Following the Symbian Foundation’s recent announcements (they’ve posted something new nearly every day on their blog!), I had a chance to chat with David Wood, from the Symbian Foundation. Mr. Wood lists his job as ‘Catalyst’ at the Foundation, which we cover in the interview below. The Symbian Foundation is the result of Nokia purchasing Symbian Limited, which was a for-profit company, and then open sourcing the whole Symbian OS, and setting up the Symbian Foundation, which is a non-profit organization. Members of the Symbian Foundation pay an annual membership fee of $1,500 to access to the source code, and can use the Symbian Platform releases on any number of products, with no royalty fees.
The Symbian Foundation is made up of a governing body, in which each member, regardless of their size or contribution, is given a single vote, to help guide the Foundation. This means that Nokia has one vote, as does Samsung, and as does a manufacturer such as ZTE, or some other smaller entity.
The Guru – With the new Symbian Foundation setup, including licensing and open source, it’s possible that we’ll finally see more activity from other licensees like Samsung, LG, and now obviously Sony Ericsson’s joining the fray. Are there any steps that the Foundation is taking, moving forward, to encourage these licensees, aside from Nokia, to increase their use of Symbian’s releases?
David - We’ve had quite a lot of people using Symbian OS over the years. What we’re doing, as you said, is reducing the license fee to zero, and similarly there won’t be any license fee for S60, either. It’s all being combined into the Symbian Foundation platform, which will be royalty free. So that’s the first step, is taking away the barriers. Second thing is making it easier for people to get involved with the code and to experiment with it and make changes to it. Historically, what they did, which actually deterred some customers, is a minimum royalty commitment, I think it was something like 100k devices. So that, once again, deterred licensees from using Symbian for any commercial reason, whereas now that’s gone.
You’ll see that the new releases have a bit more flexibility in them, once we announce the feature set. Flexibility with the different screen resolutions, for example. S60 currently has some adaptability, in terms of the screen resolution, put back into the code to develop further, and this way begin to make it easier for different companies to experiment with different types of devices and form factors.
The Guru – Specifically with Symbian Signed, what steps is the Symbian Foundation taking to make that an easier process – why applications are rejected/not rejected, and making it easier for consumers to deal with?
David - Well I can’t say much about this publicly, but I can say a few things. We’ve had quite a few ideas for a while on the way to build on Symbian Signed and improve it. What I’ve now done, here in the Symbian Foundation, building the team, to be double the size that it was with Symbian Limited. As a result, they’ll get more ability to check out program refinements and implement them. So I’m not saying what we’re going to do, but saying that we recognize the quite wide unease which many developers express about Symbian Signed, and we’re now more able to allocate resources to incrementally improve the program.
The Guru – One of the biggest things with the new release schedule published recently, it seems like there will be, at any given point, 5 different Symbian Foundation releases supported, whether that’s in development, in a level of maturation, or kind of the legacy support. One of the major competitive issues that we hear about a lot is that S60/Symbian has lost agility. As these new competitors come in and are built from scratch, and Symbian has so much legacy code in there. How will juggling four or five different releases at a time allow Symbian Foundation to remain competitive and increase agility and incorporate newer features as the market dictates?
David – So one of the drivers to greater agility is that individual packages making the platform are given individual levels of autonomy. This is called ‘modularity’. It will be increasingly possible for people to pick and choose new modules or to modify modules.
Historically, there was quite a lot of interconnections between the internal APIs of different packages. And for the last year or so, there’s been a big internal cleanup of these APIs with the view to improving the modularity and agility of the overall system.
The Guru - So, being able to pick and choose which parts or modules to incorporate will make it easier to adjust as the market dictates. Will it also enable easier updating of specific features? Since the PIM features of Symbian, right now, are somewhat lacking, compared to the other platforms. The modularity is what you’re saying will allow these one bits, as they get outdated, to be taken out, updated, and reinserted, without affecting anything else. Is that accurate?
David – Exactly so. We will see, I think, many devices which are hybrids, based on Symbian 2, that will have a collection of packages from Symbian 3, and or packages that the phone manufacturer has taken and improved on by themselves.
The Guru – Now is there any requirement, so to speak, for example if Samsung takes one part and improves on it, is there a requirement for them to re-share that adjustment with the Foundation. Obviously there’s motivation, being open source, but basically they’re not allowed to say ‘we fixed this, this is ours to keep’, it has to be shared back with the Symbian Foundation. Is that accurate?
David – Correct. So, any changes to the Symbian Foundation code have to be made available under the same license. If it’s a plugin, a new application, or a different piece of middleware that attaches via standard APIs, in that case they can make their own decision about whether to contribute that or keep it for their own differentiation. We think that’s a nice balance – the balance between on the one hand keeping the platform improvements shared and on the other hand allowing commercially significant innovations to take place outside the platform.
The Guru - Symbian is one of the lesser known operating systems in the U.S. specifically. Are there any steps that the Foundation is taking to address that, or are ya’ll pretty much leaving that up to the manufacturers in terms of bringing Symbian into the U.S. market, more so than it is today?
David – The Symbian Foundation will have a much higher percentage of its personnel in the U.S. than did Symbian Limited. Symbian Limited, as a company, grew to about 1,600 people of whom about 16 were in the U.S., which is about 1%. Whereas Symbian Foundation is budgeted to grow to about 200 people, and possibly 40-50 will be in the U.S. We’re there in the U.S. in part to some of the Silicon Valley culture, to make sure we’re benefiting from the best of the Silicon Valley culture, and second to seek there, and be sure that Symbian platform insights are heard.
The Guru – What is it that you actually do at Symbian Foundation? What are your day-to-day responsibilities at Symbian Foundation?
David – We have a startup feel actually. The reality is, whatever needs to be done, we all roll up our sleeves and do it. There’s a lot of activity to prepare our website, which will have our new tools in it, such as our Source Code system, which is material, which will in turn give access to huge amounts of source code, and we’ll have a bug tracker such as Bugzilla. So all of this being prepared now, in startup mode, so lots of people getting involved.
My role at Symbian Foundation Leadership Team is the role of Catalyst. It’s a kind of weird notion in some ways – you won’t find a catalyst on many senior management teams in traditional companies. But if you look at how people go write about successful ecosystems or making succeed, they recognize this kind of a role of catalyst. A catalyst makes things happen faster than they would otherwise do. A catalyst doesn’t supply energy, but rather the energy that already exists needs to be ignited, and that’s my role. Getting involved in discussions, getting involved in planning, attending conferences, having lots of meetings, paying attention to what’s being said, understanding the trends, understanding the topics, and then advocating for them inside the Foundation and also the wider ecosystem for attention. So catalysts make ecosystems happen, and that’s my task.
The Guru – For you, what is it that you think sets Symbian apart from the other platforms, and why do you think Symbian will be around in 5 years?
David – I think we have a complete, or reasonably complete software stack for smartphones, which works very well together, and has been well-tried in the marketplace, across a variety of product types. I’m not saying it’s the best, always, but I’m saying it’s the best starting point. And couple that answer by saying we have a track record in designing and executing roadmaps. In other words, figure out what needs to happen in 6 months, and then 6 months after that, and so on. Then, delivering software of reasonably good quality that meets the targets set out in your roadmap.
Earlier you asked if isn’t having 5 releases at a time going to be a challenging and difficult thing to do, and all I’m saying is that we’ve already been doing this for a considerable number of years. We do at the time have five releases ready to go. In terms of the Symbian OS version numbers, still doing some maintenance on 9.1 and 9.2, development of sorts on 9.3, 9.4 and 9.5, and then the next ones after that have considerable amounts of work on them, too. I’m just referring to these as somewhat of proof in my statement that we are well practiced at designing and executing roadmaps.
The Guru – What is it that you personally really love about Symbian?
David – I really like our collaborative attitude. I also toyed with the idea of being a collaborator instead of a catalyst, but collaborator has some bad connotations about plotting with the enemy or something like that. This of collaborating is incredibly important in the set of challenges that we face in world today. I’m not just talking about the challenges in the mobile industry but the challenges of the economy and the climate and the changes in society. I think we become better at collaborating – that’s getting ideas from more people and more involved in discussions in a less structured way. That’s what Symbian has done for years, and it’s an existence where we have brought together many of the leading thinkers of the customers we’ve had so far, along with the leading thinkers from the network operators, and we have distilled out of that a roadmap with a collaborative basis. We want to see more of that, going forward. We think this is the best way to solve really complex, really challenging problems
The Guru – What phone do you currently use?
David - I’ve got the E71
The Guru – Do you like it?
David – Yes, it’s certainly smaller than the E61i, which I had for a while before. So I’m having a bit of difficulty typing quickly into it as I’d like, but you know to text on, once you learn how to use it, it’s very helpful.
The Guru - In your opinion, what’s the single most revolutionary thing that’s happened in mobile in the past year?
David – I would say the sensors that are built into the phone, that make it possible for the phone to know if it’s being shaken, or moved in this direction. Increasingly there are additional sensors, like a compass, and the camera is even a sensor. Phones are therefore not just calculating agents, but sensing agents, and we’re only touching the surface of what happens in terms of improved UIs and improved functionality as a result.
The Guru – What do you think separates a smartphone from a featurephone?
David – I think we’re going to try to stop thinking about smartphones. It’s going to be hard for me, we’ve been talking about smartphones for so long, even with our Smartphone Show, but it’s time to retire that terminology, I think.
The Guru – In favor of what?
David - Just as mobile devices, or smart mobile devices. Devices with different elements of intelligence. Some of them focusing more on multimedia, some of them focusing on browsing, the kind of ‘smartness’ is less important. We should stop talking about our share of the smartphone space and start talking about other metrics instead. In fact, I would go so far as to say we should have less emphasis in the short term on how many units are shipping with our software, and more emphasis on how vibrant is the developer community. So instead of talking about being the most widely used software platform on the planet – and we still have that aspiration, to be clear – but we’re going to talk more about building the most vibrant productive software movement on the planet, and we think that’s going to have all kinds of benefits for all kinds of mobile devices, whether you call them smartphones, featurephones, iphones, or whatever.
Some great stuff, and hopefully this interview gave you a better idea of where the Symbian Foundation is going, and what they’re doing to get there. I want to extend thanks to David Wood for taking time out to chat with me, to hopefully give Symbian-Guru readers a good idea of what’s going on. We’ll continue to have more coverage of the Symbian Foundation as they progress closer and closer to the first platform release.
