Nick Jones, writing on the Gartner blog network this morning, painted the following colourful analogy while commenting on the news from Lee Williams that a team from SOSCO have ported the Symbian platform to run on an off the shelf Atom-based motherboard from Intel:
…despite the heated emotions they generate, these mobile operating system battles are starting to look increasingly irrelevant. Arguing about which OS is running on a chip is like arguing about which glass your beer is served in. A few fanatics care, but for most of us the big issue is the taste of the beer not the shape of the glass…
It’s a fine turn of phrase, in a short article that makes a series of interesting points. But I disagree with the analogy.
The operating system platform in a smart mobile device is carrying out a role that is both much harder and much less replaceable, than a glass that happens to be holding your beer when you drink it.
Briefly, here’s the task of the operating system platform:
- To convey as much as possible of
the power of the hardware and the networks to multiple applications and services – and therefore to the end user – in a manner that is easy, efficient, and secure.
If you choose a suboptimal operating system platform, you’ll squander much of the latent power of the underlying hardware and networks. You’ll risk infringements of security and privacy. You’ll put too many limits on what applications and services can run on your device.
It’s true that, nowadays, lots of important tasks can be carried out by application platforms such as Web, Qt, Java, Flash, Silverlight, Python, and Ruby. But these application platforms have significant dependencies on the underlying operating system platforms. I therefore disagree with the thesis that all value is somehow migrating up the software stack, away from operating systems, towards applications. I’d rephrase what’s happening as follows: value is extending up the software stack, to include applications as well as operating systems.
It’s also true that, nowadays, some of the best mobile operating system platforms carry zero licensing cost. But again, this doesn’t mean there is no value in these platforms. Zero licence cost does not imply zero value. Don’t imagine that one operating system platform can easily be switched out, without loss of quality and performance, in favour of another.
Rather than the pint glass, a better analogy is that the operating system platform is like the incredibly sophisticated nervous system of a human being. When you observe a human being, you don’t directly see their nervous system. But you see lots of consequences of their nervous system – lots of behaviour which the nervous system enables.
Does this matter to end users of mobile devices? I think so. I foresee a time in the not-too-distant future where consumers will be asking phone retailers for assurance that their intended new purchase is running the Symbian platform. It’s conceivable, I guess, that these consumers will ask, “But is it an S^phone?”
These consumers will have learned that the Symbian brand stands for the following:
- Ready support for a huge variety of interesting, capable, enchanting, intuitive add-on applications (which can run in background as well as in foreground);
- Excellent battery life and operating speed;
- Minimal worries about software defects or device security;
- A strong likelihood of a great user experience.
> Arguing about which OS is running on a chip is like arguing about which
> glass your beer is served in.
Moving out of the world of mobile that’s like saying that because Linux, Mac and Windows all run JavaScript in browsers and Java there’s no difference between them. Quite a dumb thing to say…
> I foresee a time in the not-too-distant future where consumers will be
> asking phone retailers for assurance that their intended new purchase
> is running the Symbian platform.
Maybe – however my experience is that if people are asking for specific features they are asking for a specific brand (Apple, Google, RIM, etc).
It would be interesting how many non-technical people go looking for an “Android phone” as opposed to a “Google phone”.
Hi David,
I agree with David Durrant, consumers chose branded phones not the OS, most people do not even know S60 uses Symbian! I even saw one report from a ‘journalist’ about the acquisition and the Foundation who did not even know S60 ran on Symbian!
The Symbian brand should be pushed to consumers. Right now it is phone brands that are pushed for Symbian not Symbian itself. I personally think the Symbian OS branding could work really well and creating pull for more Symbian phones, given Symbian/S60 market hardend OS and operator conformance, I think this is a good place to build a brand directly with consumers
Wow.
).
This is a very good Apology (in Plato terms
I think I agree: the Nick Jones’s position/post it’s not really looking at the topic in the right way. Even though users care “more about what and how easily they do their stuff”, I think the “modern” user cares also about “the shape of the glass”.
And I like the subtle (?) punch to iPhone for not running background processes! Even if I have an iPhone and I love it, I think, as a developer, that the absence of background processing is a “kick in the b***s” for who wants to write apps. Sorry, I’m going OT
The Gartner guy could just be 100% wrong.
Arguably these standards and platforms have actually “helped” different OS’s proliferate.
We’ve seen very large growth in Linux, OS X, Symbian OS and RIM based devices in the last ten years. Who would have bet on that back in 1999?
> Qt, Java, Flash, Air, Silverlight, Java FX, Python and Ruby.
What’s so disruptive about any of these?
“It’s conceivable, I guess, that these consumers will ask, “But is it an S^phone?””
Consumers are already asking whether it is a windows/google phone.
How do you plan to make that happen? Are you planning and working towards making S^ a REAL consumer brand? If yes, the branding effort so far does not seem to reflect that. If not, too bad.
Anyone notice that Java is not listed; yet Java FX is??!! Everyone here including the host of the topic and the person quoted has not clue or forgotten that RIM’s blackberry platform is run exclusively on Java/J2ME-MIDP2.0/CDLC 1.2. Its been gaining marketshare, revenue and profits exponentially SINCE 1999. Began with products and services in North America, for corporate and business users alone then went for the consumer market.
Their the best for email – unfortunately – and because of their NOC ppl are hooked.
I employ Symbian Foundation to consider the following:
- Brand marketing! Co develop smart REAL marketing in TV, magazines and billboards to raise awareness. Too many have no clue what Symbian is, therein lies 30% of the problem. Consider BIG names like musicians, artists, actors, etc.
RIM has worked with John Mayer – away from Apple, supporting concerts – and doing VERY well with him and other actors/actress. ITs the BRAND their advertising – most common users (90%) of the market in North America do not CARE whats under the hood, just that it works!
- Improve the core elements of the OS:
a) allow caller id from gsm providers to be identified correctly from the inbound caller’s number associated with the correct number+name+phone type (cellular, cellular work, Home tel, etc etc). No limits on the phone number format saved in the device ie (123-456-7890 or 1234567890) – this is a ROYAL pain in the arse.
- Bring back powerful SHORTCUTS! In the menu, on the homescreen, in core system applications (messaging, contacts, wlan, etc).
- Finally bring AutoText – if you’re not sure what it is or just how POWERFUL it can be … pick up a BlackBerry, go into the main system Options, then click into AutoText. Create a new keyboard shortcut for text prediction. type 3 letters for an entire paragraph … save and test in Email, PIN messaging (more powerful than IM or MMS individually better than combined), Notes, or 3rd party applications having access to this API. Read my blog specific entry about this.
http://seriousmobile.wordpress.com.
Will end customers really beging going to ask “is there any Symbian phone?”. I doubt. I think those customers who ask whether it’s a window phone or andriod phone are very much mobile industry buffs…. At least in China, most people just want tho know it’s a Nokia phone or Moto phone, etc.
As you know, MTK platform gets a great success in China due to ShanZhai phones. No customers (except those in mobile industry) know it’s based on MTK. Actually, they dont care. What they care are low price and rich features. You know, with some UI tricks, the MTK phones can look like iPhone/S60, etc very much.
We can not forget that, Symbian will never sell its phone on the market directly(Am i wrong?). Actually, there is always a brand in front of Symbian, that is Nokia, SE, Sumsung, LG, etc. They are the brands end customers are careing. In such context, I doubt it will make sence to market Symbian in TV or magzine.
From the aspect of Symbian, device vendors and ISVs are its customers. Help them to provide more and better devices and applications. Afterwards, it maybe will make sence to make an ad/program such as “Symbian inside“！
Harry, if a customer is only looking at UI, price, features etc – he or she is essentially looking for what the industry calls a feature phone. OS and Platforms come into play only in the smart phone category.
You are mistaken if you think only industry buffs go looking for a WM or Android phone. Just walk into any retail shop in Singapore or India and you can see a separate section where only WM phones are displayed. All such phones carry WM branding on them and lots of branding items in the store also with WM on it. Google android, though new, has relied more on Word of Mouth right now. and the fact that the HTC phone is normally referred to as the ‘google phone’ is testimonial to the fact that the google platform is already a consumer brand.
The ’symbian inside’ kinda concept is exactly what the foundation should be gunning for. However, that it turn means creating a consumer brand out of symbian. which ,IMHO, is the only way for symbian to flourish.
Symbian Foundation guys> Dont make the same mistake Symbian and S60 made. Make it a consumer brand….Get consumers to walk in and ask for a phone on symbian OS…
For those who might want to point out that symbian was not a failure, just look at market share statistics minus nokia numbers. Nokia didnt sell bcoz it was symbian, symbian sold because it was on a nokia. And even that is not happening anymore; market share dropping everywhere….
Echoing “Zombie” and “Harry He” on the branding issue. It’s very difficult for a phone two have to very strong brands. In most cases it’s the device brand people go for – not the OS.
Exceptions being WM (one of the most recognized tech brands there is) and maybe Google (you might have heard about this one as well).
Most of WM and Google phones are not manufactured by well known device brands (e.g. Nokia, Samsung…) and in turn the OS vendor puts a lot of marketing effort behind its product. Just so happens that WM and Google don’t necessarily need to push the OS brand as much as e.g. Symbian. They are already known globally. And a big chunck of the WM/Google OS marketing comes on the side from the main brands (Windows and Google).
So for Symbian, to get to the stage where consumer volumes start demanding and asking for Symbian phones, the branding task is HUGE.
To me there is only one way to get there: make the platform live up to its promise, make sure the devices are truly great and innovative and offer features and services that people find irreplaceable. I see the Symbian brand building happening from people falling in love with the features and services on their devices, and becoming hooked on devices having those. The brand building should then be focused on emphasizing the benefits of these features with the Symbian brand.
The good thing here is that Symbian based phones have been used by way more people than the WM/Android/Apple phones. There has to be some heritage which can be used in the brand building. Even if it’s not the brand itself (S60, UIQ, MOAP(S), Series 80).
And going back to David’s original topic: I strongly believe OS matters. As a set of tools and technologies for the industry. To be used to meet the needs of the consumers out there.
Zombie, maybe I need more trave abroad.
Meanwhile, I should say, at least in China, most guys buy Nokia phones, not because they are smart phones instead of feature phones. It’s only because they are NOKIA.
Another example is iPhone. Lots of guys buys buy iPhone in China also. One part of them are Mobile Fans. They love the excelent user experience, and keep trying to install different Apps. However, for the other part of the buyers, it’s only because it’s COOL. They dont know how to download the apps, they dont want to pay for any apps.
I totally agree with branding Symbian. I just say, it’s this the priority for Symbian OS? IMHO, most of mobile phone customers(in China at least. ^O^), do not care which OS the phone is based. One exception may be that, to keep personal user experience, one may always buys particular OS phone, e.g. Windows Mobile phones , but it’s mainly becaus he/she can use the phone in the simaliar way….he/she does not want to change to another user experience.
The OS on a phone is like the glass for beer – it’s a good anology but the conclusions are wrong. Like the glass, choosing the wrong OS is only noticeable to a consumer when the choice is wrong. But, when it is wrong, it is very noticeable.
Imagine if every time you bought a beer it came in yard or perhaps a shot glass or whisky in a pint pot etc.
I too appreciate the analogy being used here.
The OS is becoming less relevant. It’s not irrelevant, performance, security etc are still important, but the relevance of the OS is certainly significantly reduced compared to the situation a decade ago.
The idea that web runtimes, Qt, Flash etc are dependent on the underlying OS is of course correct, but misses the point. They are dependent on an OS – whatever that OS happens to be. The OS just needs to be there and provide the necessary services. It doesn’t have to be any paritcular OS.
These higher level runtimes are all platform independent in terms of the API set and capabilities offered to developers. Sure they have thin layers that are dependent on the underlying OS, but this is a good thing. It’s these thin OS-dependent layers that allow these runtimes to be quickly and easily ported to other OS platforms. The presence of an OS dependent layer doesn’t justify the existence of one OS over another OS.
It is the very platform independence offered by these higher level runtimes that is sucking value out of the OS and into the higher layers of the software stack. Sure, there are some limitations in terms of access to some particular services that might be available on a given device, but such services tend to be device specific anyway and are therefore not appealing to developers of platform agnostic solutions.
As a developer, if you have the choice of investing in a platform independent solution that allows you to target almost all mobile devices, or of investing in a native platform that addresses a large slice of available devices, but by no means all of them, what should you do?
Depends on your business model – but the highest value for the greater number of developers is achieved by reaching as wide a pool of available devices as possible which is achieved by developing for platform independent runtimes, not by writing native code for a specific OS.
It’s also worth noting that even Microsoft acknowledge to a certain extent that platform independence and runtimes are the way forward. The .NET framework is platform independent, relying on the CLR, which itself is platform independent to a large extent. Only a subset of the CLR needs to be ported to different underlying OS / processor architectures. Thereafter, .NET is effectively a portable runtime environment. (And it’s been ported to Symbian and is offered as a commercial product.)
All of these platforms free developers from the specifics of the underlying OS. The OS is still important and continues to have a role, but the value of the OS is reduced and the need to develop native code is erroded almost on a daily basis.
From my point of view, this reduction in OS value and errosion of the need to write native code is a major issue that the Symbian Foundation will face as it tries to entice open source developers to work on the OS and to find new markets to adopt the OS.
[...] Symbian Foundation Blog Official mouthpiece of the Symbian Foundation « Operating systems matter [...]
I think that we have to split the engineer point of view and the user point of view. As an engineer and it is well described by Gavin i would care about the OS and development environment knowing that as a developper I agree with him the largest populaion you can reach the beter it is.
But as a USER i don’t care at all about OS and all this OS proliferation is just making my life more difficult. What I want is a device with features in line with my expectation with a good battery life time!
If it is supported by OS A B or C I don’t care at all and the analogy with the glass of beer is perfect to that extend.
Just look at a more simple thing, I am in the industry around mobile since 93 and we could have a chance to have a universal battery charger for mobiles by 2012!!! So long time for a simple problem like this with no real technical complexity but a HUGE interrest for the USERS we are, just because a myriad of engineers and marketing guys decided with good and more bad reasons to have chargers of type A,B or C all incompatible each others.
It is then mandatory to understand what the user really wants and not what the stakeholders in the value chain, and making a lot of money on the back of the users, are telling us what the market is.
So please we, as engineers, we have to understand that technology is there to solve users problems in first and not put the user in a position where he is the slave of the technology it is anyway my engineer view.
Branding will be a difficult thing for Symbian to compete on, when the likes of Apple, Google, etc market their brands, they can be seen from many different levels.
From a developer point of view, yes the underlying OS is important. But branding is aimed at the end-user where they see the end-user services mostly, this is why I think the other brands are much stronger because they might have a phone OS, but they mainly have end-user apps and services that they are known for.
A user is after an iPhone because it has established services like iTunes, App Store etc and the same with Google and Microsoft. That is what the end user sees.
For anyone to compete on branding with these guys there needs to be a more complete offering that spans more than just the phone OS.
Its always been a little confusing who is responsible for what here, eg Symbian/S60/Nokia. I think firstly there needs to be a more unified brand that covers more, and not have people thinking have I got a Symbian or an S60 or a Nokia phone, as they actually have all 3!
Things have changed a lot, in the old days things were clear, the operator, phone manufacturer, OS provider and service provider all had their place, but now days to compete, it seems all companies need offerings in more than one area.
I hope things change with the Foundation, and the end-user and user experience of a whole service offering is considered a higher priority then it has in the past.
[...] important is the OS in your smartphone? This has always been a strong discussion topic, as David Wood points out on the Symbian Foundation blog, but it’s not the only issue around [...]
DNA of the OS makes the DNA of the product.
It is the main contributor to a number of important non-functional characteristics of the product and user experience.
The DNA of the OS make one to sustain, another to struggle – see for example this: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2000/11/14/palm_cto_rubbishes_3000_man/
It seems quite evident that in this case Palm failed to recognize the importance of the OS – which led to a situation where a well established ecosystem was struggling for years.
So I can’t see the OS to become irrelevant.
Symbian, which has great deal of it’s DNA from mobility, will continue to excel as long as power efficiency remains to be a relevant issue. And if that gets sorted with some radical battery technology innovations, heat dissipation challenge will still remain.
I believe I’m about a month late on reading this here article but better later than never right? Finally someone at symbian of all places realizes the goodness of a working OS with hardware. Without a well thought out OS that maximizes the hardware, the device basically ends up being useless. That’s why after getting my N95-3 I really doubt the future of S60 and Nokia. This phone has a lot of potential but yet Nokia ruined with a crappy OS. It is stuck on S60 v3rd FP1 while there is S60 v3rd FP2 out there that fixes all the bugs from FP1 and the Original s60 v3rd OS. Whoopdeedoo Them releasing S60 v3rd FP2 with all the fixes doesn’t mean anything to me if I’m still stuck with FP1 even though they are the “same” operating system. Anyways the OS the the Nokia 95-3 has right now doesn’t fully maximize the hardware. I have download a patch that triggers the Accelerometer to work then on top of that another application from a 3rd party to have it rotate the screen for me. The phone is capable of using a 16gb micro sdhc card but then I know it won’t work well with it becuase the OS wasn’t created correctly for it to support it. Then I have to download another app that allows me to have a sound when I slide the phone open and close (this should have been integrated on there from the beginning) On top of that the OS wasn’t created in a way that allows for the upgrade to happen on a whim otherwise you know I’d get FP2 in my N95-3 which is only barely a year and a half old. Having come from a 6620 which that is a showcase of a full optimized OS with hardware phone I would have expect a lot more with s60 on the N95-3 but its disappointing and well left a bad taste in my mouth so good thing for competition right? But I will give you something for realizing that a good OS is needed other than just having stellar hardware (somethign I have been saying for a while now.) So maybe there will be a chance for “symbian” or “s60″ in the coming years against other OS which to me I think personally you’ll be catching up to or changing s60 to meet them.
Hi Lu,
>I believe I’m about a month late on reading this here article but better later than never right?
Definitely. Welcome to the discussion!
>…after getting my N95-3 I really doubt the future of S60 and Nokia. This phone has a lot of potential but yet Nokia ruined with a crappy OS.
Everyone’s entitled to their opinion, but you seem to be in a minority in being so critical of the N95.
>I have to download another app that allows me to have a sound when I slide the phone open and close (this should have been integrated on there from the beginning)
I see things differently. It’s a strength of the device that it supports downloads of new apps and other software that alter the built-in behaviour.
>…releasing S60 v3rd FP2 with all the fixes doesn’t mean anything to me if I’m still stuck with FP1 even though they are the “same” operating system.
I’ve replied here to your comments about software upgradeability of Symbian devices. It’s an important topic!
// David W.