Symbian Blasts Google's Phone Initiative 276
nowhere.elysium writes "Symbian has suggested that Google is not experienced enough or capable of fully developing a workable mobile platform. Symbian's vice president, John Forsyth inferred that Google's interest in the field will also wane due to it being 'deeply unsexy', and that development is not likely for such a platform because "You have [...] a lot of zeroes in your sales figures before a developer gets out of bed."
In the same series of statements, Linux is likened to the common cold: "About every three months this year there has been a mobile Linux initiative of some sort launched. It's a bit like the common cold. It keeps coming round and then we go back to business.""
First step for symbian. (Score:5, Insightful)
1. First they ignore you (Linux? What is that? Who cares?).
2. They ridicule you (Linux is like cancer. Linux is un-American)
3. Then they fight you. (Our ROI is so much better and we have a roadmap too!)
4. Then you win
It will happen to you to symbian!!
Whoops (Score:3, Insightful)
Hmm... A bit of complacency there too.
A lot of /what/, before /who/ gets out of bed? (Score:5, Insightful)
Nothing like building a big wall around yourself, then complaining that nobody ever comes to visit.
Re:A lot of /what/, before /who/ gets out of bed? (Score:3, Insightful)
PR stories on slashdot = lame (Score:5, Insightful)
Here, to have a CEO call the mobile field "deeply unsexy" in an attempt to make the public think Google doesn't fit into it implies that he and his company are deeply concerned about Google entering the mobile platform market and shaking it up! As for "You have [...] a lot of zeroes in your sales figures before a developer gets out of bed," he's implying that it will take a long time to be profitable. However, I think Google has "a lot [more] zeroes" in its market capitalization and R&D budget than Symbian and many other companies combined. Thus Symbian's fear that Google will get into mobile devices.
So what? They're not doing it alone. (Score:5, Insightful)
John Forsyth, vice president of strategy at Symbian, the platform that powers many of the world's phones, said Google lacked experience.
Google has formed an alliance with 33 firms to develop an open platform for mobile phones, called Android.
Among those firms are phone giants HTC, LG, Motorola, and Samsung. Additionally, they're apparently courting Nokia, as well. I don't think that Google's inexperience in designing phones matters one bit. They've allied themselves with virtually every major mobile phone maker in the market. They don't *need* any experience within Google. They have it in spades with their partners.
Cold (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:First step for symbian. (Score:3, Insightful)
I would estimate that linux is more prevalent in the cell phone market than in the desktop market, so you're likely backwards here.
Re:A lot of /what/, before /who/ gets out of bed? (Score:5, Insightful)
That's what he said - "supporting customers
"If you are a serious phone maker
But he does sound a touch envious of the lifestyles of those at Google - describing his own work as "a deeply unsexy job". Aww...
then why is the iphone killing everything? (Score:5, Insightful)
Underestimated, again? (Score:5, Insightful)
Its foolhardy to make such assumptions and reckless for an officer of Symbian to make such statements. How can you do anything but take Google seriously at this point?
If google says they are going to do it and they have the skills and the deep pockets needed to do it: so why not plan on it and have product in place to protect your own company from it?
Because its cheaper and easier to bury one's head in the sand than face the fact that you have real competition whose goal is to make money on advertising by giving away an open source OS. They don't even wish to compete in Symbian's turf, they want to make phones for the masses to get more advertising clicks. By executing this strategy they will make Symbian's entire business model obsolete.
So bury your heads Symbian, we'll bury the rest of you later.
Fools.
Why Phones Suck (Score:5, Insightful)
I hope Google does to mobile phones what it did to online search, maps and blogging: makes them work by finally providing some competition in the core function without being trapped in its box.
Re:First step for symbian. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:First step for symbian. (Score:3, Insightful)
There was a story here some time ago about that there are WiFi access points running Linux at Microsoft. The WRT54G access points are very well known even by people who don't know how to use Linux. Linux runs on various other embedded devices as well. Linux is big in the server arena, especially for cheap web hosting and such. Very big operations (Google, Akamai, etc) run massive amounts of Linux boxes.
The desktop will get there eventually. I hear more and more about Ubuntu making excellent progress, and thanks to Linux being open that means that any improvements to one distribution can propagate to other ones as well.
Re:Symbian must have some sand in their Bajingos (Score:2, Insightful)
Uhh.. what?
The SDK is a free download. How is that hostile?
You can program in standard C or C++. How is that hostile?
Compared to some platforms it's positively open.
Re:Competition. (Score:4, Insightful)
Exactly. Given that it's Google, there isn't even a beta to look at... But this is Google at its finest -- stirring up a hornet's nest, dropping hints and outright misdirections, then rolling out there own thing like they're surprised anyone had ever heard of it or knew it was coming. It certainly generates buzz.
Re:First step for symbian. (Score:4, Insightful)
Microsoft does desktop, for the most part. In this, they are enjoying comfortable domination based on their success with XP, and have some time to turn around from the failures in Vista.
My point is simply that he's got it backwards- the cell phone market is much more promising for linux than desktop, at this point. Linux will really rely on the death of the classic PC market to enjoy total market "domination"-- or permeation, if you will- Microsoft is more vulnerable to the linux-based device market overtaking PC's than linux taking the PC market- if you're just arbitrarily anti-Microsoft you might like the see the captain go down with his ship, in this case.
Re:A lot of /what/, before /who/ gets out of bed? (Score:5, Insightful)
That's why mobile development is in such a bloody mess. Phone vendors do not want phones to become a portable application platform. You can port your phone number when you change carriers, but they'd sure as hell prefer you to lose as much else as possible, for example your phone book and applications, and if possible the phone itself. I expect this is why J2ME is not offered in the same way as J2SE; the phone companies would do their best to kill if it looked like it was emerging as a platform which freed mobile applications from carrier control.
There's nothing really all that special about mobile development. Devices are resource constrained, but in the grand historical sense they aren't all that constrained, when compared to a 286 PC/AT machines from which many an entrepreneur made his fortune. User interfaces are different, but not in a way that a smart designer (who can be hired for a fee) can't take into account. Believe me, I've done it, and while it is easy to make stupid mistakes, it's not really that hard to avoid those mistakes if you have enough money.
And it's not like mobile applications are, in the current state of the art, all that wonderful.
The real problem is overcoming the phone companies. Google is in an interesting strategic position, because they have so much money, they've got huge amounts of mysterious dark fiber, they're making noises about being interested in acquiring spectrum. Maybe they'd have a hard time becoming a mobile phone company, but they could become a mobile something else company and by the way pretty soon that something else does the things you use your phone for now.
Smart people at the mobile companies should be concerned that Google's involvement in mobile technology, if not co-opted, could lead to a paradigm shift. At least in the US, the companies aren't prepared for that kind of competition. They aren't even prepared for fair competition in their existing business. They do their level best to make it hard for consumers to price compare services.
So, Google is in a position that Symbian might well envy. Symbian is a captive of the phone companies. If the phone companies don't want to play with them, there goes their business. If they don't want to play with Google, it has almost no effect on Google's main business, and Google goes back to the lab and cooks up a world of pain for them.
Whatever (Score:1, Insightful)
If sym doesn't get over itself, they will be next Netscape. Sitting in the garage wondering what happened and talking
about how they can throw a football over that mountain....
Bingo! Monocultures will dominate. (Score:1, Insightful)
Bingo!
MS dominates the world, due in no small part, that they are a monoculture and tightly control the platform while 3rd party developers make the apps, but still have to do things the MS way or their apps won't work very well.
Google will also be a giant juggernaut monoculture, stealing vast chunks of marketshare from MS... with the big difference being that they'll be based upon an open platform, but will tightly control the development end of things instead.
Re:In that case... (Score:3, Insightful)
I think this is what Sybian is trying to point out. Google may have a good idea and a motivated geek force behind it. But, it takes more than just motivated geeks to ensure longevity in the marketplace.
Symbian is right, because of customer service (Score:3, Insightful)
Why?
Because quite simply, google sucks at customer service. And the OS business is all about customer service.
How do I know that google's customer service sucks? Simple: I've used them for things other than search. Have you ever tried to get a detailed sales report out of google checkout? You can't. You can ask about it, but it disappears into the void that is google checkout's customer service. Can they tell you if they're ever going to have reporting? Nope.
What does the sales report include? Dates, amounts, and state. What about customer names and addresses? Nope. What about anything else? Sorry.
Google's service philosophy is "help yourself." That doesn't help when you need features of a product that don't exist.
If google can't give you a useful sales report for the last month, how can they support a mobile phone launch?
The answer, of course, is they can't. Unless it's advertising-related, google can't concentrate for long enough to make a mature product...or they're too arrogant to listen. gmail still doesn't have folders, which is totally different than keywords (which is their 'justification'). Yeah, whatever.
Re:Symbian C++ experience (Score:2, Insightful)
http://www.symbiantutorial.org/symbian-tutorial/?3._Symbian_Fundamentals:3.1_Console_Application [symbiantutorial.org]
Hmm, let's look at main.h
http://www.symbiantutorial.org/symbian-tutorial/?3._Symbian_Fundamentals:Starting_a_Console_application [symbiantutorial.org]
Re:In that case... (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:First step for symbian. (Score:3, Insightful)
No. I don't support DRM, period.
If it uses DRM, I don't buy it or use it. If it even supports DRM (portable music players say), I will specifically look for the device that either supports none or has the least amount of it.
And I should care about the market why exactly? I used Debian for a long time. RMS liked, IIRC. It worked perfectly fine for me.
Haha. Whoever at MS or Apple says "let's screw our userbase" won't keep their job for very long. MS is well known for maintaining backwards compatibility for a very long time. Apple shipped emulators to compensate for an architecture change. They certainly have broken compatibility, but that's not something that is done easily or often.
I didn't mean precisely that, however. What I mean is that companies have to deal with issues that aren't relevant to many Linux distributions. Including a popup blocker in IE was probably a major decision for MS -- what if our partners get annoyed, or people block ads on MSN? How can we implement this feature in such a way that we can say "See, we have that too", while not creating a conflict with another division? MS also isn't going to let you run Windows on a 32-way box, or have the box be a domain controller without asking for a good deal of extra cash, while Linux distributions need not have any artificial limits like that.
Tried it. Many times. I used MS-DOS, DR-DOS, PC-DOS, PTS-DOS, OS/2 Warp, Windows 3.1, 3.11, 95, 98, ME, 2000, NT 3.51, NT4. I maintained many Windows boxes. I currently prefer Linux to all of that.
Many Linux distributions are non-commercial. Debian and Gentoo for example. What do you mean by "not alternatives" though?
Re:Symbian is right, because of customer service (Score:2, Insightful)
Yeah, that's just what I want...Google giving up my name and address to some prick so they can spam me in my own house. If I give Google my personal info for ANY reason, I expect them to keep in under lock and key, not make it part of a "detailed sales report".
Basically, if I didn't give you that information myself or direct Google to let you have it, you aren't entitled to it and you can fuck off.
Re:A lot of /what/, before /who/ gets out of bed? (Score:3, Insightful)
Here at Brazil most operators sell their phones without any features disabled, for an example I can upload any application to my phone using an microSD card, also after one year all operators must unlock your phone for free. I think this happens on other countries too.
So, even if this Google initiative fails at the USA... it can succed at the rest of the world.
"Deeply Unsexy" (Score:3, Insightful)
Google (Score:2, Insightful)