Nokia had some very interesting things to say about mobile operating systems in a recent interview. According to Rick Simonson, Nokia’s executive VP and head of mobile phones, there isn’t room for more than 5 operating systems in the smartphone market. Mr. Simson made his comments in a revealing interview with India’s Economic Times. He said “there is definitely not enough room for more than 4-5 operating systems” but the really cutting comment was “Palm’s OS is very good, but with less than 1% of the global volumes, it won’t be too appealing to developers.”
What we think?
Nokia is still struggling with the smartphone market, you have to take everything they say about the devices with a pinch of salt. But in this case I wholeheartedly agree with the Finnish giant. The fragmentation of device platforms is definitely damaging to the industry as a whole. Not only are developers are torn between what OS they should be programming for, but consumers are presented with a deluge of devices that have very few standard features.
And its not like Nokia is blameless in this regard. It has three different operating systems for its devices! Simson explained that Maemo is for what Nokia is calling “mobile computers” (see our N900 review), Symbian is for its general smartphone category, and Nokia has its own OS for its other mobile phones.
But if you look at the smartphone market, you’ve got a huge number of different platforms. Symbian, Blackberry OS, iPhone OS, WinMo and Android would be the biggest – and that slots nicely into the “4 or 5″ operating systems that Nokia wants to see competing. But you’ve got other systems clustering around as well, with Maemo, Palm and LIMO all trying to grab market share. And I’m sure there are more – but those are just the ones that come off the top of my head.
Would the detonation of all the other OSs outside of the big 5 be good for the mobile industry? If you take the home computer market as an example, there are really only two choices. You go with Microsoft or you go with Apple (or Linux, but that’s not really a big part of the casual home computer market). And with the two machines now sharing Intel infrastructure, many people are going for both.
I find this interview very revealing of Nokias smartphone strategy. It seems to be saying “there’s too much noise at the moment. Wait for the market to quiet down and mature, then we’ll make our push”. And with more Nokia phones in pockets globally than any other device, they can probably afford to wait. After all, outside of the US the smartphone market really isn’t all that strong.
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I agree with Simonson and think the next one to go (after Palm) will be Symbian. I used to think it would be a 4-way horserace between iPhone, Android, RIM, and Windows Mobile, but it looks like WinMo is out of it now, based on 4Q09 performance.
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The irony is that back in 1998, one of the reasons for the creation of Symbian was precisely this purpose – to reduce the number of operating systems. The theory was that all of the manufacturers could share the same underlying system and differentiate in other ways. This standardisation of the operating system would open the door to innovation by giving developers access to a much bigger cake. The Symbian OS was not Microsoft and was meant to displace the existing operator systems. Yet, 11 years after Symbian was established, there are now arguably more mobile operating systems than when Symbian was set up.