Nokia has had plenty of practise of keeping cool under fire this year, as it seeks to convince investors and customers that the media is more impressed by head-on assaults from Apple, Google and others than Nokia itself is. The company has stuck admirably to its national proverb ‘ ‘behave in the heat of the sauna as you would in church’ ‘ and kept aloof and unflustered at all times.
To the launch of the iPhone we had the masterpiece of damning with faint praise from multimedia head Anssi Vanjoki – “It is quite an interesting product but it is lacking a few essential features, such as 3G, which would enable fast data connections. Apple’s objective is not at a very high level.”
Now in response to Google’s Android Linux-based software platform for handsets, including a potential future ‘gPhone’, Nokia would spare it just eight bald words ‘ ‘we do not see this as a threat’. Even the comment from a company spokersperson that Nokia had ‘not ruled out’ joining Android if the Finnish company ‘saw it as beneficial’ had the air of an indifferent beauty giving faint hope to an eager suitor.
Amid the hysteria of the media, Wall Street and some competitors, Nokia’s cool response to Apple and Google is clearly studied and to some extent disingenuous, but it also injects a much needed antidote to the over-reaction.
The search giant’s sheer weight and ability to drum up headlines and industry support is important, and will help to galvanize the movement for a unified and functional open mobile internet platform ‘ even if Google does not, in fact, succeed in its aim of dominating that. Just as Nokia has been far more creative and quick-witted since Microsoft got serious about the mobile OS market ‘ even though, in reality, the Windows giant’s once vaunted success has not really materialized ‘ so it will also raise its game to keep Google and other PC/internet players with mobile ambitions on the touchlines. All this can only be good for the choices that consumers and operators ‘ whether traditional or not ‘ will have as mobile broadband services evolve.
Perhaps Nokia’s most important decision in its response to Google and its attempt to keep hold of the mobile internet software steering wheel will be its attitude to Linux. Many analysts are presenting Android as a threat to Symbian, the smartphone operating system company that Nokia dominates, and whose product has a majority share of the smartphone installed base. In reality, the real threat to this position comes from Linux in general, not one particular flavor of it, and Nokia itself has started to veer towards a multiple OS strategy, with Linux at the heart of its important Internet Tablet range. One of its dilemmas now is whether to try to make proprietary SymbianOS so superior for mobile devices that it can holds it own against the open source tide, or to back away and join the Linux movement itself, focusing on higher level products for differentiation. The latter is what really matters anyway, and although Nokia will certainly not defocus hastily on Symbian, a platform it can control, while it remains so successful in high end handsets, it is almost sure to port its key software products, such as the Series 60 user interface and development environment, to Linux (it is already putting key elements of S60 into the open source process). A Linux version of the S60 family would provide a direct equivalent of the top-to-bottom stack envisaged by Google, but with years of R&D effort, a major developers community, and an installed base already behind it.
For its part, Symbian reported a 56% increase in third quarter shipments to 20.4 million units last week, with revenue up 30% to $109.1m. This was slightly below analyst expectations, partly because of weakening demand from Japan, according to analysts at Nomura, who estimated that Japanese sales fell short of projections by 1.2 million units (actual sales to the country were 3.3 million units).
Symbian was more defensive around Android than its major stakeholder, however. Its vice president of strategy, John Forsyth, told a UK broadcaster that Google lacked relevant experience. ‘Making a mobile OS is a very specialized form of rocket science,” he said. “It’s not search rocket science.” He also echoed a point made by many observers once the dust had settled ‘ that any alliances involving multiple strong partners with different agendas are hard to keep together, let alone with a coherent roadmap. Nokia and Apple (and Qualcomm) have total control over their agendas, while Google will have to please many major allies to keep them sweet, while needing their input in terms of market presence and mobile expertise. Forsyth said Google’s Open Handset Alliance was one of a series of groupings that are “a bit like the common cold. It keeps coming round and then we go back to business.”
Most players were either committed to the OHA or, like Palm, showing studied indifference, though Microsoft was aggressively dismissive, saying it had been developing its own phone system for five years.
One thing that is becoming clear from the reactions of the other mobile software stack players is that Android will have a hard job to create any of the unifying effect on handsets or mobile Linux that it has been touting. The availability of the SDK today will throw some light ‘ as Bill Weinberg, general manager of the LiPS Forum, another open mobile Linux effort, said, “operators want code, not standards’. He pointed out that the Apache open source license ‘doesn’t prevent fragmentation and will allow Android to be taken in different directions. But this is really what operators want because they do not strive to interoperate, so it’s in their interest to fork the Android stack in different directions.”