The Mobile Phone OS Playoffs

Eswar Priyadarshan, CTO

If the various mobile phone OS vendors were to be considered professional sporting teams, I think it’s safe to say that the playoffs have begun with the Nokia acquisition of Symbian. Here’s my rundown of the top playoff contenders (the Power Rankings, so to speak) and as an added bonus, since the playoffs are all about the matchups at key positions, I will elaborate on key matchups between the teams.

You may be shocked to read this, but I must nominate Nokia as the top seed simply by respectfully acknowledging the 40% worldwide handset market share for Nokia plus the 5-10% additional market share for other Symbian-based handset vendors such as Sony Ericsson.

The other top tier players and likely never-say-die contenders are Microsoft with Windows Mobile, RIM with the Blackberry platform, Google with the new Android platform and Apple with the Mac OS platform on iPhones.

When you see this list of contenders, you may be tempted to conclude that this playoff season may never end, resulting in five fundamentally different platforms for the foreseeable future. I think that the ultimate deciders of which of these platforms remains will not be the wireless carriers or us consumers, but rather the unaffiliated handset vendors like LG, Samsung and HTC – the companies who will build for any mobile OS as long as they can make a volume-based profit.

What about standards-based platforms like J2ME (Java 2 Mobile Edition)? What about the rush to open source all of these platforms as is being done with Android and LiMo? I think that the mobile application and OS environment is too nascent to derive any true competitive benefit because you proclaim that your platform is standard or open. And the guys subsidizing the price of the devices, the handset vendors and wireless carriers, ultimately want someone with deep resources to call when they have an issue or want a new feature – and certainly not participate in some open forum where they reveal precious roadmap secrets to all comers.

So there you have it – top six playoff contenders named Nokia, Microsoft, Apple, RIM and Google. What about the key matchups?

I organize the key matchups around the key constituents that the OS contenders must cater to – consumers, wireless carriers, handset vendors and finally, application developers.

Apple obviously leads with the consumer, or does it? Does it actually lead with a specific class of consumer – someone who can spend approximately $2000 over a 2-year period to own a beautiful piece of mobile functionality? Because if you ask the ‘who leads with the most consumers – and why?’ question the matchup goes to Nokia, who makes very functional and affordable devices for a billion-plus people around the world. By the latter metric, Nokia remains the leader in this matchup category.

As for the wireless carrier driven matchup, Google jumped in hard with a truly open approach to cater to carriers (and device makers) with low to minimal platform licensing fees but they have hit a few carrier-related snags that are pushing the Android launch out. The first snag is the carrier demanding UI customization (as Sprint has reportedly done) that fundamentally changes the phone UI from baseline Android. The second snag is something that bites most software companies, its just surprising to see Google join the club – difficulties porting the platform features and functions to Chinese multi-byte character sets for China Mobile.

RIM, on the other hand, has always done a masterful job of catering to the carriers despite stepping out and creating its own consumer identity with the Blackberry family of devices. I wonder if RIM’s next major move should be to license the Blackberry platform to other device vendors as a way to leverage great carrier distribution and relationships and dramatically expand market share.

The handset vendors obviously loathe licensing software platforms from other handset vendors – even if the licensing cost was free. The only two contenders who do not make phones are Google and Microsoft. Until Google ships Android in volume, the matchup winner in this category therefore has to be Microsoft. Unfortunately, Windows Mobile is a usability clunker, at least in my opinion, and is but a minor cog in the giant Microsoft wheel, so I’d day Google will win this matchup in very short order.

The final matchup is for the hearts and minds of people like me, the developers. I honestly have to confess to being completely underwhelmed across the board. As a modern Java (or .NET) shop, do I really want to hire back-to-the-future specialty C/C++ developers to code to the Microsoft, Apple or Nokia platforms? Do I train my existing Java developers to code to the proprietary Google or RIM Java APIs? And if I spent these developer dollars, am I assured that the apps I have built will actually work across the specific family of devices?

Given these thorny (and costly) issues, my mobile developer view of this matchup is to write-in a new contender – the mobile internet browser on the phone. There’s an actual “stack” of features and functions I can design for and code to around the mobile browser – simple pages for simple phones and rich Javascript-driven pages and features for iPhones and the like – with my developer cost and training requirement being that I teach a standard HTML/CSS/Javascript Web Developer all about mobile.

My conclusion is that while the playoff contenders are all global technology heavy hitters, there really isn’t one that is a clear first or second place finisher across all key matchups. All this points to several more years of jockeying, working on higher layers of platform usability, finding ways to get developers more involved and excited and constantly courting device vendors and wireless carriers with cost or customization incentives. For us mobile veterans, it seems that the plethora of platforms song will remain the same.