Nokia is taking over the governance of Symbian, leaving the non-profit Foundation as a vestigial organisation in name only.
Symbian
Nokia ends cruel and unusual ‘Symbian programming’ practices
Nokia has bowed to international pressure and agreed to end the cruel and unusual practice of programming natively for the Symbian OS. It still wants developers to target Symbian, but using the more humane Qt APIs instead.
Nokia has also torn up the OS roadmap, and will speed up the delivery of new functionality to users in chunks, as and when it’s ready, instead of in milestone releases. In less prominent statements, Nokia has clarified what had become a very confusing development picture.
Farewell then, Symbian
Ten years ago to the day, I attended the surprise foundation of Symbian. I was in Norway and sorry to miss the event today that closed the chapter – and probably the book – on the great adventure.
I find it exquisitely ironic that the philosophy behind the decision to end Symbian’s independent existence as a joint-ownership, for-profit consortium has its roots in the Microsoft antitrust trial. Symbian was created because the leading phone manufacturers desperately wanted to avoid Microsoft’s desktop monopoly being extended to mobile devices. They didn’t want a dependency on high license fees, rigid requirements and poor code.
Well. Philosophy might be a grand way of putting it – it’s more of a fashionable buzzword. This is the idea of “multi-sided markets”, which when you get down to it, is really just a fancy way of describing cross subsidization. The case for a “multi-sided business model” was made in an economic defence of Microsoft’s strategy of bundling Windows Media Player with Windows in the EU antitrust case. So take a bow, economist Richard Schmalensee, Microsoft’s favourite economist. It was Schmalensee who in the US antitrust trial argued that the true price for Microsoft Windows should be around $2,000 per license. The idea that emerged from the EU trials was that WMP created a “platform”, and therefore consumer benefits. The idea here is that Nokia, which now entirely owns Symbian, will cross-subsidize the market by giving away the Symbian OS, er … platform, royalty free.
Why didn’t Nokia become the next Sony?
When, a few years ago, I described Sony and Nokia as the only two companies who could call the shots in consumer electronics, a few eyebrows were raised. Sony, yes. But Nokia?
I anticipated that success in smartphones would be a beachhead into a bunch of other consumer electronics markets. Few noticed that Nokia already made TVs and set-top boxes. It had just launched a games console, too.
In fact, Nokia had began planning for “mobile multimedia convergence” in the mid-1990s, when it began sniffing out a next-generation operating system – it eventually opted for Psion’s Epoc, which became Symbian OS. For years Nokia put its best brains on the task – and sat back and waited. And waited.
Panic in smartphoneland
Google is set to give the mobile phone business a body blow today – the second punch in the guts it’s had this year. Apple delivered the first blow, by turning the operators’ subsidy model upside down – as well as making rival manufacturers look like knuckle-dragging Neanderthals. But Google’s arrival may prove to be … Read more
Psion: The story of the Last Computer
This long (40-page) history of Britain’s last computer company, Psion, was written over four days. It’s the longest piece The Register has ever run, we made it available as a PDF (for a small fee). Included are full transcripts of interviews with David Potter, Martin Riddiford, Mark Gretton, David Tupman and Nick Healey. (Charles Davies … Read more
What sealed Palm’s software fate?
So, PalmOS ends up in the hands of an Japanese mobile browser company that almost no one has ever heard of. It’s a sad sign that expectations for PalmOS software have been so low, for so long, that PalmSource stock leapt 70 per cent on the news.
The origins of this decline have been well documented here at El Reg, we’ll only recap the key mistakes before raising a spectre that haunts this tale of Silicon Valley history: a spectre called Apple.