The Open Road

The mobile-computing world is increasingly a two-horse race between Google and Apple, with Apple clearly in the lead but Google Android making up ground quickly. Microsoft and Symbian are also still in the game, but the ultimate winner will be the one that best appeals to consumers or developers.

Or both.

This struck home while reading Mark Sigal's analysis of the "inevitability" of Google Android. On his way to dismantling the idea that Google's victory is assured, Sigal stumbles into apparently divergent interest groups:

[U]nlike the PC, where "good enough" was the bar required to seize the market,...for most consumers, their mobile device of choice is a lifestyle decision, a personal, ever-present extension of themselves that is resident in a way that never existed before with the PC--a value proposition that Apple has completely run with on iPhone (and iPod before that).

Fundamentally, though, mobile is a platform play, a game that is largely won by securing the hearts and minds of developers, and for them, the expectation bar is now set pretty high, owing to the success of iPhone across so many domains....

If you're Google (or Microsoft or Symbian), then, who do you target? Developers or consumers?

It's a real question, as while both parties' interests ultimately converge (consumers want developers to make great applications so that those same consumers can pay the developers lots of money), the short-term interests of consumers (sexy product) and developers (ease and richness of development platform) don't necessarily go together.

Motorola RAZR? Sexy product, lame development platform. Windows Mobile? Arguably a solid development platform...with almost zero sex appeal for consumers.

This is why John Carroll is probably right to argue that Microsoft should reinvigorate its mobile strategy with an emphasis on .Net as a powerful way for developers to write powerful mobile applications, it's not going to be enough. Microsoft can port all the business applications it wants for Windows Mobile. It won't matter.

Consumers don't buy business applications. Not until after they've chosen a phone that meets their personal needs, first.

Yes, enterprises do try to dictate corporate standards with Blackberrys and dull Dell PCs heading the list. But in the fast-changing mobile market, you can't hope that consumers will be forced to use your software. You want them to want to do so.

This is why I believe Google has a good chance of taking a serious bite out of Apple, and Symbian and Microsoft do not. Symbian is too difficult an application development platform, as Gartner notes, and Microsoft...is boring.

Not that it needs to be. XBox certainly isn't, and actually helped Microsoft surpass Apple in a recent consumer survey focused on product innovation.

But not in mobile, or even in computers. Apple understands how to create wicked cool products that consumers want, which is why its Mac sales are projected to grow by 26 percent in 2010, right through the recession, and why its iPhone continues to thrive.

But Apple's Achilles heel could well be developers, which are reportedly tiring of Apple's apparently arbitrary application approval and updating process. If Google can continue to help handset manufacturers to achieve the "Wow factor," while simultaneously creating a more open, robust development platform, it just might be able to beat Apple at the game it started.

In other words, the winning mobile vendor will be the one that marries sex appeal for consumers with platform appeal for developers. Google is on course to deliver, but it probably needs to win big with consumers before it makes waves with developers.

Is Apple an enterprise software or hardware company? That's the question Gartner's Nick Jones asks, ultimately answering with "you have to have a pretty relaxed definition [of enterprise] before Apple fits it."

It strikes me, however, that "enterprise" isn't something you define. It's just what gets used within the enterprise.

With this definition in mind, Apple clearly fits the "enterprise" moniker, whether Apple wants it or not. As BusinessWeek reported back in 2008, the Mac is finding its way into enterprise computing, with or without the IT department's blessing. Ditto the iPhone.

Is it somehow less enterprise because the CIO didn't issue a policy giving permission?

Maybe "enterprise" means something more than "gets used a lot within the enterprise." In fact, Jones points out a few reasons he, personally, doesn't feel Apple is an enterprise vendor:

Apple does the bare minimum for enterprises, they aren't deeply committed to security, management, road maps, low TCO and so on. And they don't open up the architecture of iPhone enough for third parties to fill the holes.

But, again, is this really how we should define "enterprise?"

It reminds me of the criticisms leveled at open-source software early in its adoption. Originally Linux, for example, wasn't considered "enterprise grade" or "enterprise ready," presumably because it didn't meet Jones' hurdles above.

Now, however, Linux is considered an essential enterprise technology. What changed? Nothing...except adoption.

Here's a test for Jones: while Gartner pooh-poohs Apple's iPhone as an enterprise mobile device, perhaps for a variety of good definitional reasons, will it hold to such a rationale once the iPhone's market share within the enterprise dwarfs that of Windows Mobile, which has lost a third of its market share since 2008?

Seriously, at some point it won't be enough to listen to Microsoft's Ray Ozzie deprecate the iPhone's enterprise credentials because its 100,000-plus applications are "not very deep" and lack the "thousands of man years" that have gone into the applications that run on Windows. It won't make sense. Why? Because no matter how "enterprise grade" those Windows Mobile applications are, few within the enterprise are using them.

Enterprise is as enterprise does. Would you rather work for the company that builds software for the enterprise, or would you prefer to work for the company whose software gets used by the enterprise?

If you can have both, great. But it's silly to say Apple isn't an enterprise company simply because it sells to the enterprise without even trying.

In the battle of the open-source mobile platforms, developers have at least two choices: Google Android, which is open source but (relatively) closed development, or Symbian, which is open source...once it gets around to releasing the full source code.

Guess which one is winning?

Gartner expects Android to become the second-most popular mobile platform within the next few years as it continues to gobble up Symbian's declining market share.

But why?

Symbian has been dismissive of Google Android, as well as smaller upstarts like the LiMo Foundation, arguing that the latter is overly focused on middleware for wireless operators and the former is fake open source with more hype than substance.

All of which might be true, but the reality is that it seems to be working for Android. Google has been signing new handset manufacturers at a frenetic pace, while Symbian has been holding steady with Nokia...and that's about it.

Despite Symbian announcing new handsets, Google is actually shipping Android. There's a big difference between marketing and reality. Google Android offers the latter.

For all the buzz that Android gets from developers, its success owes more to handset manufacturers than to open-source developers. Handset manufacturers and wireless carriers are hungry for alternatives to surging Apple and declining Microsoft. And while others may not be seeing source code in copious amounts, handset manufacturers are apparently getting their fill.

More than this, though, Google gives them a safe, consumer-friendly brand. Symbian does not.

This is the reason Google Android is winning. It's not about developers--at least, not yet. Neither Symbian nor Android really offers developers open communities and open code.

No, the difference today is brand. Google has it. Symbian does not, and that's despite decade-long dominance of the mobile market.

Symbian still has a ways to go. It has a weak user interface (UI) that is supposed to get better, but that describes much that is wrong with Symbian today. Everything (source code, revamped UI, and resumption of market dominance) is always spoken of in the future tense.

Meanwhile, Google Android rolls on--not because it out open-sources Symbian, but rather because it out-executes it.

You can look at Google's growing market share in Android, its dominance in search, and elsewhere as signs that it's winning in its markets. But for me, the best indicator that Google is winning is the increasingly vitriolic attacks piled on it.

You can always spot a winner by the bull's-eye painted on it. No one bothers to diss a loser.

Or sue them. Red Bend Software has launched what appears to be a specious patent claim against Google, alleging that Google's Chrome browser violates its patent (6,546,552) by including the Courgette algorithm, which enables Google to push compressed software updates to the browser.

As Microsoft learned years ago, success breeds patent lawsuits. Microsoft rarely sues over intellectual property infringement, but has endured hundreds of patent lawsuits, nearly all of them ultimately found worthless.

But it's not just patent trolls that are on the scent. Symbian, the one-time leader in mobile phone operating systems, has gone on the offensive, claiming Google is "evil" and fear-mongering about what Google will do with consumer data gathered with its Android software.

Is this an indication that Symbian can't compete in the market and must instead resort to FUD?

Google may ultimately be able to get out of the Red Bend lawsuit cheaply, and it's unlikely that Symbian's noise will unduly distract it. It may not end up dominating mobile, for a variety of reasons, but it's going to be a significant competitor, just as it is in search and increasingly in enterprise computing.

After all, Google is innovating in Android, as CNET reports, and generally pushing the envelope on what's possible in computing: mobile, "desktop," and cloud/server. Importantly, open source is a central strategy in each of these areas, which may be one of the things that most riles the incumbent competitors in its markets.

For Google, the increasing vehemence of the attacks on it should signal that it's doing something right. In fact, many "somethings" right.

Ars Technica's Ryan Paul wants to know, "Can a [truly open smartphone] be done?" But the real question is, "Should we care?"

I ask because some within the open-source ranks can't see the forest (choice) for the trees (freedom). For them, Freedom (with a capital "F") has but one meaning (free and open-source licensing), and is the end itself, not the means to an end (user choice).

Hence, Bradley Kuhn of the Software Freedom Law Center expresses anxiety about the future of freedom in mobile...

We are in a very precarious time with regard to the freedom of mobile devices. We currently have no truly Free Software operating system that does the job.

...when he really should be concerned with choice in mobile. Right now, we're spoiled for choice in mobile, what with Apple's iPhone, Google Android, Symbian, LiMo, Moblin, etc., which suggests that users are free to move between devices.

In this case, it's not the license that makes users free. It's the market.

Open-source software plays an important role in ensuring user choice, but it's not the sum total of the freedom/choice equation. It's just one factor. As Tim O'Reilly reminds us, it's not even necessarily the most important factor, either.

Kuhn and other free-software advocates worry that the nuts and bolts making up the software on mobile phones be free, but this is surprising given the increasing irrelevance of single-node freedom when it's tied into a network. This is what I've described as "the Hotel California of tech," and it suggests we should be far more concerned with freedom between nodes than freedom of the nodes themselves.

In other words, the real concern should be over open data, not open phones. No matter how open my phone's software may be, it's meaningless if I can't move my data between devices or wireless providers.

Even here, there's cause for hope. For example, Funambol's open-source mobile cloud synchronization and push e-mail software is in use by 10 of the leading mobile service providers, as identified in a new report, which arguably should be more relevant to the Freedom fighters than whether Bluetooth is open source.

Glyn Moody, a journalist with strong free-software leanings, understands this. That's why he makes the case for an open cloud, and not simply "open node in the cloud":

Ideally, what we need is a completely open source cloud computing infrastructure on which applications providing people with things like (doubly) free email and word processing services could be offered....The trick here is not to fight the battle on the opponents' terms, but to come up with something completely different.

For example, how about creating an open source, *distributed* cloud? By downloading and running some free code on your computer, you could contribute processing power and disc space that collectively creates a global, distributed cloud computing system. You would benefit by being able to use services that run on it, and at the same time you would help to sustain the entire open source cloud ecosystem in a scalable fashion.

One can quibble with the feasibility of this approach, but at least Moody is thinking at the right scale. Those who are still stuck in the Open Source 1.0 of isolated, client-side software are not.

I suppose someone has to fixate on upper-case Freedom above all other priorities. Like usability. Or ubiquity. Or...well, anything.

But most of us don't think this way, because the world is a lot more complicated than Freedom on one hand, and Slavery on the other. Also, the focus of freedom has evolved in our networked world, though some free-software advocates seem mired in Freedom 1.0.

It's time to upgrade. Freedom is more than a license. It derives from a competitive market, one that is assisted by open source but not exclusively or even primarily defined by it.

Apple has an app store, of course. So does Microsoft. Google has two, one for Android and now one for Wave. In fact, it's hard to find anyone who doesn't have an app store these days.

We're swimming in app stores. Or drowning.

I'm serious. At the Symbian conference in London on Tuesday, I attended a panel that was overrun with app stores. Nokia, Symbian, GetJar, Sony Ericsson, Handmark, and Handango were all promoting their respective app stores, each talking about how great theirs is.

They're probably right. They probably are all great. But how am I, as a lay consumer, going to figure out which one to use?

More particularly, how will developers decide which platforms to target?

After all, everyone wants to be a platform these days. Does that mean that no one is?

Developers may be spoiled for choice, but "choice" in this case may not be what they want. Developers need to feed their families and will follow the money. Money is more easily made when choice is manageable (which is a euphemism for "limited").

This means we'll see plenty of application developers remain with Apple (though it's debatable whether the iPhone is the land of milk and honey for anyone but Apple), but we'll also continue to see a stampede to Google Android.

At present, every other mobile platform is playing for third place, but this could change: Symbian, as a foundation, is in a good position to launch an effective challenge to both Apple and Google if it can get its marketing and execution right.

Outside of mobile, it's unclear what role app stores will play. It's nice that Google Wave is getting an app store, but it's just one more "forge" among many. Every vendor (my employer, included) seems to feel an irresistible urge to create a forge/app store where third-party developers can "add value" to their "platforms."

Do we really need these? Or do we need more general repositories like Google Code and SourceForge?

I wish I had a definitive answer. I'm just not sure that these competing app stores do anything more than appeal to vendor vanity, and they could end up causing customer confusion.

As a consumer, I don't want to have to think about sorting among competing app stores. I just want applications.

Presumably, if I use a Sony Ericsson phone, I'll automatically find myself within its app store (unless my wireless provider doesn't slot me into its app store first, that is). But if that's the case, what's the point of making a big deal over a glorified catalog of applications that work with my given device/software/etc.?

It strikes me that app stores, like the cloud, are simply a way to dress up old ideas. If they help to organize potential buyers and sellers of software, great. But I still think I'd prefer meta-repositories of applications, similar to SourceForge, than individual application repositories for every single device or piece of software that I happen to buy.

How about you?

Apparently, Qualcomm didn't get the memo. Open-source developers as a group tend to be hostile to patents, believing that they're detrimental to technology innovation.

But Qualcomm, a company devoted more than most to acquiring and prosecuting patents, announced Monday the launch of a wholly owned subsidiary called the Qualcomm Innovation Center (QuIC) to focus on open-source development for mobile.

The patent king seeks to become the open-source king?

Maybe. Maybe not. The mission of QuIC signals an intent to blend the best of mobile open source with the best of Qualcomm's proprietary technology:

Open source and community-driven software development is becoming increasingly important to the wireless industry....Qualcomm Innovation Center, Inc. is a wholly owned subsidiary of Qualcomm that brings together a dedicated group of engineers focused on this area of growing innovation. With the goal of investing greater resources into enabling and optimizing open source software with Qualcomm technology, Qualcomm Innovation Center, Inc. works closely with the open source community to enable the faster advancement of the wireless industry as a whole.

It's a welcome sign, but as yet Qualcomm has demonstrated negligible involvement with any open-source community One of the cardinal rules for engaging with open-source development communities is to, well, engage with them.

Typically, this means writing and contributing code. Code is the coin of the open-source realm, and I'm unaware of much involvement from Qualcomm in this area.

So let me offer a suggested shortcut for Qualcomm: hire someone to educate you. Danese Cooper, formerly of Intel and Sun Microsystems and recently departed from Revolution Computing, could help to shake things up on Qualcomm's San Diego campus. And there are others.

In whichever way Qualcomm opts to do it, the company must engage with open-source communities through free code transfer in order to be taken seriously and to have a chance of influencing such communities.

For example, as noted in GigaOM, Qualcomm intends for QuIC to help it optimize its technology for Android, Chrome, Moblin, and other mobile open-source projects. Yet given that the company doesn't even show up in the list of top Linux contributors, how can we expect to see Qualcomm play a meaningful role in distributions like Android?

No one is going to give Qualcomm bonus points for creating a subsidiary to focus on open-source development, if little open-source code is actually contributed.

In this Qualcomm could learn a lesson from Adobe Systems, which despite maintaining a healthy business in proprietary software, is learning to engage productively with open-source communities, as highlighted in The H Online.

In sum, it is welcome that Qualcomm finally sees enlightened self-interest in leveraging open-source software for the good of its business. Now it just needs to learn to accelerate such benefits through real code contributions--and not simply nice-sounding business units.

For years, Oracle, Hewlett-Packard, and IBM have used Linux to lower the cost of their hardware and software-based solutions, while keeping profit margins fat and healthy. Google, ever the quick learner, is now doing the same with Android.

The mobile market will never be the same.

Just as Google and others are using open-source software to lower barriers to adoption of their proprietary cloud offerings, so, too, is Google using open source to reduce the cost of mobile computing in order to drive uptake of its proprietary search-related advertising business in mobile.

Google CFO Patrick Pichette said as much in Google's most recent earnings call:

If we move forward the adoption of these smartphones by having a lower cost infrastructure because it's open source...all the (mobile) searches...will happen so much faster.

Open source: it's all about peace, love...and capitalism.

However, Android is more than just a way to shave a few dollars off a phone's purchase price. Jim Zemlin, Linux Foundation's executive director, declared recently that Linux offers "greater flexibility, freedom from lock-in, and lack of licensing costs."

He's right, but I'd argue that the "lock-in" argument is a bit of a throwaway line and the cost advantages are of secondary importance. The real value for would-be Android developers is its flexibility, which in turn helps to corral a community of interested participants.

Google Android's open-source license also encourages broad experimentation with the platform by a range of device manufacturers. Some handsets will be flops, but others, like Verizon's forthcoming Motorola-developed Droid, look likely to succeed.

Google can play the odds because, unlike Apple, it hasn't tied its fate to any one device. Instead, it has intentionally spread Android's risk--and chances of success--through its open-source license.

It's genius. Sheer genius.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer seems determined to revive Microsoft's stale desktop monopoly, as reported by The New York Times and, in mobile, is focused on toppling Apple's iPhone "momentum." But he probably should be more worried about Android as a long-term community play.

Mobile is the future, and that future is going to be heavily influenced by open source.

Linux has succeeded in servers precisely because a wide array of Microsoft competitors have converged on it as a way to club Microsoft. The same is happening in development tools (Eclipse), browsers (Firefox), Web servers (Apache), and more.

In Android, then, Microsoft isn't simply competing with Google. It's competing with the entire industry--or will be, soon enough.

Google, for its part, should continue to spearhead Android development, but must find ways to open Android further to outside involvement. Otherwise, it stands to lose out to open-source alternatives like Symbian if they do a better job at encouraging community uptake. Google really doesn't need to control the platform to succeed.

In fact, given that its revenue derives from proprietary services delivered on top of the Android platform, its best chance for success is to do whatever is necessary to further proliferate Android.

Android is powerful with Google behind it, but it would be much more so with Nokia, Palm, and others. As in the server war, such vendors may find it advantageous to abandon their "Unix" variants to combine behind Android.

That is the power of open source, and it's how Google has made such intelligent use of Android. It's not about freedom from lock-in; it's about freedom to demolish competitors and serve customers by shifting the rules of the game.

Symbian has the market share; Apple's iPhone has the mind share. The future of mobile, however, will be owned by the company or project that best appeals to developers, especially open-source developers. Microsoft, with its long-standing interest in developers, also needs to reach out to open-source developers, if it wants to succeed.

Part of this reason is cost. As IBM's Savio Rodrigues suggests, Research In Motion could reduce its cost and improve the reach of its platform through open source:

RIM should be utilizing R&D investments more effectively by leveraging existing open-source projects. RIM could have built (its software development kit) for a lower investment by starting with PhoneGap or an equivalent open-source framework...This was absolutely a missed opportunity for RIM to compete versus Apple, Palm, and others using open source.

No, I'm not going to suggest that RIM open-source the BlackBerry Enterprise Server; that would be silly. Rather, I believe RIM could have saved R&D costs, increased the value of its BlackBerry platform, and influenced developers building for the iPhone, if RIM had built the Widget SDK on top of (an) open-source project like PhoneGap.

Symbian is taking this road, as Michael Mace points out, putting developers, and not itself, at the center of attention. The more money third-party developers can make with Symbian, the better off Symbian will be.

Palm, too, is trying to appeal to open-source developers by making it cheap and lucrative to develop for Palm devices.

Apple's world, by contrast, comes with a hugely sexy device, optimized distribution...and low return on investment for its developers, according to Newsweek. In Apple's world, developers add value to Apple, but not necessarily to themselves.

Microsoft is different. Although the company has not committed its mobile strategy to open source, it is a company that has a serious romance with developers. With 97 percent of its sales coming through its channel, Microsoft depends upon third-party development and distribution partners.

Now Microsoft is launching Windows Mobile 6.5, a light upgrade to previous versions that has failed to catch the media's attention. Today, the company has few--246, to be exact--applications available for version 6.5 in its Windows Marketplace for Mobile, but it has more than 20,000 designed for Windows Mobile 6.0 and 6.1.

The question, however, is whether it can attract new developers to the seemingly moribund Windows Mobile, which declined in market share to just 9 percent of handsets shipped in the second quarter of 2009, according to The Wall Street Journal. An open-source complement strategy, similar to what it's using for SharePoint and its CRM product, could help.

It must, as Google is calling.

Microsoft has no choice but at least dabble in open source, regardless of Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer's publicly sanguine stance on Google. Open-source Google Android is starting to make waves, even if its momentum can be overhyped. Verizon has jumped on the Android bandwagon, citing the "unmatched openness and flexibility of the Android platform."

Open source isn't an afterthought for Google. It's a core business strategy. And it's winning converts.

Ballmer pooh-poohs Android and further discards "free as a business model," but he acknowledges that Android represents open source, with significant financial resources behind it.

There's more to it than this. Free is a great business model, one that Microsoft has used to tremendous effect, as Internet Explorer, SharePoint, Bing, and other Microsoft successes demonstrate and as Techdirt highlights.

Microsoft needs to integrate open source into its mobile strategy. It needs developer attention. As CNET's Ina Fried reports, a recent Windows Mobile 6.5 session at Code Camp attracted just six developers. You don't win with numbers like that, and you don't get developers without open source, anymore.

Microsoft could attempt to replicate Apple's model of mobile success, but its DNA is more Google than Apple. Microsoft rightly recognized early on that building products soup-to-nuts, as Apple does, was not the best model to achieve ubiquity (even if some suggest that this model has broken the PC industry). That model works great, early in the formation of a market, as Clayton Christensen theorizes, but it loses its efficacy in mature markets.

Microsoft could attempt to replicate Apple's model of mobile success, but its DNA is more Google than Apple.

Mobile doesn't yet count as "mature," but it's getting there fast.

An enabling strategy similar to what Microsoft did on the "desktop" would succeed in mobile, too, but it's going to require a Googlesque open-source approach for Microsoft--not the Apple approach.

This isn't to suggest that Microsoft should open-source everything. As I learned from my own open-source mobile days at Lineo, to build a successful business in mobile (or elsewhere), you've got to own something.

Google is interested in owning the advertising that results from greater mobile Web browsing and other mobile services. For Microsoft, it could match this, and extend it with ties to its server and personal computer businesses, like SharePoint. It probably can't afford, however, to try to build a big per-unit licensing business--not with Google undermining that model with its free Android.

Microsoft simply needs to find the right "format" in which to deliver its open-source mobile strategy. The software giant has 90,000-plus employees. Surely, one of them can figure this out.