by Lee Williams
Well, it’s been a big year and I want to take some time to sum up a few major points. I believe it is becoming clear that Symbian, both the platform and the organisation, is headed in a very positive direction in the coming year. This is due to the hard work and the commitments of a great number of people from around the ecosystem, and I want to send a special thanks to all of you.
We have good news as the year comes to a close. First, though it has been a huge amount of work getting the Foundation going, judging from comments on the blog and around the Web, we’ve seen both positive and constructive suggestions about our progress. From where we sit in the foundation, it’s been quite a journey to define what a Foundation like this should do, and to execute our role in various aspects of the marketplace.
While I am reading some of the comments on the web and taking the feedback on board as best I can, it is clear that many recognise that the folks here and throughout the eco-system have worked incredibly hard to create a path breaking new initiative, and with little or no precedent to work off.
All involved should feel proud of their work toward this new frontier we have created. In looking at 2010 as a timeframe for even more progress, we are poised to continue to surpass expectations as to what we can accomplish in the marketplace with these initiatives and this is in large part due to the work completed and the foundation for progress established during this year, 2009.
Why does 2010 look so good? Well Nokia, a company that is clearly our largest initial contributor, could not have done more to support these concepts and to show their support for the Foundation and platform than the endorsement they gave us at their Capital Markets Day at the start of December. Let me elaborate upon what some of this means.
Symbian’s value in the future mobile market is its incredible flexibility, robustness and adaptability to future needs. We enjoy better multitasking capability, better power management, security, and scale of market than any mobile platform out there. It is clear that we have a unique offering, and an OS architected for mobile from day 1, and poised to continue to appeal to the marketplace at a tremendous scale.
Nokia’s endorsement of Symbian specifically marks out our future as a mobile computing and communications platform for the masses, globally marketed in smartphones costing $150 and under, and being an essential ingredient for helping others embrace the power of new types of communication.
Symbian will maintain it’s role as the smartphone for the masses which is where such a powerful, flexible platform belongs. An exciting aspect of this is that it also means that the offering will continue to have a huge impact on the lifestyles of people around the world.
There’ll be an estimated 4.6 billion subscriptions to mobile networks by the end of this year – just a few days away. To give you some sense of what this implies in terms of reach and significance, there are only 480 million newspapers circulated daily, around 1.1 billion personal computers, and 1.7 billion Internet users active globally.
From 2010 onwards Symbian powered smartphones will continue to bring the web to people who cannot afford a PC and who need to be on the move as a part of their lifestyle, perhaps because they might be farmers in a rural area of the India sub-continent, or small business owners in a remote area of China. We will be directly assisting them in linking them into a global economy, and we will be giving them computing power and access to essential applications and services in finance, payments, healthcare, transport, entertainment…and so on.
Through our apps community and future Symbian releases we’ll be bridging the gap between those 1.7 billion internet users and those among the 4.6 billion people who are mobile subscribers and who are not yet online. The future of the web, and all of it’s power to have a positive impact on people’s lives, is clearly mobile. This is a near term future, not one that is so far out there, and one that we can map and shape now. We see that what we do in our business and social lives here in the Symbian community will be dramatically more inclusive of the needs of hundreds of millions of people who so far have not had access to the benefits of computing and communications technology.
I’m looking forward to engaging you in a dialog about how that future should shape up, and what our collective role looks like. Thanks for being with us in 2009, and have a very Merry Christmas, and celebrated New Year.
