Owning the Next Digital Frontier
I have watched the news from Redmond and Espoo recently with a sinking heart. On the one hand, Microsoft seems to be accelerating their mobile vision with great success. Nokia, the only company capable of offering an alternative to a Microsoft monopoly, on the other hand is stumbling.
My particular bugaboo (after four years at Borland) is the development ecosystem. I firmly believe that the mobile phone is going to become a computer in our pocket. There are 1.34 billion mobile phone users in the world and only 676 million Internet users. For the vast majority of the world, the phone will become the primary access vehicle to the Internet, and thus the portal to information, communication, and data creation.
As the phone becomes a computer, and while the market is fragmented into Microsoft, Symbian, and potentially Linux operating systems, software development will be the crucial battleground for phone manufacturers in differentiating their product offerings. Microsoft understands the developer and the importance of the development ecosystem. It was no surprise to learn this week that Microsoft has released a free mobile application development environment. Needless to say they will back it up with education resources, support for publications (books and magazines on mobile development), support for companies creating applications...
At Web 2.0 last week, Stewart Butterfield (founder of Flickr) told an anecdote about Microsoft. As his team was building their first product, they got a friendly phone call from Microsoft developer support. They person calling said, effectively, "hi, I am not calling to sell you anything -- I just want to know if there is anything Microsoft can do to support you as a developer." Needless to say, Microsoft can't call every single software developer in the world with this offer. But this kind of outreach is an indicator of how seriously they take the 3rd party development community, and the lengths they will go to to help developers be successful.
Where is Nokia? I joined the developer community. I asked for information about how I could get ahold of the product -- I am even willing to pay for it -- that we wanted to target for development. Nothing. Not even an email letting me know that the product was now commercially shipping, so even though they hadn't been able to provide me with a pre-release version, I could now buy it at a Nokia store.
How about LifeBlog (Nokia's effort to integrate data on the phone with the PC)? Great that they announced a partnership with SixApart but where is the open API and developer support program so that ANYONE can build a compelling application that integrates with LifeBlog, not just Christian Lindholm's friends?
How about just getting syncing right? Russell Beattie rightly points out in his blog that Nokia can't even synchronize address book and calendar data with the PC -- again, where is the open API with developer support so that the 3rd party community can fix this for Nokia?
Recently Nokia announced that they had licensed application development technology from Metrowerks. Nokia CTO Pertti Korhonen (who I hold in high regard) was quoted as saying
“This agreement illustrates Nokia’s commitment to Symbian as the best operating system for advanced mobile devices as well as our support to Symbian as the leading mobile platform for device creation and application development... The transaction will enable Nokia to provide developers with a comprehensive wireless tools portfolio, helping them to grow their mobile application revenues. We are very happy to work with Metrowerks in this important area.”This is the right rhetoric, but a month and a half have gone by and developers have heard nothing more. The same "personal edition" of CodeWarrior, for a purchase price of $399 is listed on the Nokia Developer web site.
For Nokia to succeed in challenging Microsoft, they will have to be 10 times more effective in wooing developers. Here are a few of the things that have to be done well: open supported developer APIs to all aspects of the device, synchronization, and the programs around the platform such as LifeBlog; a free high-quality development environment that makes it easy for developers to utilize these APIs, test their applications, and deploy across the Nokia family of devices; pro-active support for the third party development community starting with sponsorship of magazines and books and conferences and continuing through to pro-active outbound calls to developers to offer consulting, developer kits, phones for testing; interaction with the VC community to educate the VCs on the opportunity to build successful companies around the Nokia ecosystem...
It is an uphill battle and the news I keep hearing indicates that it is a battle that is being lost. It may be that as soon as 2006 Microsoft has become the dominant player in the smartphone category -- the category that I believe will eventually take over all phone sales worldwide.
1 Comments:
In general, I agree with all Ted’s comments here, but I'd like to make a couple of clarifications. First, though, full-disclosure: I work for Nokia, and I am work in the unit in which are both the CodeWarrior tools for Symbian OS and the much-lamented sync software. And, as if that weren't already enough of a caveat, I am also a former product manager from Metrowerks, so I know the CW tools, with all their benefits and detriments. However, these comments are my own, and don't reflect the views of Nokia, and I am not an official spokesperson for Nokia.
So with that out of the way, I’d like to offer a couple of clerical corrections. Sync does need to improve but it would be better to look at the current state of the art rather than lament how bad it's been in the past. The sync infrastructure in Symbian OS phones from Nokia has recently been upgraded. In the past the synchronization technology came from Symbian (e.g., in the 9210, 3650, 6600) and it was cumbersome to use. With the 7610 and all subsequent Symbian OS-based phones, the synchronization technology is much improved, and for the first time, USB synch is supported. There are still improvements to be made to get sync to the ease-of-use as, say, Palm's Hot Sync, but it's not as bad as Russell experienced either (which was a bug on our side that's been corrected as a result of Russell's bring it to Nokia's attention.) I strongly recommend a side-by-side test of the 6600, 7610 and a Treo and you'll find the gap between the latter two is indeed much smaller. Furthermore, I think you'll find the 7610 much better at being a phone than offerings from PalmOne.
Which brings me to my next point. In the mobile phone business, computer-in-your-pocket-future notwithstanding, volumes of phones sold to operators are the measure of success. Today, Smartphones, as with almost all mobile phones, are sold at retail based on their main feature, voice. Of course, an increasing number of advanced users also like the basic features of the Smartphone, address book and calendar and camera too. Third party applications are playing an ever-greater role in smartphones as users discover a world of additional functionality in their pockets, but those third party applications don't today tip the volumes one way or another yet. This will change, but not in 2004 and maybe not even in 2005. Taking Ted's comments into account, you only have to look at the market share splits, globally, of Symbian OS phones (of which Nokia Series 60 is the biggest portion) and those offerings from Microsoft and Palm. Symbian OS not only leads today and is predicted to continue leading, but at least one source (msmobiles.com) has identified that Microsoft will abandon its Smartphone platform due to slow sales and decreasing market share and focus its efforts on the PocketPC Mobile Edition -- which is a computer first and a phone second. So, in sum, applications from independent developers, while important, aren't yet capable of driving the success of smartphones today's market. In the future, applications will be one of the most important, if not the most important, elements of the platform, but to get to that place, Nokia needs success in the market today to build that base. In 1990 you might have used your home computer for Visicalc, WordPerfect, and maybe Castle Wolfenstein. In 2000 people started to regularly shop on their PCs. And today, we do pretty much everything. I think a similar evolution will occur with phones, though likely at a much faster rate. But in those early days of the PC, it was the core applications that defined the utility of your PC. On the mobile phone, those core applications are voice, address book, SMS, and increasingly calendar and camera. But the implied suggestion that Smartphone market will evolve the same way as the PC market (Dell doing phones anyone?) and hand the advantage to Microsoft fails to take into account at least two things. Operators are the king makers in the mobile world, and they have increasingly more influence over everyone else in the ecosystem. And consumers, who love their phones, still don't want to pay too much for them, indeed they want them for free. Those dynamics make the phone market quite a bit different than the PC market, so the evolution of the market will take a slightly different path.
But what about tools? If you visit http://forum.nokia.com you can today download pretty much everything Nokia makes at no cost. Nokia has regular newsletters for developers, and for businesses committed to Nokia platforms, even offers a for-fee program with business development support and a range of other benefits. But all of Nokia's software tools are free, whether that's an SDK or plug-ins for professional audio development tools so that you can compose a ring tone. It's all available for anyone to download.
Nokia is also IDE agnostic. In Java, we support Borland, Sun, IBM, and Eclipse. In C++, we support Visual Studio v6, Visual Studio .NET, Borland C++ BuilderX and CodeWarrior. We don't ask developers to change their tools to develop for us; rather we provide SDK support for any developer’s preferred environment.
How about free tools, an important benchmark of a company's commitment to supporting its platforms? Well, today Nokia provides Nokia Developer Suite for J2ME, a stand-alone tool for building MIDP applications. This tool can also be included with your favorite J2ME development environment, including Eclipse. Incidentally, Eclipse is proving to be the fastest growing Java development tool, and Nokia was among the first mobile phone vendors to provide support for our developers. In C++, Nokia in the past has partnered with Borland to provide no-cost copies of C++ Builder Mobile Edition, and made a significant contribution to Borland's effort to bring the first RAD tool for Series 60 to market. Nokia still works closely with Borland to provide support for Borland’s developers to target our platforms. Finally, Nokia today, at http://forum.nokia.com/codewarrior provides 90-day evaluations of the CodeWarrior Personal Edition for developers to trial. There's no expectation that developers have to switch to CodeWarrior, but for those that want a dedicated environment for Symbian OS development (including equal support for the also popular UIQ UI package), CodeWarrior gives ISVs and third party developers the opportunity to use the same tools for application development that Nokia uses internally to build Series 60 mobile phones and Symbian Ltd. uses to create Symbian OS.
Finally, Nokia is also working on adding new environments to the mix of programming choices. We will soon have Python support for Series 60, and other projects are also under review.
There’s a lot of work to be done in the mobile phone market to improve development support but asserting that Nokia will loose the Smartphone market on the basis of a comparative evaluation of tools and developer support fails to take into account Nokia’s already existing support and the overall dynamics of the global mobile phone market.
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