In mobile, open source is a winning strategy

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.

Windows Mobile 6.5

(Credit: Microsoft)

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.

[Chao_Sama]

Last line of the article priceless lollll

[slapppy]

ahahaha... 90 plus and all they do is copy what Apple does and hope their monopoly keeps it going long enough to make a profit and displace the real innovators.

[maneeshpan]

I've always liked open source software not just because its completely FREE to use but there aren't any restrictions imposed by open source developers on the users of its software. In an ideal world all standardized file formats would be open, universal, interoperable and work well with all computers regardless of operating system software. In this situation Microsoft's proprietary Windows Media Audio and Video formats would have to work with Mac and Linux -- they can't keep proprietary closed formats restricted to their operating system. During the Microsoft antitrust case in the U.S. that started in the 1990s over Microsoft's bundling its IE web browser with Windows to crush Netscape (for which Microsoft was taken to court over for unfairly using its Windows desktop monopoly -- in such an abusive way that they were using Windows to seize control of other markets and force competitors out of business or seriously weaken their businesses) but that's not all they coded Windows 98 to not work well apparently with Netscape and withheld critical information from rivals to prevent them from making their software work better with Windows. Microsoft feared Netscape's web browser business would make the Windows operating system obselete -- that programmers would instead of having to write for Windows would be able to begin to write applications for the browser directly and given that Netscape established itself as a cross platform browser capable of running on different operating systems Microsoft was scared that Netscape could make Microsoft Windows irrelevant.

So Microsoft bundled Internet Explorer with Windows, made a special version of IE for Mac and as part of the 1997 agreement between Microsoft and Apple got Apple to bundle IE for Mac with the Mac OS. This would enable them to crush platform threat of Netscape. Of course once IE was the dominant browser Microsoft stopped innovating IE -- not much changed between IE 5 and 6 but with the new browser war -- which has many more browser alternatives than the original war (original war was mainly just Microsoft IE vs Netscape) -- the new browser war has many more contenders -- anyways Microsoft was forced to begin innovating IE again when they released IE 7.

During the time they had stopped innovating IE though they created a new internet browser based on their MSN online service (www.msn.com) originally called MSN Explorer now just called MSN 8 or MSN 9 etc (today they call it MSN and add the browser version next to the name MSN) and started innovating MSN's browser -- later they would realize they had to start innovating IE again for the new browser war now ongoing (which this time will continue indefinitely) and would issue IE 7 with tabbed browsing and other features Firefox already had.


Microsoft after winning the original browser war would begin to neglect updating Mac IE (last version was IE 5 for Mac OS X) and Apple needing a web browser for the Mac created one itself called Safari after which point MS just quit the Mac version of IE completely. Eventually, Apple even ported Safari to Windows and made a mobile version of Safari for iPhones and iPod Touches.

Google would also create their own web browser called Chrome based on Apple's Web Kit used in Safari -- which is still Windows only but Google is working on Mac and Linux versions also. IE has been quite a buggy browser in the past, quite insecure to say the least which is why I don't even use it anymore when running Windows. I prefer Apple's Mac OS X and iPhone OS firmware which are on my Macs and my iPod Touch.


So I prefer file formats and applications that are universally interoperable, open (for example, I've often used Apple iTunes with my iPod Touch and earlier iPods as well as my Apple TV but prefer the customization Mozilla Songbird allows me of the way the player looks -- I can choose different skins etc for the application which iTunes won't currently allow me to do - thanks Mozilla for this great open source media player -- iTunes is free to use while proprietary -- unless you use iTunes Store that might cost money depending on what content you use; however, Mozilla Songbird is free and open. Open source developers respect users freedom more than proprietary companies.

[richard993]

I don't think Symbian lost anything by open sourcing their platform, it has gained more trust and support by going open source . It's not so much that open sourcing the software will let developers peek at the code. Let's be honest here, not many developers are interested in going through millions of lines of code just for fun. It's really about trust, support, interoperability and extensibility. There are no valid reasons that I can think of why Microsoft shouldn't open source some of thier OS unless the rumours of hidden secondary encryption keys for law enforcement officials is actually true... the only other reason I can think of is that Microsoft wants to maintain it's monopoly by restricting access to it's underlying api's so that only it has the knowledge to take advantage of them. If this is true, then it will only hurt the software industry and should be another subject matter that should be under investigation by the competition watchdogs.