Apple’s iPhone is off to a great start, with consumers lining up to buy the latest 3G model and Apple seeing thousands of downloads a day from its iPhone App Store. And all this while Google’s open platform, Android, is still under wraps, even from some of its own developers. But this is just the opening salvo of the mobile phone wars, and there are quite a few battles left to fight.
Remember the old PC wars, when Apple had a huge lead but kept its architecture closed? Microsoft, which came in late and had far less glamorous technology, kept its architecture open and stole the market right out from under once-dominant Apple. Perhaps a similar scenario is being played out in the mobile phone arena.
Computerworld reports that analyst Jack Gold of J. Gold Associates is predicting that within three to six months, Google’s Android and the Symbian OS will combine into a single open source mobile OS.
Nokia, the largest maker of smartphones today, recently acquired 100% ownership of Symbian and turned it over to the new Symbian Foundation in an effort to create an open source OS. It says it expects the new OS to be available to foundation members sometime in the first half of 2009. Google is also pursuing the open strategy with its Android OS via the new Open Handset Alliance (OHA), and it says to expect a working phone by the end of 2008. The problem with having two separate open foundations, Gold notes, is that many of the same companies sponsor both the OHA and the Symbian Foundation, and few relish supporting competing OSes.
Enter Symbian CEO Nigel Clifford. According to Rethink Research’s Caroline Gabriel, Clifford has already offered Google an invitation to partner up at the OS level:
“If there is an opportunity, we will be happy to collaborate with them,” Clifford says. “And that could be on the application level or that could be on the more fundamental operating system level.”
Google, which Gold says is struggling with the complexities of building a mobile OS, is likely to take them up on their offer. And then the mobile phone arena will have a pretty clear cut demarcation line: Open Google/Symbian on one side, and Apple on the other. As Gold says:
If Android and Symbian do combine, it would pose a challenge to Apple Inc. and the iPhone in the long term, since only Apple offers the iPhone operating system based on Mac OS X, Gold said. “Not licensing the OS to other manufacturers is exactly what hurt Mac against Windows on the PC,” Gold added. “The parallel to iPhone is striking.”
As the old adage goes: Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it.
