Symbian Blog

In my keynote at last week’s  “Mobile Internet 2009″ IIR conference, I suggested that the best word to describe the grouping of partners, developers, and end-users that surrounds the Symbian Foundation, might be “movement”.

This suggestion resulted in feedback that I wasn’t expecting.  Several in the audience were unconvinced by the suggestion, or even perturbed by it.

To address these worries, let me briefly tell a tale of four different words: community, ecosystem, economy, and movement.

“Community” is the word with the oldest heritage to describe the partners, developers and end-users who develop and use Symbian software.  “Community” means people with something in common – such as a shared geographical location, a shared environment, or (as astutely described by Etienne Wenger) a shared set of practices.

Symbian Software’s second CEO, David Levin, observed ahead of one of the annual Symbian gatherings that the words “community” and “ecosystem” were both used to describe the gathering.  He asked the Symbian Leadership Team if one was more appropriate than the other:

• “Community” seemed to imply a feeling of being in a club – we are all in this together, and we will all look after each other; there are no real losers and no real winners;
• “Ecosystem” reflected a business reality that there are winners and losers; members of the ecosystem frequently compete with each other (and even sometimes eat each other) as well as often collaborating with each other.

So the biological term won favour – we spoke more and more about “the Symbian ecosystem” and less and less about “the Symbian community”.  (Moreover, there was a nice “pun”: Symbian consisted of Symbian OS plus Symbian ES – that is, operating system plus ecosystem.)

Over the years, I often wondered whether “economy” might have been a better choice.  Symbian’s rival PalmSource had been talking about a “Palm Economy” since at least February 2001.  Arguably, the difference between an ecosystem and an economy is that the former is entirely self-managed, whereas the latter can in principle benefit from a measure of intelligent central steering.

With the formation of the Symbian Foundation and the adoption of open source, it is time to rethink vocabulary.  Just because such-and-such terminology has been used in the past, is no reason for using that same terminology in the future.

This brings us to the word “movement”.  Movement seems to me to add some concepts that are missing from each of the words “community”, “ecosystem”, and “economy”:

• A clear sense of direction and purpose
• An expression of passion.

Of course, there will be Symbian developers who take part in shared community activities, without having a sense of shared direction and purpose.  That’s fine.  But I envisage that, over time, more and more participants will want to:

• Not just use the software, but collaborate in creating and developing the software;
• Not just use the devices and applications, but seek to tell other people how good these devices and applications are;
• Develop software, not just because their boss pays them to do so, but because of the excitement and pleasure they derive from this software system;
• See the bigger picture of what can be accomplished as the platform and the associated services improve – and start to root for these improvements.

That’s why I like the term “movement”, to describe what the Symbian Foundation is creating.

As I said at the beginning, the word “movement” unnerves some listeners.  They fear that blind passion could lead developers to make poor judgements.  In the words of lyricist Otto Harbach, “When your heart’s on fire, smoke gets in your eyes”.  The risk of faulty judgement arguably becomes worse, if you’re in the midst of lots of other fans, who are galloping along uncritically.

But we’re not looking for blind passion.  We’re looking for informed, intelligent passion.  We’re looking for participants who know full well what they’re doing.  We want developers and end-users to get firmly into the state of flow with Symbian software, where they can become both highly productive and highly fulfilled.  And we’re expecting plenty of fully-informed debate along the way.

That seems to me like a movement worth joining!