Symbian CEO on open source, Windows Mobile and 'usability'

Can mobile OS leader Symbian keep up with rising competition from the likes of Apple, Microsoft and RIM? Natasha Lomas speaks with company CEO Nigel Clifford.

Nigel Clifford is CEO of mobile OS maker Symbian, the market leader in the smart phone operating system space. The 49-year-old CEO, a Cambridge University graduate who also has an MBA from Strathclyde University, joined Symbian from another telecoms software business - Tertio Telecoms - and has also worked at Cable and Wireless, heading up its UK operations, and at BT where he held a variety of management roles.

Earlier this year - and some three years after Clifford joined Symbian as chief exec - the company announced it would be going open source, shifting from a proprietary business model to one that offers access to its millions of lines of code to developers everywhere via the Symbian Foundation. Or as Clifford puts it: "At the heart of [this decision] is a belief that the power of many is better than the power of the few and that by making ourselves open we then have the opportunity to use millions of brains who perhaps previously were held a little bit distant from us."

silicon.com caught up with Clifford recently in his loft-style office at the company's Southwark HQ in London to discuss the finer points of going open source; the challenges posed by mobile newbies like Apple and Google; how to build 'usability' into an OS; and how a humble mobile app helped him best his two teenage boys in a triathlon.

Rising competition
Symbian's history is a long one, for the tech industry. The company was established a decade ago by Ericsson, Motorola, Nokia and Psion, and by 2006 there were 100 million Symbian phones in the market - a figure that has more than doubled two years later as the smart phone market continues to grow year-on-year.

Today the company remains undisputed market leader in the smart phone space, largely owing to the strength of Nokia - the world's number one handset vendor - which uses the Symbian OS. But Symbian knows the mobile game is changing - as the CEO writes on the company website: "Our market today is very different from the one we've been operating in successfully in the past 10 years. We're clear that powerful competitors are vying for this space."

And while these "powerful competitors" are not name-checked on Symbian's site, they are very familiar brand names indeed - Apple, BlackBerry, Google, Microsoft - all encroaching on its territory.

According to analyst house Gartner, Symbian claimed well over half (57.1 per cent) of the smart phone OS market in Q2 2008, followed a distant second by BlackBerry-maker RIM (17.4 per cent), after which comes Microsoft's Windows Mobile OS with 12 per cent. However the stats also show Symbian's lead is shrinking. Back in Q2 2007 Gartner gave Symbian 65.6 per cent market share - which means the company has seen a not inconsiderable 8.5 percentage point drop in market share in a year. And rival platforms continue to cut bigger slices of the pie - most notably BlackBerry-maker RIM that has seen an 8.5 percentage point increase over the same period.

Asked why the company's growth has been slowing, Clifford takes a 'glass half full' perspective. "The smart phone is still the fastest growing marketplace in mobile… and we're still market leader there, want to remain market leader - 60 per cent of phones sold in this sector in the last 12 months had Symbian inside them," he begins.

But he concedes there have been 'regional differences' - or "particular patterns in different marketplaces". He points, by way of example, to government/regulator intervention in the Japanese market that has removed generous subsidies for high end phones, meaning dramatic price rises for consumers and a knock on effect for mobile companies (something that has also affected mobile maker Sony Ericsson).

"Everyone who's got a strong market position in Japan has seen growth slow," he says philosophically. "Conversely we've seen in other markets significant growth - in the US there's been significant growth and we would like to see more market share in the US. So some of this is very regional."

Beyond Nokia
Misbehaving markets aside, Clifford's still resolutely upbeat about what tomorrow will bring Symbian: "Our growth depends on shipping lots of new products and what we've got now is a pipeline of 90 products - the biggest pipeline we've ever had - which are waiting to go out through the door."

If Symbian has historically been bound up with the fate of Nokia, part of the unspoken rational behind the creation of the Symbian Foundation is to go beyond Nokia, which is also facing the challenge of more and more determined rivals, to bring new users to - and perhaps even create new uses for - the Symbian software platform. Even if, in the short term at least, this means getting closer to its Finnish partner as Nokia buys up all Symbian shares and then bequeaths its code to the Foundation.

"I can just speak for Symbian [rather than the Symbian Foundation as a whole] but probably over the last 18 months or so we've been thinking very hard about how we engage with developers," Clifford explains. "How we engage with partners, how we get more people using the code. And also how we release the opportunity that's out there - we've got 225 million phones out there running Symbian. That's a huge opportunity for a developer - if they could get everyone who's taken an app, [to] pay a pound then all of a sudden they become a rich person."

Under the current model, Symbian charges a royalty for use of its software and requires its partners to sign up to a licence agreement. It is this business model which will be swept away by the Symbian Foundation, thereby removing a hurdle preventing more developers from using Symbian software, according to Clifford.

He tells silicon.com: "[The royalty business model] was kind of a barrier which in the case of the partner was probably not financial, it was just overhead. So if you were a hobbyist or a small part of an R&D team just getting to the starting point of having the code in your hands was an effort. And the one thing that we don't want to do is put effort and barriers in the way. So that was one of the reasons - let's get these hurdles flattened and allow people to experiment."

The Foundation will also resolve another barrier as it will unify all the different flavours of the Symbian OS into one platform. "[Previously] developers could have been put off by the fact that even though [Symbian] was a very large marketplace there were these elements of overhead of writing for multiple UIs [Symbian OS, S60, UIQ, MOAP]," he explains. "Every time you put a hurdle in the way then that's another bump, which means well maybe [a developer will say] I don't want to go there."

The company claims to have notched up an estimated four million developers in its 10 years of operating. And Clifford believes the Foundation will be able to hold its own in the competition for developer mindshare, even taking into account Apple's faithful and Google's brand clout "This [Symbian] is where the volume is, and this is where you will get the biggest population across the world using your product... So would you rather have a very broad marketplace or a very narrow marketplace?" he points out.

Asked whether going open source is the best strategy to survive in an increasingly crowded marketplace, Clifford is unequivocal: "Yes. We obviously think so. And the reason being that for most of our partners the OS isn't what they specialise in or make their money from. It is a really important ingredient… and it's the connection point with the developer world.

"So if you put that to one side and then think what does the consumer want? They want very innovative products created to high quality using the best ingredients. So for us to keep an ingredient on the top shelf or locked away seems counter to what the consumer's actually wanting."

Beyond the mobile
Freed by the Foundation, the CEO sees no reason why Symbian software might not end up being applied to non-mobile hardware, such as a set-top box, say, or an e-book reader, camera or navigation device.

"That's one of the really exciting things - now there isn't a point of control or a point of 'we will only allow Symbian to be used here'," he says. "We are saying it can be used anywhere that is decent, legal and truthful. It should be available for that experimentation, so you could have someone who's looking at putting together components for a unique product offering or service offering and we just become one of those components.

"You could see developers saying, 'Well I know this [Symbian software] works with cameras because they're on phones so why don't I take this and then I'm going to come up with a whole new camera concept using this mobile OS' or 'I know it works with navigation - because a third of our products had navigation on last year - so I can be confident and take this fragment and go and play with this in a navigation context.' So it's interesting that the output now becomes two ways."

But of course the Symbian Foundation is also all about putting pressure on the competition.

"I imagine that there are quite a lot of strategy teams [in rival companies such as Google and Microsoft] at the moment putting their heads together on this and working out what this move means for them and whether this is an inevitable transition in the industry," says Clifford, adding: "Whenever something changes in the competitive world it puts pressure around that world to respond react anticipate the next move. So people will be feeling destabilised by what's happened, I'm sure."

Interview continues on page 2... click here to read Clifford's views on the iPhone and more