The focus on the mobile industry has been enormous during the last year. Device vendors, service providers, application developers, infrastructure vendors and content providers have all been jostling to position themselves in the new value chain. Like the PC industry, control over the technology platform is critical. It is less clear whether the critical platform will be the operating system (OS) or the microbrowser.
There are three major contenders for the OS role: Windows CE, EPOC and PalmOS.
Windows CE, supported by a number of hardware manufacturers, such as Compaq, Hewlett-Packard, Casio and Philips, so far has had limited success. This has largely been because CE is a shrink-wrapped version of its desktop counterpart, rather than built from the bottom up for small, handheld devices. This has resulted in problems concerning ease of use, robustness, synchronization and power consumption. Philips has dropped out of this space, having stopped production of its Nino product.
To add to Microsoft’s woes, its two major competitors have agreed to work together. Symbian, owned by Nokia, Ericsson, Motorola, Panasonic and Psion, develops the EPOC operating system currently used in Psion’s handheld products. 3Com recently spun off Palm, which owns the PalmOS, used on the highly successful Palm Pilot. Together these hardware vendors dominate both the mobile handset marketplace, as well as that of personal digital assistants (PDAs). The vision is that, combined, the two operating systems will provide a top-of-the-line product with broad industry support-both on the hardware and software sides.
But Microsoft does not give up so easily. It acquired STNC, developer of microbrowers, which are supplied to Symbian. Microsoft’s Mobile Explorer (MME) is operating-system agnostic, and has had some success in finding partners, including Ericsson, Sony and Benefon, and Samsung and Sagem probably will join as well. MME is attractive because it can be used to browse both Wireless Markup Language and Hypertext Markup Language Web sites.
Despite these efforts, the Symbian-Palm partnership is likely to have the edge. Palm’s recent initial public offer was highly successful, with Nokia, Motorola and America Online taking a share in the company, both cementing previous relationships and adding strength to them. However, 3Com still owns more than 90 percent of Palm, and Microsoft may be eying this as a future investment.
Jan ten Sythoff is a London-based industry analyst with Frost & Sullivan. He can be contacted at jan.sythoff@fs-europe.com.
