On 12/21/2010 02:25 PM, Shayon Pal m...@shayonpal.com wrote:
[...]
Considering the speed at which the cellphone technology is advancing, the
next phone may be much ahead than the current generation Androids and
iPhones. Creating an ecosystem (appstore etc.) wouldn't take more than a few
years. With more and more people using mobile phones and the population
explosion, MeeGo (and others) could easily survive and compete.
[...]
Remember Symbian? I agree, it wasn't open source before, but Nokia had still
tried hard to survive by allowing other handset manufacturer too to use
Symbian on their handsets. Unfortunately, things did not turn out to be too
rosy and figured the time had come to go open source, with Symbian^3. And,
there was Moblin too that tried to co-exist. Cut to today, and there is no
Moblin anywhere nearby, and the Symbian group has closed down. While Nokia
does think that Meego is the future for their company, have you ever
wondered why, despite the change in the heart of the phones, their
appearances always stayed the same? Why, with every single attempt, Nokia
has been forced to look back and re-strategize?
Well, it's common knowledge (atleast to those who're interested in it)
that Symbian though innovative in the initial years couldn't keep up the
pace. It did go open source, but then the strategy of open-sourcing a
failed product didn't work.
Symbian did not succeed as far as high-end phones were concerned. It
certainly powers a large number of devices till today for those people
who don't care about the OS of the phone. They just want something that
works, and that's the majority. To keep the facts straight, Symbian
failed as an open source product (there are a variety of reasons for it,
and they're not important), and now Nokia has taken it back. It's no
longer open-source.
Nokia has been changing strategies, yes, but I am not sure why that
should be considered negative. Their current strategy says that
Symbian^3 would continue to power the low-end and mid-range devices, and
that's where the market is. MeeGo is meant for the top-end devices. It
may not be fair to comment till a MeeGo device comes out in the market.
Nokia is not popular in the top-end US market, but overall it sells the
largest number of phones all over the world. And they make excellent and
durable hardware. MeeGo is not linked with Symbian's interface in any
way, and from the early look of it, it's something which could be
spectacular. See N900 with Maemo - it could be considered a hobbyist's
phone but it could do some real neat things when others were just
thinking about them (including multi-tasking for that matter).
It doesn't matter how good/bad/open a mobile operating system is, to be able
to sustain yourself in this market. Of course, keeping the hardware and
software open, and adhering to open standards are important. But what's also
important is how you utilise your software, and how you market it. I was
recently appalled to find that Samsung had modified the very find Android
into a closed-source OS of theirs, Bada. And what disgusted me was their
calling it open closed-source software!
Anyway, my point is simple here. Building an ecosystem that can self-sustain
and flourish is not tough. WHat's tough is to stays ahead in the game. And
that's exactly where Nokia has been lagging behind, for the last couple of
years!
Yes agreed. But it has been only a couple of years, and Nokia indeed has
realized it. They changed their CEO and brought in a US based guy so
that they can get someone who's a non-european to give a better view of
the actual market (primarily the US one). They've stopped announcing
phones months ahead of their launch, they've continuously improvised
their hardware and features - example, their qwerty keyboards have
improved a lot and you can do a single-handed operation, the N8 has a
mass-storage device connectivity in-built so you can plug-in a USB
directly amongst many other things. They're bleeding at the moment due
to the OS they have and its interactivity with the hardware. But I
believe that's just short-term, and it'd change soon.
Regards
Vivek Kapoor
http://exain.com
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