Won’t it take time to develop an open-source version of Symbian, giving competing open-source groups time to get their products out?
One of the factors that sets our initiative apart is the promise of backward compatibility with Symbian Version 9 and S60 3rd Edition. That means developers can release something today and it’ll be compatible with the consolidated release of the Symbian Foundation.
Because of the compatibility promise, because we’re starting with an asset that’s been in the market for a decade, that gives us a 10-year time-to-market advantage. Also, from a Nokia standpoint, this is the basis for our high-end portfolio. So our commitment to making this successful, for us and our partners, is incredibly high.
What sort of work is necessary to make Symbian “open source”? It’s not just a function of revealing the code, right?
The work is mostly crawling through the code to identify third-party components in Symbian and S60 and ensure that our suppliers don’t get ‘open-sourced’ if that was not their intention. So we have to go through the platform module by module to make sure the code is ‘clean’ before we transition it to open source.
Was this deal driven or initiated by Nokia? It appears to be positive news for all Symbian Foundation members, but perhaps best for Nokia, with its installed base of Symbian users.
I can’t comment on the mechanics of how the deal got going. But I can say there was high-level engagement by all parties, so this was quite a feat. Clearly, Nokia has a market share advantage in the Symbian ecosystem and we’ll be a major contributor here. We must continue to execute well to sustain our leadership. If we do that, we’ll be well-positioned.
Will an open-source Symbian platform help spread the base for Nokia’s Ovi and related Web-based applications and content plays?
We do want to get out of the ‘plumbing business’ and focus more on interesting applications, creative services visible to the consumer. We’ve talked a lot about our Ovi strategy. This enables us to do that. The fact that we have network operators on the Foundation board from Europe, the U.S. and Japan speaks well to the global opportunities of the platform.
What’s your reaction to analysts’ remarks that this is competitively driven by other, large open-source efforts?Symbian has had a great run in the 10 years of its life and this is about positioning Symbian for the next 10 years. Of course, we have to be responsive to market dynamics. Value is shifting to higher layers in the software stack and that’s where vendors like Nokia and its Foundation partners want to focus their attention.
Many of the members of the Symbian Foundation also hold membership in the other, large open-source efforts such as LiMo and the Open Handset Alliance. How do you see them deciding where to place their efforts among these various platforms?
Ultimately, those companies will decide where they want to invest their resources. The Foundation won’t do the R&D itself, that’ll be done by the Foundation members. If I were in their shoes, I’d put my money on the proven platform rather than the speculative one.
Is Nokia coordinating or controlling the R&D effort, to drive time-to-market?Clearly, at the early stage, the majority of the developers will be Nokia employees, because Symbian employees will become Nokia employees. But the governance of the Foundation is managed by the board, which is comprised of the five handset vendors, the three network operators and two chipset manufacturers. In that sense, governance is balanced.
We’re going to be investing a lot from an R&D perspective to push the platform forward. Certainly that creates a good opportunity for Nokia.
