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Posts Tagged ‘silverlight’

Today Adobe announced a series of changes to its emerging web applications platform. The changes include:

–The next version of the mobile Flash runtime will be free of license fees. Adobe also confirmed that the mobile version of the Air runtime will be free.

–Adobe changed its licensing terms and released additional technical information that will make it easier for companies to create their own Flash-compatible products.

–The company announced a new consortium called Open Screen supporting the more open versions of Flash and Air. Members of the new group include the five leading handset companies, three mobile operators (including NTT DoCoMo and Verizon), technology vendors (including Intel, Cisco, and Qualcomm), and content companies (BBC, MTV, and NBC Universal). Google, Apple, and Microsoft are not members. It’s not clear to me what the consortium members have actually agreed to do. My guess is it’s mostly a political group.

Adobe said that the idea behind the announcements is to create a single consistent platform that lets developers create an application or piece of content once and run it across various types of devices and operating systems. That idea is very appealing to developers and content companies today. It was equally appealing two years ago, when then-CEO of Adobe Bruce Chizen made the exact same promise (link):

If we execute appropriately we will be the engagement platform, or the layer, on top of anything that has an LCD display, any computing device — everything from a refrigerator to an automobile to a video game to a computer to a mobile phone.

If Adobe had made the Open Screen announcement two years ago, I think it could have caught Microsoft completely flat-footed, and Adobe might have been in a very powerful position by now. But by waiting two years, Adobe gave Microsoft advance warning and plenty of runway room to react — so much so that ArsTechnica today called Adobe’s announcement a reaction to Microsoft Silverlight (link).

Also, the most important changes appear to apply to the next version of mobile Flash and the upcoming mobile version of Air — meaning this was in part a vaporware announcement. Even when the new runtime software ships, it will take a long time to get it integrated into mobile phones. So once again, Microsoft has a long runway to maneuver on.

Still, the changes Adobe made are very useful. There’s no way Flash could have become ubiquitous in the mobile world while Adobe was still charging fees for it. The changes to the Flash license terms remove one of the biggest objections I’ve seen to Flash from open source advocates (link). The Flash community seems excited (link, link). And the list of supporters is impressive. Looking through the obligatory quotes attached to the Adobe release, two things stand out:

–Adobe got direct mentions of Air from ARM, Intel, SonyEricsson, Verizon, and Nokia (although Nokia promised only to explore Air, while it’s on the record promising to bundle Silverlight mobile).

–The inclusion of NBC Universal in the announcement will have Adobe people chuckling because Microsoft signed up NBC to stream the Olympics online using Silverlight. So NBC is warning Microsoft not to take it for granted, and Adobe gets to stick its tongue out.

What does it all mean?

Nothing much in the short term. As I mentioned earlier, this is mostly a vaporware announcement (other than the license changes). Some people are speculating that this will put pressure on Apple to make Flash available on the iPhone (link). That’s possible, if Apple’s real concern was that they didn’t like Flash Lite. Now they can port full Flash, or someone else can do it. But if Apple is in reality unwilling to let anyone else’s platform run on the iPhone then we’ll see other objections to Flash emerge.

The marketing competition to control the future of web apps is continuing to heat up. Microsoft is trying to take the whole thing proprietary by creating a comprehensive architecture, Adobe is trying to drive its own platform, Sun is trying to re-energize Java, Google is making its own moves, and so on (link). Plus, of course, most web app developers today are happy with what they’re using now and have little interest in switching to any of the new architectures (check out the dandy commentary by Joel Spolsky here).

It’s an enormously complex situation, and it’s going to take months, if not years, before we can start to see who’s winning and who is losing. Rubicon is working on a white paper that will try to clarify the situation a bit. I’ll let you know when it’s published.

In the meantime, enjoy the marketing fireworks. The intense competition is forcing companies to innovate faster and open up their products, as Adobe did today. I think that process is good for just about everyone in the industry.
Copyright 2008 Michael Mace.

Tags: apple, apps, ash, bbc, blog, developers, docomo, free adobe, game, google, iphone, lcd display, Mac, microsoft, microsoft silverlight, mobile operators, mobile phone, mobile phones, mobile version, mobile world, mtv, ngage, nokia, ntt docomo, olympics, online, operating system, qualcomm, silverlight, sony, sonyericsson, system, t mobile, Technology, technology vendors, vaporware, video game, web applications platform, Windows

There’s so much hype in the mobile industry that I’m always reluctant to use a word like “shocking,” but nothing else fits Nokia’s announcement today that it will support Microsoft Silverlight.

If you missed the press release (link), Nokia said that it’s going to make Microsoft Silverlight available for all of its mobile platforms — Series 40 (the low-end phone OS), S60 (the high-end OS), and its Maemo Internet tablet. (It’s not clear if Silverlight will be bundled or just offered as a download.) Silverlight is a web app graphics and interface layer, intended to displace Adobe Flash.

The announcement was shocking for several reasons:

–Up until now, Nokia and Adobe had worked together closely. Nokia is one of the few companies paying to bundle Flash on its phones, and Nokia had featured Adobe prominently at some of its developer events in Silicon Valley. So the announcement I was expecting was that Nokia would bundle Air, the next evolution of Flash, rather than its competitor.

–Nokia has generally treated Microsoft as the spawn of the devil. The whole Symbian OS consortium was designed primarily as a way to prevent Microsoft from getting a controlling role in mobile software. Now Nokia gives Microsoft’s software layer a huge boost?

–Although Microsoft had hinted vaguely about taking Silverlight mobile, it had given no definite plans at all. So this is a huge step forward for Silverlight.

–Just a few weeks ago, Nokia bought TrollTech and announced that its software was going to unify development across Series 40 and S60. Now Nokia endorses Silverlight, which will also run across Series 40 and S60. Which one are developers supposed to focus on?

What in the world is going on?

I don’t know. Nobody from Nokia has explained it to me, so I have to read between the lines. Nokia says in the press release: “Nokia aims to support market leading and content rich internet application environments and to embrace and encourage open innovation. By working with Microsoft, we are creating terrific opportunities and additional choices for the development community.” Okay, so I guess what they’re saying is that they want to support every platform and development option out there. Presumably the benefit to them is that they can claim their phones support more software than anyone else.

I doubt that’s the only motivation, though. By supporting numerous platforms, Nokia reduces the possibility that any one of them can dominate the market and push around Nokia. It also lets Nokia play the sides off against one another. I’m sure the threat of embracing Air made Microsoft give Nokia a very good deal on Silverlight, and no doubt Nokia will now use its Microsoft relationship to get business concessions from Adobe (assuming that Nokia still plans to work with Adobe at all; that’s not entirely clear).

Anyway, I can sort of see how this all works for Nokia strategically, although it feels like Nokia is trying too hard to be clever. I’m not as clear on the benefits of all this for mobile developers and users. As was covered in last week’s post on mobile apps (link), many developers view the proliferation of platforms as a problem, not a benefit. Microsoft itself said in the Nokia press release:

“We want to make sure developers and designers don’t have to constantly recreate the wheel and build different versions of applications and services for multiple operating systems, browsers and platforms.”

That’s a pretty danged funny quote coming from a company that now offers at least four mobile platforms (two versions of Windows Mobile, Silverlight, Tablet PC, and does .Net CF count as a fifth?), in a press release from a company that apparently wants to support every platform available. If you really think platform confusion is a problem, guys, look in a mirror.

For users, the benefit of all this deal-making is unclear. We’re stumbling into a world where you’ll need to know details of which platforms are loaded on a particular phone in order to know which apps it can run. I can’t think of a better way to discourage use of mobile applications.
Copyright 2008 Michael Mace.

Tags: adobe flash, application environments, apps, ash, blog, business, developer events, developers, interface layer, internet application, Mac, microsoft, microsoft silverlight, mobile application, mobile applications, mobile developer, mobile developers, mobile industry, mobile platform, mobile platforms, mobile software, nokia, operating system, rim, silicon valley, silverlight, software layer, symbian, symbian os, system, t mobile, wheel, Windows, Windows Mobile

Nokia bought Trolltech for about $150 million, and there’s all sorts of speculation online about what it means. Before I get to that, let me quickly summarize what Trolltech does:

Trolltech is a Norwegian company that makes development tools and Linux software. Its best-known products are Qt (a software layer and development tools for writing applications that run across multiple operating systems, including Windows, Mac, and Linux), Qtopia (a user interface and applications layer for Linux), and Qtopia Phone Edition (a Linux software environment for mobile phones).

In the mobile world, Qtopia Phone Edition has been the company’s best-known product, although it hasn’t exactly been a commercial success. Motorola uses a version of Qt in its Linux mobile phones, but not all of Qtopia. The Sony Mylo mobile device uses Qtopia, as did the Sharp Zaurus PDAs. But Trolltech had so much trouble getting a mainstream phone licensee for Qtopia that it created its own hardware prototype, the Greenphone. (Out of fairness, I should add that Trolltech has a lot of other tiny licensees you’ve never heard of; you can see the full list here.)

The obvious assumption would be that Nokia bought Trolltech for its phone technology, but that’s not what Nokia says. The company’s press release says Trolltech will help advance its “cross-platform software strategy for mobile devices and desktop applications, and…Internet services business. With Trolltech, Nokia and third party developers will be able to develop applications that work in the Internet, across Nokia’s device portfolio and on PCs.”

All About Symbian reinforced that message, reproducing a slide from the Nokia press briefing that showed Qt layered on top of Nokia Series 40, S60, and a variety of desktop PC operating systems (link). The Guardian quoted a Nokia spokesperson as saying the emphasis of the deal is development tools: “This is about Trolltech’s fantastic tools. You can much faster develop programmes which can work on multiple platforms.” (link).

Vnunet quoted an analyst saying that Nokia will use Qtopia to help deploy its Ovi Internet services cross-platform (link). I don’t really see the Internet connection; Qtopia has not been a contender in the net applications world the way that Flash and Silverlight are. But maybe Nokia wants to build it into a contender.

Other analysts suggested other motivations for the purchase. Some of the commentary on Slashdot suggested that Nokia is investing in Linux to counter Google Android (link). ArsTechnica suggested that Nokia might be planning to replace S60 with Qt (link), while others suggested that Nokia plans to use Linux instead of Symbian. Richard Windsor of Nomura pointed out in an e-mail analysis that the purchase of Qt rips the guts out of Motorola’s Linux plans, although he guesses that’s more of a happy side effect for Nokia than the primary motivation.

But an unsigned article on ZDNet UK had the most sweeping interpretation, basically saying that this spells certain death for all proprietary operating systems (link):

Nokia’s bet is that the sheer size of the Qt 4-based market will be a decisive inducement for everyone else, handset makers, operators, and pure applications players alike, and that the explosion in compatibility will amplify the market for everyone much as happened on the desktop when MS-DOS anointed the PC architecture. But unlike then, Qt 4 will break forever the idea that one part of the market can seal itself off as a profitable mini-universe, an idea as archaic in the 21st century as the feudalism it so closely resembles.

As we say here in California, I want some of what he’s been smoking.

What does it really mean?

We’re all assuming that Nokia actually has a coherent master plan here. Although $150m is a lot of money to me personally, it’s mouse nuts to Nokia. Maybe Nokia bought Trolltech just as an experiment, or to keep it from falling into some other company’s hands. The fact that Nokia’s going to continue to develop its Maemo version of Linux, which is not based on the Trolltech technology, suggests a certain amount of incoherence.

If you want to be really Machiavellian, you could speculate that this purchase is the Nokia mobile phone organization’s answer to Maemo — “you tablet guys keep your version of Linux, now we have our own.”

But let’s assume there really is a plan, and it’s aimed at competitors. About six months ago, I wrote about Nokia’s ambitions to be a computer company (link). Now we see them dealing themselves into the operating system competition as well. No matter what you think Nokia’s motives are, the fact is that it’s now the owner of a respectable cross-platform software layer that runs on PCs and mobile devices. Nokia is now a software layer company, in very direct competition with other layer companies like Microsoft and Adobe and Sun. The deal also makes Nokia a much more important player in the open source community. And it puts Nokia in more direct opposition to the companies with their own operating systems — Apple and Google and (once again) Microsoft.

That’s a huge potential change. I say “potential” because Nokia has a lot more to do if it really wants to compete. The Trolltech team will need more investment (they have been losing money) and Nokia has a lot of work to do in developer evangelism and support to make the challenge real. But the potential is there.

I think that as the implications of the deal become clear, Nokia may have trouble continuing to partner with some of its new competitors. For example, it has spent a lot of time positioning itself as a partner to Adobe Air, but it’s hard to see the evolved Qt as anything other than a competitor. Same thing for Google.

As for how this fits with all of Nokia’s other products, I’m having a lot of trouble understanding how Qt will cohabit with S60 and Series 40. What exactly are developers supposed to develop for, and which user interface will the phones feature? If Nokia tries to keep all of them going, its phone software is going to look like a petit four, with layers stacked on layers stacked on layers. That makes for a nice pastry, but in a mobile phone it’s a recipe for bad performance and short battery life. It’s also a certain way to confuse developers.

So a lot depends on Nokia’s next steps. Does Qt replace Series 40 and S60? I don’t know which group within Nokia made the Trolltech deal, but I wonder if the biggest competitive battle might end up being the one inside the company, between its competing software standards.
Copyright 2008 Michael Mace.

Tags: amp, apple, ash, Battery, blog, business, desktop applications, developers, google, hardware prototype, internet service, internet services business, linux qtopia, Mac, microsoft, mobile device, mobile devices, mobile phone, mobile phones, mobile world, money, motorola, nokia, nokia series, online, operating system, os company, party developers, pda, pdas, phone technology, platform software, rim, sharp zaurus, silverlight, software environment, software layer, software strategy, sony, symbian, system, Technology, user interface, Windows

[With a correction made on June 26.]

The Symbian Foundation announcement today is a fascinating change in business strategy, but I’m not sure if it will help or hurt Nokia in the long run. I think something like this was probably necessary just to clean up the mess in Symbian’s ownership structure. If Nokia can make the new structure work, it’ll be a milestone in the use of open source by large tech companies, but I’m not sure it helps Nokia win the smartphone war.

What happened

–Nokia is buying Symbian. Everyone currently working at Symbian becomes a Nokia employee after the deal closes. Nokia said it will spend the next six months deciding “how we will use the unique talent we are gaining.”

[By the way, the buyout by Nokia is a change I said was possible two and a half years ago when it first became clear that some of Symbian's owners wanted out (link). I am astounded that the change took so long. I looked back at my old post a few months ago and thought, "wow, I really got that one wrong." Now I am relieved to say that I was not wrong, I was merely prematurely correct ]

–Symbian OS will become free. Nokia’s Symbian-related assets, including both Symbian OS and the S60 interface, will be contributed to the new Symbian Foundation, a nonprofit that will control the Symbian platform. So Nokia writes the code and then gives it to the foundation for free.

Founding members of the foundation include: AT&T, LG, Motorola, Nokia, DoCoMo, Samsung, SonyEricsson, ST Micro, TI, and Vodafone. It’s very interesting to see some operators in the mix, especially AT&T.

The foundation will open source the new Symbian platform over a two year period. So eventually Symbian will be available for free.

The new Symbian Platform will have a broader scope than the current Symbian OS. It will include:

-An application suite (previously controlled by licensees)
-Runtimes (including Webkit, Flash, Silverlight, and Java; previously licensee-controlled)
-UI framework (formerly controlled by licensees)
-Middleware
-OS
-Tools, SDK, and application signing (previously shared between Symbian and licensees)

–UIQ is dead. SonyEricsson’s UIQ technology, and NTT DoCoMo’s MOAP, both of which are user interface layers written on top of Symbian, will also be contributed to the foundation, which will incorporate pieces of them into S60. The new Symbian foundation partners said at the press conference, “We will reposition UIQ in the new ecosystem.” That’s seems to be a face-saving way of saying, “UIQ is dead.” Confirming that, UIQ announced immediate plans to lay off more than half its employees (link).

These are huge changes, even though they’ll take a couple of years to implement. We won’t get the first release of the new merged platform until 2010, although the partners say S60 and native Symbian apps will continue to run in the future, so they hope many more developers will create Symbian apps today in anticipation of future growth.

–Nokia will continue to control Symbian development. This is my interpretation, not something they announced. Technically, control over Symbian and S60 passes to the new Symbian Foundation, with product plans controlled by a managing board and councils made up of foundation members. This makes Symbian sound independent. But Nokia will employ most of the people maintaining and extending Symbian and S60, and could divert them to other Nokia projects if it ever dislikes the direction of the foundation. More to the point, the whitepaper explaining the new foundation says, “device manufacturers will be eligible for seats based on number of Symbian Foundation platform-based devices shipped, with the other board members selected by election and contribution” (link). So Nokia as the dominant shipper of Symbian devices gets the most seats, and can then control the election of additional board members. Symbian contacted me on June 26 with a correction: “Five Foundation board seats will be allocated to handset vendors on the basis of volumes shipped using the Symbian Foundation platform. There will be a maximum of one (1) board seat per company.” So Nokia gets one board seat, and does not control the foundation.

The right phrase for this, I think, is puppet strings. But I don’t mean that in a bad way; it would have been insane for Nokia to actually give up control over its smartphone OS. Just don’t have any illusion that the strings have been cut. They’ve merely been relocated, and in fact I think Nokia now controls things more directly since it owns the Symbian development team. Added June 26: Nokia has given other companies a formal say in the feature set, with less official control by Nokia than it had when it held about 50% of Symbian, but perhaps more practical influence because it now directly employs most of the people doing the engineering. So I think Nokia gave up the official veto it had over Symbian’s actions, and replaced it with a practical one.

What does it all mean?

I don’t know.

The announcement is so complex, and so many things are changing in the mobile market, that it’s very difficult to predict how everything will turn out. Also, the whole thing depends on crisp implementation. Even the most brilliant strategy fails if you can’t execute on it.

You can’t say that Nokia lacks guts. The foundation members said at the announcement that it is one of the largest open source announcements ever, and I think that’s true. It’s a very interesting, aggressive move for Nokia, and I respect that. There are precedents for a big company acting as a sugar daddy for an open source software project, but I don’t think it’s ever been done with a project that is as central to the parent company’s operations as Symbian is to Nokia. It will be fascinating to see if Nokia can really work effectively through the foundation model. I presume they have thought about this a lot and feel the risks are well controlled.

I’m having trouble seeing the big picture of how this changes the world, though. I suspect the announcement is actually half cleanup and half power move. The power move is that it challenges Android, and could help harness the energy of the open source community to support Symbian. The cleanup is that the ownership situation of Symbian was unstable and had to be changed eventually, and SonyEricsson clearly wanted to get out of the UIQ business. The creation of the foundation solves all of those problems at once. My guess is that since Nokia is paying most of the bills, the other foundation partners were willing to go along with it. The Symbian investors get some money from Nokia, and can sit back and wait to see what the foundation delivers.

Here are some other issues and questions that stand out to me:

Symbian gets its UI back. Years ago, Symbian took itself out of the user interface business, allowing Nokia and NTT DoCOMo to develop their own UIs, and spinning out the UIQ interface team. The company declared that it had been a mistake to ever go into the UI business. So it was amusing to hear Symbian at today’s press conference saying how disruptive it was to have multiple user interfaces, and how great it is to have them unified.

The reality is that OS companies have traditionally created the UI along with the rest of the OS because they need to be coordinated closely, and because developers want to work with one consistent interface. So the real mistake was getting out of the UI business, and Symbian has now corrected that.

What will happen within Nokia? At the press conference, Nokia was asked what happens to its internal S60 development team (which is rumored to be larger than Symbian itself) once the merger is complete. Nokia said vaguely that it’s going to spend six months working out all those integration issues, and what it will do with the multiple geographic locations. It’s hard for me to believe that working out process won’t result in some layoffs. I hope I’m wrong; I have friends at both Nokia and Symbian, and layoffs would be incredibly painful for the Symbian folks, many of whom have spent most of their careers there.

The fate of the people is just one of the open questions about what the merger means to Nokia. Another is the fate of Trolltech, the development tool that Nokia purchased recently and said would unify app development across Series 40 and S60. Will it be contributed to Symbian? And what does the open sourcing of Symbian mean for Nokia’s use of Linux?

How does Nokia differentiate its software? The theory behind S60 was that Nokia would have its own user interface, helping to differentiate its phones from other Symbian vendors. Now that S60 will be given away, how will Nokia differentiate? The Symbian Foundation says licensees will be able to create a “differentiated experience” on its unified UI framework. Lord only knows what that means. Maybe Nokia has decided the UI is not a point of differentiation at all, and plans to focus on something else (web services, perhaps?)

Will the change in Symbian really drive more developers? As the Symbian partners pointed out repeatedly in the press conference, they have already sold 200 million phones. If that’s not enough to excite developers, how will adding another 200 million — or even 500 million — do it? Although Symbian now has a nicer long term story, I don’t think most developers were paying attention to that. They respond to user excitement and the chance to make lots of money. The new Symbian strategy doesn’t directly drive either one.

What does it mean to Apple? I think it’s probably good news. Although the Symbian partners could theoretically bleed Apple by sharing investments that Apple has to fund for itself, Apple competes on speed and elegance, not cost control. Nokia and Symbian will now spend the next six months sorting out how they’ll integrate and rationalize their organizations. No matter how much they try to avoid it, this will slip schedules and force people to revisit plans. And the other Symbian licensees have to wait two years for the new OS. That gives Apple a long, long time to build up its iPhone business. The Register put it very bluntly in its commentary on the Symbian announcement (link):

“Apple must now see a clear road ahead for world dominance…it’s now Apple’s business to lose.”

Wow, from new entrant to industry leader in just a year. That sort of stuff must drive Nokia nuts.

Is Google happy or upset tonight? My first reaction is to say that Google should be worried because there’s now another very credible operating system being given away for free in competition with Android (or there will be in two years). What’s more, the leading mobile handset companies all participated in the Symbian Foundation announcement. That makes it harder for Android to get licensees. But the new open Symbian OS is two years away from shipment, giving Google lots of runway to get established (that’s what I meant about execution determining the real impact of the announcement). Also, the governance system for Android is a lot simpler than Symbian’s. While the Symbian committees must debate and agree on product plans, Google can just decide whatever features it wants to add, and toss them out there. In theory, Google should be able to move much faster.

Besides, there is the question of why Google really created Android. One school of thought says that Android was just a tool to bleed Microsoft and force openness in the mobile ecosystem. If that’s the goal, then the opening up of Symbian is a kind of a triumph for Google. Nokia is, in many ways, doing Google’s work for it. Which brings us to…

What happens to Microsoft? Here’s the weird thought for the day: Microsoft is the last major company charging money for a mobile operating system. The throwback. The dinosaur. How many companies are going to want to pay for Windows Mobile when they can get Linux, Android, or Symbian for free? This is Microsoft’s ultimate open source nightmare, becoming real.
Copyright 2008 Michael Mace.

Tags: amp, apple, apps, ash, blog, business, car, developers, device manufacturer, device manufacturers, docomo, free nokia, google, handset vendors, Integration, interface layer, iphone, Mac, microsoft, mobile ecosystem, mobile market, money, motorola, nokia, ntt docomo, online, operating system, samsung, silverlight, smartphone, sony, sonyericsson, symbian, symbian os, symbian platform, system, Technology, user interface, user interfaces, vodafone, Windows, Windows Mobile

It looks like the topic of TechEd this year evolves around new rendering/layout technologies, like WPF and Silverlight. There are already many ISVs out there selling controls built on top of these new technologies. I was listening to a presentation about Silverlight running on Windows Mobile at TechEd today. At MIX it was announced that we are planning to release Silverlight for Windows Mobile devices and that we will have a technical preview by the end of the year. People were really excited to hear that.

I am not one to review devices, but today was a special day. I had the chance to play with the new HTC Diamond device. The device was impressive. HTC did a really impressive job on top of Windows Mobile 6.1. The device is slim, high-resolution (640×480), FM receiver, WiFi, bluetooth, touch sensors and some kind of a accelerometer… well, you can get the specs from the website. It is a great mixture of software and platform. In short, the device is delightful.

Other than that, I will be presenting tomorrow on how to increase the compatibility and usability of your Windows Mobile application. If you are here at TechEd, it would be great to see you.

 -Luis Cabrera
Windows Mobile Shell SDE

Tags: bluetooth, diamond, htc, mobile application, mobile device, mobile devices, shell, silverlight, wifi, Windows, Windows Mobile