Every time I think about Nokia and Symbian, I can't help picturing a man knee-deep in molasses, running as fast as he can. He's working up a sweat, thrashing and stumbling forward, and proudly points out that for someone knee-deep in molasses he's making really good time.
That thought came to me several times during a briefing day that Nokia and the new Symbian Foundation held recently in San Francisco. A recurring theme was a deeply earnest discussion of how big and complex their business is, and how proud they are that despite the complexity they can make forward progress. For example:
Charles Davies, CTO of the new foundation, pointed out to us that Symbian OS has about 450,000 source files. That's right, half a million files. They're organized into 85 "packages," all of which have been charted out in a diagram that will be posted soon on the foundation's website. Davies was proud that the diagram is in SVG format, so you can zoom in on it and see that "this is an architecture that's not just a plateful of spaghetti."
The diagram looks a bit like a plateful of very colorful spaghetti (although in fairness to Charles, that's true of every OS architecture diagram I've ever seen). Anyway, the big takeaway was how huge the OS is.
Davies talked about the substantial challenges involved in open sourcing a code base that large. He said it will take up to another two years before all of the code is released under the Eclipse license. In the meantime, a majority of the code on launch day of the foundation will be in a more restrictive license that requires registration and a payment of $1,500 for access. There's also a small amount of third party copyrighted code within Symbian, and the foundation is trying to either get the rights to that code, or figure a way to make it available in binary format.
Those are all typical problems when a project is moving to open source, and the upshot of them is that Symbian won't be able to get the full benefits of its move to open source until quite a while after the foundation is launched. What slows the process down is the amount of code that Symbian and Nokia have to move. I believe that Symbian OS is probably the largest software project ever taken from closed to open source. If you've ever dealt with moving code to open source, you'll know how staggeringly complex the legal reviews are. What Nokia and Symbian are doing is heroic, scary, and incredibly tedious. It's like, well, running in molasses.
Lee Williams, Nokia's software platform SVP who is moving over to become head of the Symbian foundation, picked up on the theme of massiveness. He said the OS is on 200 million devices, with 200 device types shipped and another 100 in development. With support for five different baseband modems, seven different processor architectures, symmetric multiprocessing, and a broad set of displays, "your options are dramatic and huge."
This sort of infrastructure is needed, he said, because IT, telecom, and the Internet "have merged almost completely.... It's the perfect storm of convergence. There's almost nothing it can't eat or it won't use." He compared its importance to the creation of movable type, color palettes, and the Renaissance.
He noted that some people think the Symbian Foundation is a response to Android and other competitive moves, but said the company can't move that fast, and actually the change was in the works long before Google announced its software.
At dinner, I had a chance to chat with one of the Nokia managers. He was kind enough to let me play around with a pre-release N97 (more on that below), and the discussion gravitated to the iPhone. He told me how excited he is by the many new products Nokia has in the labs but can't talk about yet, and expressed some frustration that people don't understand why it takes time for Nokia to respond to changes in the market. He described Nokia as a giant ship. "It takes a long time to turn it, but when we do..." he said ominously, and then reminded me that Netscape once had a lead over Microsoft before it was crushed.
The problem with talking to the folks from Nokia is that you're never sure what they believe vs. what's the official story they're trying to put out in the market. They're disciplined enough that they can stay on message quite well, and in most conversations they focus on talking about what they're doing rather than asking for feedback or getting into a two-way conversation.
So I'll assume that Nokia was being serious. In that case, let's look at some financials from 1997 (Netscape vs. Microsoft) and 2007 (Apple vs. Nokia):
Don't worry too much about revenue and net income; those are usually tied up by the ongoing operations of each company. The line I want you to focus on is cash. That is your ammunition -- the extra resource available to fund a big marketing campaign, or a new product development program, or an acquisition of an innovative new technology. Microsoft had 46 times more cash than Netscape in 1997, and it wasn't seriously threatened in any of its other core businesses. It could, and did, spend Netscape into the ground.
Apple has about the same cash hoard as Nokia. Much more importantly, Apple can focus that cash on a narrower battlefront. Its situation relative to Windows is relatively safe. Although Microsoft can never be ignored, it is innovating so slowly that Apple can take some profit from its PC business to fund other things. The music player business is also stable; although it's not growing like it used to, no one has come close to matching the integration of the iPod and iTunes. So Apple is free to spend huge wads of cash to establish its new iPhone business. It can pick the countries and vertical usages it wants to dominate, and as long as it doesn't do too many things at once, it can outspend almost any competitor.
Nokia, on the other hand, has battlefields everywhere:
--In mobile phones it's fighting Samsung, LG, and SonyEricsson, and a badly wounded (therefore desperate) Motorola.
--In entertainment smartphones it's fighting Apple.
--In communicators it's fighting RIM.
--In OS it's fighting Google, Microsoft, etc.
--In online services it's fighting Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, etc.
That thought came to me several times during a briefing day that Nokia and the new Symbian Foundation held recently in San Francisco. A recurring theme was a deeply earnest discussion of how big and complex their business is, and how proud they are that despite the complexity they can make forward progress. For example:
Charles Davies, CTO of the new foundation, pointed out to us that Symbian OS has about 450,000 source files. That's right, half a million files. They're organized into 85 "packages," all of which have been charted out in a diagram that will be posted soon on the foundation's website. Davies was proud that the diagram is in SVG format, so you can zoom in on it and see that "this is an architecture that's not just a plateful of spaghetti."
The diagram looks a bit like a plateful of very colorful spaghetti (although in fairness to Charles, that's true of every OS architecture diagram I've ever seen). Anyway, the big takeaway was how huge the OS is.
Davies talked about the substantial challenges involved in open sourcing a code base that large. He said it will take up to another two years before all of the code is released under the Eclipse license. In the meantime, a majority of the code on launch day of the foundation will be in a more restrictive license that requires registration and a payment of $1,500 for access. There's also a small amount of third party copyrighted code within Symbian, and the foundation is trying to either get the rights to that code, or figure a way to make it available in binary format.
Those are all typical problems when a project is moving to open source, and the upshot of them is that Symbian won't be able to get the full benefits of its move to open source until quite a while after the foundation is launched. What slows the process down is the amount of code that Symbian and Nokia have to move. I believe that Symbian OS is probably the largest software project ever taken from closed to open source. If you've ever dealt with moving code to open source, you'll know how staggeringly complex the legal reviews are. What Nokia and Symbian are doing is heroic, scary, and incredibly tedious. It's like, well, running in molasses.
Lee Williams, Nokia's software platform SVP who is moving over to become head of the Symbian foundation, picked up on the theme of massiveness. He said the OS is on 200 million devices, with 200 device types shipped and another 100 in development. With support for five different baseband modems, seven different processor architectures, symmetric multiprocessing, and a broad set of displays, "your options are dramatic and huge."
This sort of infrastructure is needed, he said, because IT, telecom, and the Internet "have merged almost completely.... It's the perfect storm of convergence. There's almost nothing it can't eat or it won't use." He compared its importance to the creation of movable type, color palettes, and the Renaissance.
He noted that some people think the Symbian Foundation is a response to Android and other competitive moves, but said the company can't move that fast, and actually the change was in the works long before Google announced its software.
At dinner, I had a chance to chat with one of the Nokia managers. He was kind enough to let me play around with a pre-release N97 (more on that below), and the discussion gravitated to the iPhone. He told me how excited he is by the many new products Nokia has in the labs but can't talk about yet, and expressed some frustration that people don't understand why it takes time for Nokia to respond to changes in the market. He described Nokia as a giant ship. "It takes a long time to turn it, but when we do..." he said ominously, and then reminded me that Netscape once had a lead over Microsoft before it was crushed.
The problem with talking to the folks from Nokia is that you're never sure what they believe vs. what's the official story they're trying to put out in the market. They're disciplined enough that they can stay on message quite well, and in most conversations they focus on talking about what they're doing rather than asking for feedback or getting into a two-way conversation.
So I'll assume that Nokia was being serious. In that case, let's look at some financials from 1997 (Netscape vs. Microsoft) and 2007 (Apple vs. Nokia):
Don't worry too much about revenue and net income; those are usually tied up by the ongoing operations of each company. The line I want you to focus on is cash. That is your ammunition -- the extra resource available to fund a big marketing campaign, or a new product development program, or an acquisition of an innovative new technology. Microsoft had 46 times more cash than Netscape in 1997, and it wasn't seriously threatened in any of its other core businesses. It could, and did, spend Netscape into the ground.
Apple has about the same cash hoard as Nokia. Much more importantly, Apple can focus that cash on a narrower battlefront. Its situation relative to Windows is relatively safe. Although Microsoft can never be ignored, it is innovating so slowly that Apple can take some profit from its PC business to fund other things. The music player business is also stable; although it's not growing like it used to, no one has come close to matching the integration of the iPod and iTunes. So Apple is free to spend huge wads of cash to establish its new iPhone business. It can pick the countries and vertical usages it wants to dominate, and as long as it doesn't do too many things at once, it can outspend almost any competitor.
Nokia, on the other hand, has battlefields everywhere:
--In mobile phones it's fighting Samsung, LG, and SonyEricsson, and a badly wounded (therefore desperate) Motorola.
--In entertainment smartphones it's fighting Apple.
--In communicators it's fighting RIM.
--In OS it's fighting Google, Microsoft, etc.
--In online services it's fighting Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, etc.
Source: http://mobileopportunity.blogspot.com/2008/12/nokia-running-in-molasses.html
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