Insurance misunderstood

A lot of wild speculation has reached me this week, along the lines that Nokia is planning to ditch the Symbian platform in favour of Maemo (a Linux-based alternative).

The speculation traces its roots back to a MobileCrunch “leaked” exclusive, with the following story:

» A future version of Maemo, called “Harmattan”, will be used for at least one Nokia phone (previously Maemo has been restricted to web-browsing tablets);
» It has already been announced that Nokia and Intel are cooperating on “a joint project called oFono which aims to build an open source telephony framework for the Linux platform”;
» Therefore, it is said, “the eventual plan is to … phase out S60 all together”;
» Therefore, it is suggested (using even dodgier logic) “the eventual plan is to phase out the Symbian platform”.
With this speculation in the air, analysts are coming up with some fantastic hypotheses. For example, from one email (written by Richard Windsor, Industry Specialist, Nomura Securities) that reached my inbox:

I suspect that Symbian is not good enough for some of the functionality Nokia has planned over the medium term… Two technologies in question are Symmetric Multi Processing (SMP) and Multithreading.

These hypotheses are particularly surprising, given the excellent lab demos of SMP versions of the Symbian platform – and given the fact that the Symbian platform has been multithreading splendidly in devices since the adoption of the EKA2 kernel variant more than three years ago.

Let’s get back to the basic point. Here’s an analogy.

Suppose you live in a block of flats. Next, suppose that you find out that one of your neighbours in the block, Olli Pekka, is taking out contents insurance for his flat. That is, in the case of fire or theft (etc), he will be reimbursed the cost of the contents. Do you reason as follows to yourself:

» Oh my goodness, Olli Pekka knows something that I don’t know;
» I suspect that the flooring material of the flat must be flawed – maybe it’s too combustible;
» I suspect that Olli Pekka must know that a gang of robbers will be targeting this block of flats…?
This kind of thinking confuses an insurance policy against the small risk of some unknown failure, with the conclusion that there must be a fundamental flaw.

To my mind, it makes perfect sense for phone companies to investigate at least two modern mobile operating systems. For example, Nokia is investigating Maemo (now coupled with oFono) in parallel to its main usage of the Symbian platform. This guards against the small risk of some unknown failure in the main platform. It does not mean that some fundamental flaws (… SMP … multi-threading …) have been identified!

What’s more, Nokia’s experiments with the open source Maemo platform, extending five years or more, surely provided the company with very valuable learnings about the potential strengths and weaknesses of open source. It’s likely that these learnings boosted the confidence of Nokia to support the transformation of the Symbian platform from closed source to open source. In this sense, there’s useful cross-fertilisation between Maemo and Symbian.

Let’s return to the apparent rumour that “the eventual plan is to … phase out S60 all together”. I suspect this probably derives from a misunderstanding of the declared intent to replace the Avkon UI libraries (which have characterised S60 over the years) with new Qt-based Orbit UI libraries – in Symbian^4. Of course, replacing Avkon with Orbit does not imply a replacement of the Symbian platform by Maemo!

Happily, there’s plenty of scope for further beneficial cross-fertilisation between Maemo and Symbian – just as there will be beneficial cross-fertilisation between other mobile operating systems and Symbian. For the sake of the entire industry, let’s build bridges wherever possible.

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