Huge moves this week in the world of mobile as Nokia bought the half of Symbian it didn't already own, and announced plans to make its software free of charge. That's millions in revenue it is giving up. Very Scandinavian.
Symbian was created by Psion with Nokai, which once led the charge with a British PDA that was ahead of the curve. The Psion Organisers are long gone (the last was created more than ten years ago), but Symbian is now in more than 200m mobile phones.
Mobile is the next great tech battlefield after the desktop and the competition is fierce. With Apple vying with the overrated/overpriced iPhone, Research In Motion with BlackBerry, Google now in the market with its gPhone and Android operating system, Microsoft and Symbian.
Nokia needed to do something bold to take on the threat posed by Google and Apple and it has. It is buying stakes from share holders Ericsson, Sony Ericsson, Panasonic, and Siemens. Samsung is also expected to sell. It will then take its own smartphone operating system and merge it with that of rivals to create one free-of-charge open source software product.
The product will be controlled by non-profit organisation, the Symbian Foundation. Members of the foundation, and there are already 20, will all be able to use the new operating system, install it for free and develop their own applications.
Symbian's chief executive, Nigel Clifford, has called the creation of the Symbian Foundation as "epoch-making". That sounds about right, it could be.
It creates a powerful incentive for mobile firms like Vodafone, AT&T, Orange, Nokia, Samsung and LG who are already signed up to use the system and rival Google.
Beating Google is essential and this takes the fight to them before it has even got its act fully together. We've already seen how it acts in the online world with its strangle hold over search and the search marketing.
Gordon Macmillan
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