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On 24 June Nokia, supplier of the world's most popular smartphone platform (the S60), announces it is buying the rest of Symbian for €264
million and then - wait for it - turning it over to the Symbian Foundation! The Foundation is a non-profit with 20 or so members whose goal is to help developers adopt Symbian OS. 10 years ago Symbian was just another British company marketing the Psion organizer before it stopped its hardware business to concentrate its OS for smartphones - smart move! With the support of Nokia and also Sony Ericsson, Panasonic and Siemens, Symbian has gained 60% of the global smartphone market amounting to over 200 million phones.
Clearly Nokia wasn't going to be left out with Google's Android (and the Open Handset Alliance) on the one hand and the iPhone phenomenon on the other. Nokia definitely isn't behaving like a traditional hardware company!
So where does that leave Microsoft's Mobile Windows whose licensing costs about $8 to $15 for each handset and has only 13% of the whole handset market??
So how does one try to compete with the phenomenal success of Apple's iPhone? Apple's 10 million shipment target by end of 2008 does not seem aggressive in anyone's imagination with what they already shipped.
The rumor-mill about the G-phone was so high that there was a (slight) disappointment when it turned out there was no phone. But the demo of the operating system, Android provided even more possibilities. So Google was not going into the handset business! The Android architecture is fully open, full of features and tools - to be expected from an open organization like Google. Check out the demos of what is possible here.
But I believe this is an even better strategy - get even more developers and manufacturers to support the OS openly by creating an open forum - the Open Handset Alliance. Big name mobile operators, handset manufacturers and semiconductor companies have become members. Of course there is the unaccounted army of developers lurking in garages and basements coding away hoping all to win part of the US$10 million challenge to come up with cool apps!!
So Google's strategy is to throw money at developers with their innovative Android OS. Apple's approach is to entice support from developers by the sexy product that is already flying off the shelves. With the two juggernauts on the road, who is there to stand in the way? What is Nokia going to do?
The iPhone phenomenon is clearly amazing. The design is sexy, the marketing slick and the product so cool. The screen is truly big enough to share a high res photo with a friend in Starbucks, or listening to your personal music mix while waiting. Everything else is un-necessary to carry around. It is difficult to ask for more in one device to carry around - anywhere in the world.
That is why it is probably not difficult to imagine success of shipping 10 million iPhones by end of 2008 to the 70 countries that Mr Jobs plans to introduce in. That is probably only the beginning. What has got the start-up community in a frenzy again is allowing application developers to make money on iPhone too. 5,200 developers attended Apple's Developer Conference in June to here the introduction of iPhone 3G and already 250,000 iPhone SDK have been downloaded. Piper Jaffray's analyst Gene Munster predicts a US$1 billion+ eco-system developed by the end of 2009. What a great strategy! iPhone economy, eco-system, whatever you want to call it, with developers around the world, the iPhone will stand to challenge handphone manufacturers around the world. Join iPhone or be history!
