What happened?
Wednesday, the European Commission announced that it – along with an industry group called Symbeose (Symbian — the Embedded Operating System for Europe) – has committed over $30 million dollars to the Symbian Foundation, which had just last week announced that it was preparing for closure within the next six months.
VDC’s Views
Whereas Symbian still leads the ranks of smartphone OS shipments, its share has steadily decreased over recent years and the Symbian Foundation has been unable to maintain the organizational agility needed to compete in today’s smartphone market. Additionally, and perhaps of greater consequence, the Symbian Foundation lacks the resources to successfully market their brand and attract/retain developers – especially in the US.
Within the past month or so we have also seen both Sony Ericsson and Samsung abandon future device plans based on Symbian. Although Nokia appears committed to the platform, its efforts are spread across both the Symbian and MeeGo platform, casting doubt as to whether a sole Tier 1 OEM can create the groundswell necessarily for a self-supporting ecosystem to reemerge.
Additionally, on the heels of Lee Williams departure, I think it is reasonable to assume that much of the talent that drove Symbian to become a $300+ million dollar corporation is no longer associated with the Foundation, either having moved to Nokia following the initial acquisition, to Accenture as part of the professional services group acquisition, or on to other endeavors, as has Mr. Williams, David Wood, co-founder of Symbian, and Charles Davies, co-founder and former CTO of Symbian Ltd who recently left Nokia.
Sufficed to say, we expect that it will be difficult for the Symbian Foundation – in its current form – to rally back from irrelevance and compete with the likes of Apple, Android, and Microsoft in an arena that has an increasingly short-term memory.
Market Leader to Laggard to Under Dog?
Enter EU subsidization.
Certainly we all understand the European Commission intentions to try to retain and/or create jobs in the EU, since “20,000 jobs in Europe depend on Symbian.” The mantle of job preservation was largely the same reason why the EU Competition Commission initially challenged IBM Rational’s acquisition of Telelogic three years ago even when the US had approved the move.
However, it will likely take much more than $30 million for Symbian to regain momentum in the mobile market. In contrast to Microsoft, who seems poised to mount a valiant second effort to recapture lost share in the smartphone arena, the Symbian Foundation lacks the resources to absorb a couple years of mis(/non)steps.
On the other hand, the “iPhone effect” has continued to drive the evolution of other embedded device classes to incorporate functionality traditionally associated mobile phones and other consumer electronic devices. Perhaps the brightest future for Symbian may lie in application classes outside of mobile phones where there is a more forgiving refresh rate and development cycle. The big question will remain: can the EC, Symbeose, or just the Symbian Foundation itself steer the platform away from obscurity and convince embedded system manufacturers to capitalize on an ecosystem of available/existing expertise and software assets – when there may be even more incentive – and buzz – around the use of a different mobile operating system (Android) in new device classes?
VDC will be exploring these industry trends among others in our recently announced 2011 Embedded Software Market Intelligence Service, which will incorporate volumes on Mobile Operating Systems and Android and Linux in Embedded Systems.
For more information on our upcoming research and to hear our more about our thoughts on the latest developments in the Embedded Market and its prospects in 2011, please listen in to our webcast next Wednesday, November 10th.
Click here for more details on the webcast.
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