Whither the OMTP?
By Keith Dyer at 3GSM in Barcelona
Nokia and Vodafone have announced that they will collaborate to “strengthen the S60 software platform’s role in Vodafone’s device portfolio.”
A statement from the company said, “The collaboration will help Vodafone to offer new services more quickly to its customers by increasing the use of S60 as a standard software platform for mobile handsets worldwide.”
So what is this all about? At one level this is about Nokia offering increasing customisation options to Vodafone. The companies said Nokia and Vodafone will develop a Vodafone-specific software complement on top of the S60 platform.
At another, it seems to signal that Vodafone has lost patience with efforts to standardise phone software performance and features, through its participation in the OMTP. Vodafone has form for this, preferring to take what it sees as the quickest route to market, rather than wait for formal standards to catch up. Indeed, its founding of the OMTP was seen as just such a move.
Lasty week, George Grey, coo of Savaje, which promotes a rival Java based OS, which he says would make it possible for Java applications to take on the “operator” look and feel with no further integration, said that he thought the OMTP was doomed as “certain” parties were setting it up to fail. Perhaps he knew something specific, or perhaps not, but this announcement can bear that interpretation.
The announcement is also bad news for non-Symbian OS based handset vendors. Nokia has realised that the battleground now is in the UI and the software platform on the phone. Using S60, one of only two UIs for Symbian (along with Ericsson’s UIQ), it can keep control of handset markets in which it was threatened by open operating systems and an operator insistence on customisation.
If Vodafone decides that it will prefer S60 as its software load, then other handset vendors are looking at licensing Nokia’s software if they want to talk to Vodafone. And if they want to license S60, it would help if they had a Symbian based phone.
And who dominates Symbian? Nokia. Granted, if Nokia want’s to grow the addressable market, it may well push for a big reduction in Symbian licence fees, to push the OS into the mid and mass markets. But if the upside of that downside is the dominance of S60 at the UI and software load level, then it will be worth it to Nokia, which after all doesn’t have to share S60 licences with its Symbian partners!
That Nokia sees this as the way ahead is evidenced in this section of the announcement:
“The collaboration also includes the expansion of the licensee base and increased portfolio penetration through open roadmap governance and establishes a strong independent brand position for both the S60 software and the supporting developer activities. In addition, Nokia and Vodafone are working jointly to promote independently licensable reference designs from semiconductor vendors to enable shorter time to market for new S60 devices.”
This announcement seems to be a strong counter-punch by Nokia against those predicting the increasing growth of open OS and software platforms. And further evidence that Vodafone ploughs its own furrows when it comes to getting what it wants.