Nokia announced that they will buy-out the remaining shares in Symbian that they don't own for $410M. More interestingly Symbian, Series 60, UIQ and MOAP platforms are to be merged into an open-sourced platform over the next two years under the Eclipse Public License (EPL) version 1.0. The move seem to be aimed at countering threats from Google's Android and Apple's iPhone platform.
The question is so what? If we look at the various players, developers like me would be the most happiest one as we need not have to churn out multiple versions of the same application on several platforms (like having an app on both Series60 and UIQ). We can now focus more on "changing the world" rather than waste time making the same thing work on various phones as we have a few less platforms to worry about. Nokia may not gain much as they were anyways driving Symbian. Other Symbian partners like Sony Ericsson and Motorola may save some money as they too have to worry only about a few platforms (but wouldn't it make every OEM's look-and-feel kind of similar?). This would sure give some head aches to Google Android. On the other hand Apple perhaps would't care. Interesting to see how would RIM respond.
Meanwhile, Google has denied that Android is delayed.
3 comments:
Well, this is why I feel Nokia needed to do this. Nokia is moving from a "handset OEM" player to "services platform player". To provide a seamless services platform, you need a collaboration from a lot more players in the eco-system than what you need to make handsets. It had a controlling stake in Symbian anyway. This makes the control "water-tight".
This move by Nokia caught many people by surprise. I believe by "Opening" the platform Nokia has initiated a huge challenge against Google. All said and done, Nokia's only serious competitor is going to be Google!
What I don't understand is how does Nokia stand to gain from this. Add to this the fact that they are now releasing as well Qt under LGPL license, I can't figure out how Nokia will acrue any benefits from all these investments it has made buying up both Symbian and Trolltech.
Initiating this as a challenge to Google is all fine, but Google's agenda is different. They are primarily into information gathering, which they leverage with their targetted ads. Google does not charge for any of their applications since they reserve for themselves the right to use any data entered by the users in any way they wish.
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