what is all this buzz about saving Symbian? According to Richard Collins from the Symbian Foundation the money main is reason is the followoing:
“The EC believes in Symbian as a Euro-centric technology that is strategic for the future. It’s in a much more competitive position than it was when it first started. The EC bought into the idea that Symbian was the start of the smartphone revolution, and is keen to see that continue.”
With all my duty respects, but in my opinion this is equivalent to throwing away our taxpayer money. It may be true that Symbian was at the start of the smartphone revolution, but already years ago a number of strategic errors have been made that have brought the system where it now is: close to death. And if I interpret the intention of the future development plans well, this money will just be used to digg its grave faster. Why? Because it will be used to foster “new device creation, and to “develop new core platform capabilities”. But Symbian has been loosing ground over the past three years not because it isn’t a good operating system, or because of a lack of technological innovation (there are over 4000 engineers working at Nokia just on Symbian), or because of lack of devices.
It has lost its former predominant position because Nokia and other Symbian supporters did not correctly identify the shift of the rules of the game: away from just devices. Towards becoming a platform to host third party applications. The real symbiose and ecosystem is that of handsets and applications: 300.000 apps for the iPhone, over 90.000 for Android phones. And guess what. The word “applications” is not mentioned once in the entire blogpost!
Hence, basically, our tax money is being poured into an initiative which is still today anchored in the past.
But, perhaps even more fundamentally, should we actually care about having an “Euro-centric technology” under the current market circumstances? We should remember that Symbian came to life as an initiative from the leading phone manufacturers that wanted to avoid Microsoft’s desktop monopoly being extended to mobile devices. Is this today still a threat? Since Microsoft was the other big player that did not see early enough the shift of the rules of the mobile game, their possibilities of becoming a big player in mobile in the near future do not seem too high.
The real power play is taking place between Apple and Google (and to a lesser extent Blackberry). Apple has been showing that they are actively pursuing a strategy of market dominance: they are following a closed ecosystem strategy that actively exerts a gate-keeping function. As we all know, they are keeping Adobe out of the game (by banning Flash), and earlier this year it tried to change the terms of the license agreement of developers to give it own mobile advertising service iAd an edge. This attracted the scrutiny by the US government, and recently Apple opened up again its term of use to allow any advertising platform to serve ads under the same conditions than its own platform. But, of course, the threat of an closed platform leadership and hence absolut dominance exists. From this perspective, backing up an open alternative system like Symbian would make a lot of sense.
But of course, Apple still hasn’t won the game, and according to the latest statistics, Apple’s iOS it is not any longer the fastest growing mobile operating system any longer. It’s Android. And that of course changes the entire picture. Android is an open source operating system, created for similar reasons than Symbian: the fear of Google that somebody could dominate the mobile space and put restrictions on both search and advertising in mobiles (and hence the future growth of the company). To prevent this, it launched the Android initiative, leading a consortium comprised by a large number of companies. And today, this initiative seems to be the main contender to Apple’s dominance.
Hence, the open source alternative already exists. And since it is open source, anybody can use it. Does it make sense to have another “Euro-centric” initiative, when there is already another initiative widely available? With a community of developers that is actively fostering the growth of an application ecosystem?
Nokia is currently the only major phone manufacturer that continues using Symbian as its main operating system for phones. It has has repeatedly (and unsurprisingly) said that it won’t adopt Android. All other, including previous Symbian supporters and members of the Symbian foundation Sony-Ericsson and Samsung have made clear bets on Android. Which basically means. The market works. Companies understand that the war is between an open and a closed platforms. Steve Jobs prefers to rephrase it as a question of being fragmented versus integrated. In any case, the open / fragmented option already exists, it is backed by a number of private companies that are willing to invest in it. So why on earth are we using public Euro-money to bail out the laggard, Symbian?
This is the kind of things that we must be aware about our where our money goes. I see the point of “European” vs “US” but Android is based on linux, an European initiative! developed by US but open source!
Again, it shows the leak of connection between people and politicians who decide what to do with our money. Thanks for bring it up.