These days, vendors of all stripes want to tout their “openness” to developers. But one analyst thinks two of the bigger players need to take their open platform ambitions a step further and merge.
Jack Gold, who heads J. Gold Associates, posits the inevitability of a merger between Google’s Android and Nokia’s Symbian mobile operating systems in a report released July 24 titled, “And-rian or Sym-droid?”
Gold conceded in an interview with InternetNews.com that he has no inside knowledge of the companies’ plans. “Some of this is speculation, but it’s absolutely logical,” he said. “If you look at the mobile world today, there are too many operating systems. If you’re an application vendor it makes no sense, or is extremely difficult to think about supporting Android, Symbian, Palm, Windows Mobile, the iPhone and so on.”
Nokia recently bought the remaining part of Symbian it owned with several other companies and then announced it planned to make the OS open source. Google spearheaded the Open Handset Alliance of companies, which is formulating an open source software stack, including OS, for mobile devices.
Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) has shown prototype devices based on Android at a few select trade shows and the first finished ones from its partners are due to start appearing by the end of this year.
“We expect that within the next 3-6 months, Symbian and Android will combine to provide a single Open Source OS. Many of the same sponsors are involved in both initiatives,” Gold wrote.
“Google doesn’t comment on market rumors or speculations,” the search giant said in a statement e-mailed to InternetNews.com.
Symbian also declined an interview on the topic, but e-mailed a more detailed response:
“Per our longstanding company policy, we do not comment on market rumors. What we can say is that the new Symbian Foundation will provide a platform formed from Symbian OS and S60 with UIQ and MOAP(S) technologies integrated, available separately under the foundation’s royalty-free license. This is expected to take place in the first half of 2009. There are no further plans to integrate other technologies. As a truly open initiative, Google and any party willing to access and or make a contribution to the foundation is welcome to do so and can sign up at www.symbianfoundation.org.”
Next page: The technical challenge
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A potential partnership, with technical challenges
Both companies have invested considerable resources in their very different offerings, and integrating them would be difficult — a point Gold readily concedes.
“Anytime you try to combine code bases, it’s not trivial,” said Gold. “But doing it now would be a lot better than two years from now when each company’s efforts are solidified. Right now a lot of it is still formative.”
The thrust of Gold’s argument is that both companies, even with their considerable resources, have more to gain by merging than by going their separate ways.
“Nokia doesn’t win by controlling the OS, that’s old thinking,” said Gold. “The money is made not because you can tightly control the device and the OS on the device. The money to be made is in opening up to a huge ecosystem of applications that people want to pay for.
Apple knows this very well,” he said, referring to the initial success of Apple’s download site for third-party iPhone applications.
On the Google side, Gold sees upside to the company supporting Symbian. “Google wants to make money off of you using your phone. The only reason for Android, in my opinion, is that there was too much resistance from the major phone companies, so Google decided to do it themselves,” he said.
But Gold thinks it will take the OHA at least three years for Android devices to get even as much as twenty percent of the market if everything goes right. A combined Android/Symbian OS would spread across a much higher percentage of devices more quickly.
The next big thing, or fantasy football?
Analyst Roger Kay credits Gold for coming up with an insightful concept, but he compares it to a fantasy football player putting Tom Brady and Terrell Owens on the same team. In other words, it’s just that, a fantasy.
“What is legitimate is that there are weaknesses in each company that would be shored up by the other,” Kay, president of Endpoint Technologies Associates, told InternetNews.com. “But it doesn’t intersect well in the real world. There is a big technical challenge and, even more importantly, one would have to give in to the other. His analysis is feasible, but politically I don’t see it happening.”
What Gold and Kay both agree is that open platforms for developers, or at the very least the appearance of openness, is an irreversible trend.
“Philosophically, I think you’ll continue to find companies touting openness like motherhood,” said Kay. “But sometimes what they are really saying is that they want their own walled garden to be the universe. Windows was always ‘open’ for anyone who wanted to develop following Microsoft’s rules. But now Linux has established what being open really means as far as access to the underlying code and the ability to customize it.”
And Gold gives Apple kudos for opening up the iPhone as a mobile platform that’s easy for developers to participate in. But he thinks open source alternatives will win out in the end.
“That is the one thing where I think Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) is screwing up,” he said. “With the open source alternative, as Google and Nokia are promoting, you don’t have to share revenue. Apple is asking for thirty percent to participate in the App Store. At some point developers are going to stand up and say ‘I’m being raked here’.”
