The Industry Standard - Microsoft on Symbian's open-source move: Good luck with that - Comments

don't have to worry about

mobil — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 16:48:06 -0400

don't have to worry about the platform?... no it has been standing still for the last couple of years so one should not be to fast to embrace MSFT if you are a developer... But they have one thing going for them, 20 million software sales at 14 dollar a piece... So when they say that OS is a small part of a product i can assure you that 14 dollars on bottom line for say a couple of million units is money well saved..again MSFT has to say what they say, where would they be otherwise?...Vista is such a success and gaining users by the day..or is that they sell vista and bundle Xp so statistics can say they are selling vista? Major corporation see no need to hurry to "upgrade to vista" many not at all, ever. Intel is one.

MSFT is in for a fight when symbian foundation has gathered the troops. in the flank apple is the silence helper of making it even more difficult for msft to "win" this time..at the very least it will take some smart strategy other then has been visible today.

I think the "fragmentation"

orcmid — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 11:28:10 -0400

I think the "fragmentation" topic is too muddled. Yes, there is a kind of fragmentation among Linux distributions and the different platform packagings, but there is no serious forking of Linux itself, which would be a fragmentation problem.

On the other hand, mobile handsets are different among each other and there are fragmentations in the service offerings and the capabilities of different carrier and phone combinations. My Symbian-based Nokia Communicator could not use the Internet services of T-Mobile because they went with a different arrangement. My current Windows Mobile T-Mobile Dash gets some things the communicator didn't have, doesn't have others (no provision of fax modem equivalent, for example, no IR coupling, etc.)

So, from a customer perspective, there is lots of fragmentation and choice of software platform on the phone seems to be completely hidden under all of that noise.

The platform difference for installable applications seems to be between developing for (a version of) Windows and (a version of) Java. Surprise, surprise.

The outcome of the so called

Elias Aarnio — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 06:43:47 -0400

The outcome of the so called "fragmentation" is increased competition and evolution. MS arguments would be right if it would be the case that all consumers knowingly prefer different MS platforms to other alternatives. Claiming that this would be the case is simply ridiculous.

Consumers deserve better devices that inflexible Windows platform.

As to fragmentation - I wonder how many different Windows platforms there are after all and how well all different hardware manufacturers in China and India follow their specs if they even have got it?

To me it seems like market droids have spoken. The content is however meaningless blahblah.

Microsoft on Symbian's open-source move: Good luck with that

IDG News Service — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 13:52:12 -0400

Microsoft has welcomed the transformation of the Symbian mobile-phone platform into an open source project, because the software giant contends the change will create a host of new problems for the Symbian community.

"They're opening themselves up to some of the same challenges of all open source projects," says Scott Rockfeld, group product manager for Microsoft's Mobile Communications Business.

Rockfeld sums up those challenges with what some might call the "F word": fragmentation. Fragmentation is bad, he says, because application software developers have to create multiple versions of their code for different operating systems, or different versions of the "same" operating systems. "There are more Linux consortiums that come and go than there are Linux phones," he says.

The comment may be a bit misleading, because the Symbian operating system is not Linux based. It's a proprietary, micro-kernel, embedded operating system, and one of -- if not the -- leading mobile-phone systems software in the world. It's the heart of Nokia's widely used S60 software platform, used by Nokia but also licensed to other handset makers, such as LG Electronics and Samsung.

What's changed is that Nokia, in agreement with its partners, bought the remaining outstanding shares of the Symbian joint venture, then turned over the Symbian operating system to a new, open source entity: the Symbian Foundation. The challenge is whether the foundation can create and sustain a viable and vital community of developers for the operating system.

There's even a bit less fragmentation in the Linux realm. The Linux Phone Standards Forum (LiPS) has just announced it will merge into the LiMo Foundation, an industry group that's developed a full, Linux-based mobile-phone software stack as an alternative platform to Symbian and Windows Mobile.

Microsoft doesn't believe in the F-word, Rockfeld says. Instead, the company has what he describes as an "open platform" in Windows Mobile. "We mean that the platform is open to anyone who wants to build on it," he says. In Microsoft's definition, "open platform" means a proprietary operating system, the development of which is completely and tightly controlled by Microsoft, and that is accessed via some 120 documented APIs available to application developers.

Microsoft recently released Windows Mobile 6.1, and the first mobile phones to use it are just starting to appear. Cellular chipmaker Qualcomm sees a role for the future Windows Mobile 7 in a new class of mobile devices: "mini-notebook" or (perhaps) "supersmartphone" PCs, compact computers with 7-to-10-inch screens and Internet connectivity over 3G cellular networks.

The Windows Mobile software developers kit has been downloaded 3 million times; and in a few weeks, at the close of its current fiscal year, Microsoft will have sold almost 20 million Windows Mobile licenses during the past 12 months, Rockfeld says. "If developers want to build a Windows Mobile application, it will run consistently on all 140 [currently existing] Windows Mobile devices," he says.

Microsoft makes it easy for handset makers and mobile carriers because Microsoft does all the heavy lifting with regard to the underlying software platform, which it willingly tweaks to tailor a specific phone and its user interface to a manufacturer's or carrier's requirements, Rockfeld says.

The fact that the "new" Symbian software will be licensed at no charge will not pressure Microsoft to reduce its licensing fees, Rockfeld says. "The cost of the OS is an unbelievably small fraction of what it takes to deliver the phone to market," he says.

In fact, open source code can actually increase costs for manufacturers and carriers, Rockfeld says. That's because they have to do more development work, more customization work, and take more risks because they lack a reliable platform partner -- like Microsoft. "With us, they don't have to worry about the platform," he says.

Microsoft sees mobile phones as adjuncts to the desktop and laptop PCs where it dominates. "People are demanding more out of their phones -- in multimedia, in how they surf the Web -- and they want the exact experience as on their PC," Rockfeld says. "Windows mobile is a great complement to the 1 billion PCs [worldwide]," he says.

Rockfeld cites as an example the experience of fishermen in the Indian Ocean, who, he says, use Windows Mobile phones to check the current price of fish at various ports, then steer for the one with the best price. There was one such project in 2007, though this reference doesn't mention what kind of mobile phones were used. And Harvard University's Robert Jensen earlier researched the impact of cell phones on fish prices in India's Kerala state, though neither the linked article nor one of Jensen's technical presentations mentions the type of mobile phone.

Rockfeld says users in emerging countries, whose first Internet and computing experience increasingly is with a smartphone, will want to "progress to [Windows] desktops" once they experience Windows Mobile.

Unless perhaps they experience the Apple iPhone. Or Research In Motion's BlackBerry. Or a Symbian smartphone. Or a Linux smartphone.

It's a fragmented world.

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