The Open Road

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 want a piece of me?

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.

One App Store to rule them all?

(Credit: Apple)

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?

I had dinner Monday night in London with David Wood, futurist at Symbian, and came away feeling strangely calm. Perhaps it was the exceptional food at Veeraswamy, capped off by a bitter chocolate ice cream....

Or perhaps it was the fact that Wood has spent 21 years with Symbian (and Psion before it was acquired by Nokia), long enough to live through several mobile revolutions and not get too ruffled by any particular one.

In fact, over the course of our dinner Wood pulled out his back-to-the-future Psion Series 5mx on several occasions, a device released a decade ago yet eerily resembles the cutting-edge Netbooks and smartphones of today.

Plus ça change...

Symbian has proved to be such a formidable competitor in Europe and the Middle East, but has underwhelmed in North America and Japan, though it claims roughly 50 percent of the global handheld market. In part it stemmed from the fact that Symbian had limited target GSM wireless carriers in the U.S. (AT&T and T-Mobile). Without a CDMA offering, Symbian was locked out of much of the U.S. market.

But in June 2008, Nokia announced that Symbian would be open sourced to broaden its appeal to developers. The catch? The process would take up to two years to complete. Today, Symbian still isn't open source but is actively working toward that goal.

Unfortunately, Apple's iPhone, Research in Motion's BlackBerry, and even the Palm Pre have been claiming ever-widening swaths of the global smartphone market, taking share in Symbian's European backyard. Wood isn't overly concerned. He may have good reason.

While we like to think of technology moving at incredible speed, the fact is that adoption moves much more slowly. Even in a market as dynamic as browsers, Mozilla's Asa Dotzler calls out the snail-pace shifts in browser adoption trends.

To prove his point, Wood points out how Apple's iPhone was considered near divine until the Palm Pre came out, and then suddenly criticism was heaped on the iPhone for lacking basic functionality. No multitasking? No cut-and-paste? Come on, Apple!

And so Apple has, as its soon-to-be-released iPhone 3G S shows. But the Pre's launch suggests that Apple doesn't have a stranglehold on mobile mind share. If Symbian does things right and provides compelling value as an application publisher, it should have ample time to mount a serious challenge to existing smartphone competitors.

Symbian doesn't plan to launch an App Store, Apple-style. Instead, as CNET has reported, the foundation wants to serve the same role a book publisher does: provide intermediary services between application developers and the wireless carriers. Such a strategy not only gives Symbian more devices to play on, but it also makes it a valuable partner to more wireless carriers than Apple can.

It's not a given that Symbian will succeed, of course, but Wood could be right to remain calm in advance of Symbian's launch of its open-source project. The world is not standing still, waiting for Symbian's arrival. On the other hand, it's also not moving forward nearly as fast as we might think.

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.

As the Apple faithful gather in San Francisco on Monday at Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC), Symbian, the world's largest mobile operating system vendor, is prowling the streets outside Moscone with a tantalizing proposition for iPhone developers: make more money by reaching more consumers with Symbian:

Starting at 7:30 AM PDT, Symbian will start handing out invitations to join Symbian at Jillian's for a Symbian Hack-a-thon (1:00 - 4:00 PDT, with happy hour kicking in at 5:00 and running until 7:00). Jillian's is located directly across the street from the conference at the Sony Metreon.

The invitations come with a rubber duck, but Symbian is also trying to wake up Apple's attendees with free coffee at the nearby Starbucks. Starbucks expects to serve 600 developers before the keynote starts, and Symbian wants to reach every one of them.

The group isn't just promising long-term success, either: hack-a-thon attendees, who will be able to code for Web runtime, Python (S60), or Flash Lite, will be given a free Nokia 5800 for their troubles, following Google's giveaway of an Android-based G1 phone at Google I/O.

Symbian has posted very strong numbers in mobile data consumption and market share. Even so, the open-source foundation has struggled to get its brand out into the market, as CNET reports, and is now playing catch-up with Apple's iPhone.

The newfound aggression bodes well for Symbian's ability to compete with Apple and other mobile platforms. Apple has made the market care about mobile operating systems, which means it's no longer sufficient for Symbian to be big but anonymous. If it wants to remain a big player in mobile, it must lose the anonymity.

Attendees at Monday's WWDC are about to learn about Symbian, perhaps for the first time. Let competition ring.

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.

The big news coming out of Sun's JavaOne conference this week is that Sun (soon-to-be Oracle) is trying to outbid Microsoft as the world's biggest photocopier company. ("Redmond, start your photocopiers.")

No, Sun isn't actually building photocopiers but, like Symbian, Microsoft, and others, it is playing catch-up to Apple's App Store with its new Java Store, as The Register reports. The store is intended to be a central repository for Java and JavaFX applications, but it's unclear how it will distinguish itself.

As a consumer, I don't care if an application is built in Java. I just want to know whether it's any good, and whether it will run on my iPhone (Blackberry/Palm Pre/whatever). The Java brand matters to developers--it doesn't matter at all to end users.

Not to be outdone in imitation, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison used JavaOne to reassure Java devotees that Oracle's commitment to Java is strong and to drop a hint that Oracle/Sun may get into Netbooks, those ubertrendy devices that everyone is talking about but few are actually using.

Back to the App Store. Or, rather, app stores....

Sun isn't alone in copycat tactics. Nokia is also getting into the App Store clone wars, and Symbian has its own planned app store. Google launched its Android Market, and Microsoft, photocopiers at the ready, is beefing up its Windows Marketplace.

Pretty soon, consumers will have scads of choices of where to buy their applications...and so won't have a clue as to where to buy them.

It's not that application stores are a bad idea. It's just that it's not clear that we need a myriad of them, or that vendors will get the mileage from them that they expect, as Joel West points out.

Google Wave showed the industry that innovation is still possible, but requires vendors to discard existing paradigms for what is possible and how to deliver software.

In a similar fashion, platform vendors need to figure out novel ways to emulate the best of what Apple has delivered in its App Store, but reinvent the concept for their own customers. We don't need App Store clones. We need new ways of delivering and consuming applications.

Unless the industry is ready to declare Apple the sole source of inspiration, then different vendors should pave different paths.

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.

Lost in the news that Nokia has finally released its Ovi application store, akin to the iPhone's App Store, is what this means for Symbian, the world's most widely used (and most easily overlooked) operating system for mobile devices.

Symbian, as an open-source operating system, should be mobile developers' darling. Instead, it continues to be an afterthought.

Symbian has been talking up its open source plans for roughly a year now, plans that should put it at the heart of an iPhone-beating application store. But that hasn't happened. Instead, Symbian has stood on the sidelines as Apple's App Store goes from strength to strength and even Google, whose Android platform is still in its infancy, entices developers with its Android Market.

Symbian, through Nokia's Ovi Store, ostensibly now has its own store, too, but it's branded by Nokia and will help Nokia far more than it helps Symbian (not the least reason being that the Ovi Store apparently doesn't distinguish between Java applications and Symbian applications).

Fabrizio Capobianco, CEO of mobile open-source leader Funambol, suggests that Nokia may struggle to make its Ovi Store pay, given that it's a hardware company at heart. I'm sure this is true, but it overlooks the larger issue: why isn't Symbian launching an application store, rather than Nokia?

I asked Capobianco, who gave a very reasonable response: Symbian already has its hands full:

Symbian is busy. I do not think they have time to breathe: trying to pull a full open source operating system is not an easy thing. Imagine building cloud services (like an application store) at the same time. No chance.

It's a good point, but not one that will likely placate members of the Symbian community, who have been clamoring for a Symbian application store for some time, but with little response. Symbian's David Wood suggested in December 2008 that it would take time to unleash its full power, but he may not have the time.

Symbian seemed so far ahead of the game when it announced in June 2008 that it was going to open source its software. Since then, it has apparently been heads down delivering on that promise.

Unfortunately, the world keeps moving, and Symbian risks getting left behind.

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.

Symbian has dismissed Google's open-source credentials for Android as merely "marketing." Open-source developers, however, are much less cavalier, finding substance in Android, according a new report from Black Duck Software.

Hype is apparently in the eye of the beholder, and asking Symbian to gauge the merits of Google Android may be like asking the fox to be a judge for the hens' beauty contest.

Black Duck's data comes from analysis of 185,000 open-source projects from 4,000 different Web sites. It found that while Apple's iPhone has spawned 266 related open-source projects, Google Android is close on its heels with 191. Symbian? In 2008, it helped to birth just 64 open-source projects, falling behind Windows Mobile's 174 projects.

Despite commanding a dominant market share of 46.6 percent in global mobile operating systems, Symbian, which was announced as an open-source project in 2008, has a ways to go before it can nominate itself as the leader in open-source mobile operating systems.

Symbian, then, would do well not to spend time calling the kettle black, as it did when Lee Williams, director of the Symbian Foundation, derided Android as pseudo-open source:

Android is not open. It's a marketing label. It's controlled by Google. It's a pretty label, but I don't think the use of Linux is synonymous with open, and they may have made that mistake of assuming it is.

Maybe, maybe not. But if developers have any say in the matter--developers that are choosing Android over Symbian three times as often--Android may soon be about much more than just Google marketing hype.

Follow me on Twitter at mjasay.

Last night in reading through my RSS newsreader I came across these two posts - one from CNET's Dave Rosenberg and the other from Funambol's Fabrizio Capobianco - and had to laugh at the odd juxtaposition of two seemingly diametrically opposed ideas:

So, which will it be? Open-source Windows Mobile or proprietary Windows Mobile, continuing to be sold at an outlandish $8 to $15 per phone for software that Businessweek's Stephen Wildstrom calls "awkward to use after a decade of tweaking by Microsoft."

It sounds like Windows Mobile should be free, and not because of any strategy to counter open-source Symbian (Nokia) or open-source Linux (Google). No, Microsoft should be giving it away because its Windows Mobile operating system is potty, despite a decade of effort to improve it. Microsoft has tried to replicate the desktop Windows experience on the handheld. Big mistake.

Microsoft's strategy? Well, as Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer notes, it's pretty much the same as ever: FUD the competition rather than beat it:

It's interesting to ask why would Google or Nokia, Google in particular, why would they invest a lot of money and try to do a really good job if they make no money. I think most operators and telecom companies are skeptical about Google. Handset makers are skeptical of Nokia, operators are skeptical of Google, I think by actually charging money people know exactly what our motivations are.

Just because people know that Microsoft wants to screw them doesn't mean they like it, Mr. Ballmer. First mistake.

Last year Nokia bought out its Symbian partners for $410 million and then open sourced it. Now it would appear that the company's ambitions relative to open source have only just begun.

According to analysts quoted in this Reuters story, Linux may actually be Nokia's biggest bet, not open-source Symbian.

Nokia says Symbian plays a central role in its software strategy, but analysts say the role of Linux in the company's Nokia phones is also set to increase, reflecting a mindset shift for a company that has long shunned using software from multiple vendors.

"It is unlikely Nokia would be prepared to open-source a strategically important platform if it did not have another one in development," said Ben Wood, research director at CCS Insight.

"We believe Nokia needs a more powerful mobile software platform to compete with the iPhone and similar products," Wood said, pointing to Linux as the likely candidate.

The idea seems to be that Symbian will be used for Nokia's mass-market phones, just as it is today, but Linux will power its more strategic bets, with Nokia's CFO recently calling Linux "terribly important" to the company. With that said, Nokia's head of software engineering, Ari Jaaksi recently blogged, "Nokia's vision is to bring open source and Linux to consumer mainstream." So perhaps Nokia has a bigger plan for Linux than niche devices...

Regardless, with Google pushing Linux in its Android phones and Nokia pushing Linux on its Internet tablets today, and possibly high-end phones tomorrow, Linux looks like it's set to find a yet another market to disrupt and, eventually, dominate.