Nokia's Albratross - The Symbian Phoenix.

The Symbian Phoenix.

Symbian itself has witnessed its average software licensing royalties
plummet from over $5 per unit a year ago down to $4.30 and then $3.40
in just the last reported quarter of sales ending in June. Symbian’s
software sales prospects are so dim that Nokia is acting to buy out
Symbian partners Sony Ericsson and NTT DoCoMo with the intent to
resurrect Symbian as a free, open source software foundation.

That will keep Symbian alive so that Nokia and its former partners can
have a software platform, even if the platform isn’t strong enough to
support itself as a commercial venture. In other words, demand for
Symbian is so poor it requires a massive bailout from a dependent
benefactor because the acute failure of the platform would be worse
than a prolonged hemorrhaging money pit.

Nokia’s new Symbian Foundation will not only have the ‘who knew this
would be so difficult’ task of opening closed software, but is also
charged with merging Nokia’s own S60 suite of libraries and
applications with those of UIQ (taken over by Sony Ericsson last year,
then split with Motorola, and currently spun off as an independent
company) and NTT DoCoMo’s MOAP. These three software platforms run on
top of the Symbian kernel. Nokia hopes to combine these all into a
cohesive platform running on top of Symbian and ship it for free next
year.

If this all seems about as likely to happen as creating a single
unified desktop Linux platform, remember that Apple essentially
combined the efforts of the three BSDs to rebuild its OS foundation in
Mac OS X. The difference, of course, being that Apple spent hundreds
of millions to develop the effort internally without political
interference between the squabbling efforts of several dozen partners,
took half a decade to pull the project off, and then used it
internally rather than giving it away. But who knows, maybe the
Symbian Foundation has discovered a shortcut.

http://www.roughlydrafted.com/2008/1...ian-dominance/