By whom? The old Nokia was a terrible software company, with so many abject failures at creating platforms (Symbian, N-Gage, Ovi, etc.) that I don't think anyone else in this business can compare.
It's a good thing that they're getting out of software and concentrating on stuff they're actually good at.
As a platform, surely not. The wheels came off by the end of 2008 when S60 5th Edition went touch-only, leaving keyboard devices still shipping with the hopelessly outdated 3rd Edition. Symbian touch devices never gained any platform traction.
Was it a success as a software foundation upon which handset makers could innovate, as had been the original idea behind Symbian? No. Everyone that used Symbian abandoned it for more flexible alternatives. The lack of a unified UI development track didn't lead to the hoped innovation, but merely fragmentation that ultimately doomed Symbian. (It didn't help that the most popular UI layer, Nokia's S60, was so poorly designed and thoroughly mismanaged.)
I actually use a Symbian^3 device, the Nokia N8. It's not bad at all. I love the physical design, and the software works fine for what I do (although the browser is a turd, it's replaceable by the fine Opera).
Still, I can't escape the feeling that this is the OS that Nokia should have had over two years ago. Also, it's a development dead end. Symbian^4 was supposed to be a UI rewrite, but it failed. The promised improvements to S^3 have been slow in coming. (Still no Qt 4.7...!)
How is Symbian a success at this point? What reason would Elop -- or anyone else -- have to believe that the existing software development structure at Nokia could substantially improve this situation?
how about global market share?
2008: 52.4% of smartphones (RIM 17%, Apple 10%) [1]
2009: 47.2% of smartphones (RIM 21%, Apple 15%) [1]
Android came in at 0.5% and 5% for those two years.
Gartner forecasts that Symbian will remain in the number one smartphone OS position until 2014 when it is contested by Android [2]
Sure, it's in decline now, but it's been a phenomenal success.
Symbian OS has several version. The version that ships in volume powers devices like Nokia C1-01 http://store.nokia.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/productdeta... or worse. It's not the same product as iPhone or Android or even the old Palm OS shipped on Treo.
The share of Symbian OS devices shipping a version comparable to iPhone or Android is a blip on the radar. A drop in the ocean. And a peasant among Kings.
Most of Nokia's cheap phones are on the Series 40 platform, which is a closed "non-smart" OS (that has nevertheless grown some fairly smart features recently, like QWERTY keyboards and a HTML browser).
Symbian by Nokia comes in three flavours:
- Symbian^3, the latest and greatest -- e.g. the E7: http://www.forum.nokia.com/Devices/Device_specifications/E7-...
- Symbian^1, the previous touchscreen Symbian version (a.k.a. S60 5th Edition): http://www.forum.nokia.com/Devices/Device_specifications/C5-...
- Symbian S60 3rd Edition, still used on keyboard devices: http://www.forum.nokia.com/Devices/Device_specifications/E72
sign of the first derivative.
The sign of the first derivative only gives you the present rate of adoption/abandonment of the platform, while integrating gives you a measure of success over the platform's entire existence.
Pretty much since the time it was called EPOC. It failed to grow and support more resources, as phones became more powerful than the desktop computers of the time it was designed in, and it's no longer suited for current smartphones. It still excels on the low end, where neither Android nor WP7 reach.
If you put out android phones, you're just another fish in a sea of commodity handsets, no matter how you differentiate your product.
IIRC, Samsung, HTC and Dell are offering WP7 phones.
This is a mistake many Microsoft partners make. Nobody but Microsoft is at the top of the WP7 hierarchy. If WP7 is a success, Nokia's efforts will be rewarded by lots of competition with more money (because they are already riding the other hit, Android), not relevance.
I agree that Nokia is better at hardware than software, but I wouldn't go so far as to call Symbian a complete failure. It served its purpose at its time and did it well. [My old N70 with S60 from years ago ran a python interpreter on it. Can iOS do that? :) ]
It's biggest issue was probably fragmentation. There were too many releases - Symbian 3, 1st Edition, Symbian 2, 3rd Edition etc... That made it difficult to write software that could target more than a handful of the latest models. And with so many models available, the audience you reached was significantly less.
And it's even better when you factor in that in each case there is a viable and much better suited free and open option available. Linux would have made a much better choice as a transitional platform from IRIX.
It's nepotism on the corporate level & just like nepotism will destroy the morale of a department, this kind of nepotism will destroy the morale of an entire company.
It would have, but this was 1998, so very few of us knew this at the time. I don't know if you remember the tech zeitgeist in 1998, but Linux was still a pretty hardcore geek alternative at the time, maybe like Vim today. NT had things like journaled filesystems.
You can delve into history to see what the Linux community was talking about at the time:
http://old.lwn.net/archives/ http://old.lwn.net/1998/1001/
"Intel and Netscape are now officially investors in Red Hat Software. A year ago such a thing would have been almost unthinkable. But times have changed."
"With this release, the GNOME desktop is reaching a usable state."
"Expect that, with the introduction of pre-installed Linux systems from vendors like Gateway, IBM, Dell or others, the number of people searching out a Linux VAR in order to get a pre-installed Linux system will rapidly dwindle."
"Oracle has announced that it will ship and support a Linux distribution."
http://old.lwn.net/1998/1022/press.php3
"Like sex in high school, everyone's talking about Linux, but is anyone doing it?"
"140,000 Mexican school labs to be outfitted with Linux and GNOME." (That was the "Red Escolar" or "Scholar Net" project. Its failure is described in http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2001/08/45737: "RedEscolar, or "Scholar Net," has put computers in 4,500 schools, but fewer than 20 are equipped with GNU/Linux machines. The rest are running Windows 95 or 98.".)
So, from the standpoint of 2011, it's easy to see that committing head-on to Linux could have saved SGI. But, at the time, it was a risky decision.
They did actually start to hitch their wagon to Linux a year later: Scott Bekker "SGI Backs Away from Windows NT - Silicon Graphics - Company Business and Marketing". ENT. FindArticles.com. 11 Feb, 2011. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0FOX/is_15_4/ai_55675...
Rick Belluzzo was the CEO who made the NT decision. WP says had been working at HP for the last 23 years, not Microsoft, but he did take a job at Microsoft after being deposed at SGI. WP also says his only degree is a BS in accounting from Golden Gate University, a vocational school, so he's probably not very smart.
Here's what he said about working with Bill Gates: "I was always surprised how much Bill knew. I wonder how you find time in the day to be on top of how many things Bill seemed to be on top of. Bill is so passionate about technology, and he really is in the right role to focus the vast majority of his time."
To me, that sounds like typical non-hacker cluelessness. So maybe it's not that surprising that Rick was blind to the finer points of technical risk, compatibility, portability, and how the free-software community worked. (He was also largely responsible for committing HP to Itanic, effectively killing PA-RISC.)
The the historic state of Linux at the time makes all the difference. I should have been more general and said "Open Platform." Because at the time BSD was a much less risky choice -- it was more mature & didn't have the GPL license stigma being pushed so hard.
The outcome of the SGI WinNT decision is even more interesting when juxtaposed with Apple's decisions during the same time period.
The adoption & use of FreeBSD as the base of OS X's Posix layer shows how SGI could have gained all the benefit of a set of core tools that they needed to stop spending money on maintaining while still retaining control of the best parts of IRIX.
In 1998 both Apple and SGI were on the ropes. Apple embraced and integrated open source, SGI turned to a closed platform. Apple immediately got geeks like me on-board (still have my OS X 10.0.x disk around here somewhere). The difference between the two companies & where they stand now is the ultimate example of how open source can help a corporation succeed.
Apple was pushing very hard at the time to get geeks on. They actually flew their evangelist and lead dev for OS 7 out to my undergrad CompSci program in '99. They really wanted to get a foothold with a dev community & integrating FreeBSD not only allowed them to save on the cost of developing a whole new posix layer, but also was a great way to get a new community of developers interested in the platform.
But at that point Apple was already on an upward trajectory thanks to the iMac and iBook, with the iPod to come the following year. Granted OS 9 was a dog that has long since seen its day, and the technology in OS X was necessary to create a modern operating system that would enable the kind of UX that Jobs sought. But I question how much of it can really be credited to open source or the geek early adopters per se; certainly it helped, but was it pivotal?
I don't think it was open source itself that saved Apple, but the decision -- as revolutionary as it was at the time -- proved to be an excellent business decision. They added value to their product (hardware sales) by integrating Open Source. And as a bonus, they appealed to a specific audience without having to invest significant resources in selling to that audience.
It was a brilliant business decision because it not only opened a new channel of potential customers, it opened up a whole new set of possibilities for integrating Open Source software; they could leverage the movement. And that's really the significance of the decision in this context.
Apple, Nokia and SGI all focused on their core business -- making hardware -- but only Apple saw the value of leveraging a movement to add value to their hardware/brand. All three were in desperate positions, but only Apple saw the merit of leveraging the Open Source movement for the good of the business.
Where Nokia could have built on the goodwill of their brand by adopting an open and vibrant platform -- one where they could have as much control as they desired -- they have chosen to chain their fortune to a third party that has relatively little vested in their success.
The biggest irony here (other than Apple's role in Nokia's demise) is that choosing Android comes with very little risk compared to the risk that Apple took: there's ongoing development underwritten by a single organization; there's no licensing or quality stigma about the platform; there's a worldwide consortium of companies already using the platform; and there's already a significant and growing market share.
They have missed the opportunity to leverage the movement.
It had real time I/O. It had the best user interface at the time, with super fast scalable vector graphics for everything in '94. (Modern desktops have caught up some 13 years later). It had usable 64 bits everything before anyone else - R10000 was generally available in '95.
They were insanely fast compared to the Sun and Digital stations of the time - the only competitor was Digital Alpha, and IRIX beat Ultrix to the ground and mopped the floor with it.
These were the days of multiculture, where my employer insisted on having several Alphas, Suns, SGIs, RS/6000 and more to make sure we're not locked to any specific vendor.
Haha, at least Nokia isn't claiming that they and Microsoft are going to develop technology "jointly".
In the press conferences, they stressed that they're going to contribute to WP7 ecosystem (by bringing OVI maps, and their expertise with developing for range hw range, or something along those lines).
- Total domination of their own field
- Resting on laurels while others snatch the market from under them
- Panic
- Get a CEO from Microsoft
- CEO quickly decides that the O/S developed in house is not worth maintaining. And that the right O/S is no other than Microsoft's offering
- Company continues dive to irrelevance, albeit at a much faster rate than before
Well, the last one hasn't happened to Nokia. yet.
Goodbye old Nokia. You will be missed.