Q&A For a man staring down Microsoft, Google, and Apple, Symbian's Nigel Clifford doesn't have the deer-in-the-headlights look as much as you might expect.
Perhaps because, at the moment, those three juggernauts are staring up at Symbian. Clifford, CEO of the company since 2005, has a dominant share of the market for smartphone operating systems and a strong backer in Nokia, the world's largest handset maker.
Nigel Clifford
Symbian CEO
Still, Symbian is sitting on top of the market at a time when it appears destined for change. Apple's entry into the market has galvanized the American consumer, who is barely aware of Symbian's dominant presence in Europe and Asia. Google threatens to come at Symbian from underneath, hoping to unify mobile Linux and teasing carriers with the promise of mobile advertising revenue. Research In Motion shows signs it might be able to add consumers to its legion of CrackBerry addicts. And Microsoft is Microsoft; it hasn't replicated its PC success in mobile phones but it continues to steadily improve Windows Mobile and is sitting on a load of cash.
Just before CTIA 2008 kicks off, Symbian hosted the Smartphone Summit in Las Vegas to discuss many of these topics and the broader market at large. I sat down with Clifford for a few minutes during the show, and here's a sampling of what we discussed.
In your view, should smartphones be like computers?
I think it is a very different world. You've got the smartphone, a device which has no access to main power, constrained memory, constrained screen size, and so the necessity of doing things very elegantly is an imperative.
But aren't you making little computers?
If you think back to the origins of Symbian, it came out of Psion, and those palmtops, the Psion 5 and Psion 3, were fully featured mini-computers. They had Word effects, Excel, equivalent data sheets, touch-screen QWERTY keyboard. What they didn't have was telephony.
One of the things our CTO is very clear about is that the multitasking capability on a phone is the most elegant thing on the planet. Because it has to deal with all this stuff going on, and then a call coming in, an SMS coming in, in the future, a video call coming in, maybe a location-based ping coming in from the side.
Why do you think you've gained such traction in Europe and around the world, and what do you have to do to get traction inside the U.S.?
For sure, the work with the top five handsets, including Nokia, has been important in creating attractive handsets that operators like to put on display, and put out at an attractive price because they know they're going to get data services revenue out of that.
In the U.S., there's perhaps been a different avenue for operators in terms of revenue growth for the last five or six years which has been pure subscriber growth. So, the order of the day has been subscribers at the lowest possible acquisition cost, which means the cheapest possible phone.
What we're now seeing is the end of the subscriber land grab--the saturation--so I think in the U.S. we're seeing some of the patterns in the rest of the world coming to bear. Where all of a sudden it becomes: how do I attract people from other people's networks, and how do I attract people to use their handsets on these more lucrative data services, to offset any slowing of the subscriber acquisition.
How does your relationship with Nokia affect your dealings with other handset makers? (Nokia owns 47.9 percent of the company.)
It doesn't. I mean, I guess you'd regard it as a proof point, the fact we can assist Nokia in making compelling devices and making compelling profits is a good thing to be able to put in front of others. But in terms of the business relationship and the ownership relationship, it's kept very, very separate.
We have a supervisory board. Around our governance table, we have Nokia, Sony-Ericsson, Samsung, Ericsson, Siemens, Panasonic--they came together to create an agnostic independent operating system. And that composition has broadly held together for 10 years.
One of the secrets is that we have a really good shareholders' agreement and a really good chairman who makes sure there's no tipping of any decision based on who you are, whether you're big or little, important or not important, shipping or not shipping.
We've had this notion of the mobile Internet for a long time, but now we're hearing more and more about the full Internet, getting the real thing onto your phone. Given the constraints that you face with these phones, how will that play out over time?
In terms of the experience, it's not inferior. If I've got the choice of booting up a laptop and going to the Internet or using the Internet that's resident on my phone, I wouldn't have any qualms about just reaching for my phone.
The intriguing thing to just think about is that there's maybe 3 billion subscribers in the world at the moment, and there's maybe 3 billion who are yet to have the privilege of having a mobile connection.
When you think about the Internet, I can see a whole generation--and maybe half of humanity--experiencing the Internet first through a mobile device.
I think the prospects of everyone in the world having power, and having a PC delivered, and having broadband delivered just isn't going to happen. It's going to happen over these mobile devices.
What do you think about the iPhone? And what do you think of Apple's participation in this market?
I think it validates what we've just been talking about, which is no fixed Internet brand--hardware, software, applications--can afford to ignore the mobile marketplace. Because ultimately the PC is going to be capped in terms of its marketplace.
It's not surprising you're seeing these legacy Internet and hardware brands coming into this mobile world and bringing their smarts with them.
One of the things that Apple is bringing with it is the walled garden, the closed system. What is the role for application development on these devices?
We have a different view. This is about innovations, letting a thousand flowers bloom, letting people experiment, providing SDKs (software development kits) and easy to use APIs (application programming interfaces), and working with a variety of different languages. A vibrant developer network is very important to us and our licensees.
Do you have to make tradeoffs then, with reliability, security, a different experience across these devices?
I think that not so much trade-offs as just different architectural decisions. Things like platform security, we've implemented because that was part of the assurance that operators wanted to have that these mobile computers weren't going to be used in a way that could be detrimental to their overall network security.
We're saying that our checks and balances are as deep and as light as possible in the operating system. Whereas maybe other people are saying, "You're playing in our territory," what we're saying is, "Have as much territory as you like and we'll make sure you're not near the cliff edge"--rather than as soon you get through the front gate, you're in my turf.
On the flip side, you've got Google and what they're trying to do with Android.
The experience we've got of the developer world is there's a curiosity market, which is "we'll go and play and see how interesting it is." But then there's a hard-core, "we actually want to make money out of this."
The advantage we can offer is 200 million devices shipped, 77 million last year. There's a platform for you to go and play with, and it's with a savvy audience, a really lucrative audience who's going to come and pay you if you can provide them a great application.
What do you think of Intel's interest in this market, with its Atom and Moorestown projects?
Maybe something that has gotten lost in the history is that we've cooperated and had projects with Intel. When I arrived (in 2005) we were talking putting Symbian on x86 architecture.
It's increasingly relative; the only SMP (symmetric multiprocessing) that's around right now is devices like the PC. It's increasingly beneficial to see what that SMP is going to be like when we play there.
Intel are certainly people that we talk to, but that (a Moorestown discussion) hasn't happened.
LAS VEGAS--Nigel Clifford, CEO of smartphone OS provider Symbian, is well aware that everyone's looking at this industry with hungry eyes.
"No fixed Internet brand can afford to ignore the mobile marketplace," he said in a wide-ranging interview on the sidelines of CTIA 2008, where Symbian is hosting the Smartphone Summit a day before things officially get started.
As Google and Apple have shown over the last year, everybody wants a part of the mobile world. Symbian dominates this world at present, with well over 60 percent market share in the smartphone industry. But it's facing challenges from all sides, as Apple goes after its consumers, Google goes after its developers, and Microsoft and Research In Motion continue to court businesspeople.
In a way, however, Clifford sees the competition as wider than just the phone market. "There's 3 billion (mobile phone) subscribers in the world, and 3 billion who are not. I can see a whole generation experiencing the Internet for the first time on the mobile device," he said.
Of course, the PC industry wants to get those people inside its big tent as well. This means that mobile phones are going to have to get smarter, and embrace the Internet that's already in place for PC users around the world.
"There just has to be one Internet that you access, and we as hardware and software suppliers have to find a way to do that," Clifford said. The era of the mobile Internet seems to be officially dead as smartphone companies go after bringing the full Internet experience to their customers.
Apple has certainly made that a centerpiece of its pitch for the iPhone. Clifford recognizes that the PC industry is going to have to start doing iPhone-like things into the future. "No fixed Internet brand can afford to ignore the mobile marketplace. The PC is going to be capped in the marketplace. They're coming, and they're bringing some of their smarts with them."
I'll post much more of the interview with Clifford after I have a chance to transcribe it later in the day.
LAS VEGAS - There's almost as many people buying smartphones as there are people buying laptops, and that trend is about to turn the computing industry on its head.
"We do see that gravitational pull of the single-use device being played out in the market," said Nigel Clifford, CEO of Symbian, during the opening presentations of Smartphone Summit here at CTIA 2008. "This is not just about multiple devices, it's about knocking aside some other forms of communication."
Symbian CEO Nigel Clifford takes questions from the audience at the Smartphone Summit.
(Credit: Tom Krazit/CNET News.com)At CTIA, smartphones are still a niche product. The Smartphone Summit was held in two generic meeting rooms deep inside the maze of twisty passages that is the Las Vegas Convention Center, while hundreds of cranes and forklifts careened around the show floor, setting up for tomorrow's main event. The math is simple: smartphones like Nokia's N95, LG's Voyager, and Apple's iPhone make up around 10 percent of the global market for mobile phones
But that's already a serious number. With the mobile phone market crossing 1 billion units in 2007, that's 115 million smartphones that were purchased worldwide last year. In the PC world, notebook shipments are gaining on desktop shipments, but on a worldwide basis still make up less than half of the 271 million PCs shipped last year.
The PC isn't going anywhere, but it's increasingly competing for attention with the smartphone. This is an old story in Europe, where teenagers searching for flashy phones and Web access have been served by carriers hawking inexpensive phones, said Pete Cunningham, a senior analyst with Canalys.
But in the U.S., people are just waking up to the possibilities presented by having the Internet in your pocket. Credit Apple and the iPhone for the surge in interest on the part of Americans, said Jonathan Goldberg, senior analyst with Deustche Bank.
The title of a slide used in Clifford's presentation was "Brands are Transitioning From the Desk to the Hand." The slide contained a who's-who list of Internet properties, including Google, Yahoo, eBay, and the usual suspects, and was making the point that the PC is not the only avenue to the Internet.
LG's trying to make sure people notice its smartphones, taking up the whole front of the Las Vegas Marriott with this ad.
(Credit: Tom Krazit/CNET News.com)Three things in particular are driving smartphone growth and interest among regular people: the increasing amount of time they spend online on things like social-networking sites, the impatience of having to wait until they get back to their home or coffee shop to get online to check messages or update their status, and the desire to look good while doing all that, he said.
For all the hubbub over the iPhone's software development kit, it seems most people are content to spend their time in their browsers. Bill Hughes, principal analyst at In-Stat, surveyed U.S. smartphone users and found that they only downloaded 1.83 applications on average, and that many of those were games. The number of iPhone users in the survey was too small to be relevant, Hughes said, meaning that smartphone users with more open operating systems aren't really taking advantage of them.
Obviously, you're not going to find too many smartphone naysayers at an event called the Smartphone Summit sponsored by Symbian, the world's largest smartphone operating system provider. But when you consider the trend more broadly, it's hard to deny.
At some point, we'll be able to retire the term smartphone, Goldberg said, in a development that will delight the editorial copy desk at News.com. Intel and ARM are pushing on each other to develop more and more powerful chips for mobile devices. Apple and Google are raising the bar for operating systems in terms of performance, user interface, and openness. And carriers are starting to recognize that in the future, they might be no different than a wireless ISP.
That means all our phones will be smart. In other parts of the world, where PC adoption is still just getting underway, a lot of people might just skip over the PC and start using a powerful phone that costs around $200 to $300, gets them online at broadband speeds, lasts all day, and fits in their pocket.
That's a smart idea.
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