Nokia Acquires Symbian, Sets it Free - First Take

Michael Gartenberg | June 24, 2008, 02:24 PM

I've been in meetings all morning so while I posted a few first, first thoughts on Twitter I'm a little behind in my first take. Fortunately, colleagues Ian Fogg and Thomas Huson offered their insights this morning. As Thomas correctly notes, this is the acquisition of the rest of Symbian that Nokia previously did not own and is a bold move and a major investment on the order of 400 million + dollars. So what does it mean?

1. This is a reminder that there is no single dominant player in the mobile space providing a single platform that all hardware and software vendors can rally about. Despite the early Symbian lead in the market, platforms such as RIM, Windows Mobile, Palm, Android and Apple's Mobile version of OS X all are vying for attention. The market will continue to exist with strong players amongst many.

2. This is more of threat to those vendors seeking to license their platform to hardware vendors than it is to those who are not. Translation, this is more disruptive to Microsoft and Google than it is to Apple or RIM.

3. This really doesn't change the developer landscape in the short term. In addition to winning the hearts and minds of hardware vendors, everyone is going after developers (developers, developers and developers). If this gets more Symbian licenses out there, that will potentially help the developer story as developers like cool platforms with lots of users.

4. This underscores the message that you can't sell and license your software whilst competing directly with you licensees. Apple tried it (twice actually), Palm tried it and Nokia tried it with Series 60. It just doesn't work. Never has, never will.

5. Nokia is not just licensing Symbian for free but also Series 60 it seems. This is huge news and underscores exactly how high the stakes are for platform dominance.

There's a war on for mobile dominance, expect more big news before YE.