Nokia buys Symbian
I've been reflecting on Nokia's move to buy out Symbian earlier this week. If you missed the news Nokia plans to purchase the remaining 52 percent of Britain's Symbian Ltd. for $410 million and to establish the Symbian Foundation.
The Symbian Foundation will provide the software for free combining three different versions of the Symbian software into one open platform.
This development is really interesting as it brings a whole new phase of competition with LiMo Foundation and Google also providing their software for free.
In the short term this won't have much of an impact as Nokia was already a majority shareholder in Symbian and is at least a year away from devices using this version of their platform. In the longer term it will probably generate challenges to developers and solutions providers with potential fragmentation of the platform.
What this does demonstrate though is the importance of Software AND Services to the mobile industry.
Interesting times ahead!
Comments
Anonymous
June 25, 2008
PingBack from http://wordnew.acne-reveiw.info/?p=3695Anonymous
June 26, 2008
MS would save a bundle if they dropped Windows Mobile and used Symbian Foundation instead. I'm sure the Windows Media, Silverlight and Office guys and girls would be more than happy to provide their services on such a platform....