Last week I shipped off for a whirlwind, 24-hour, trip to San Francisco. The meeting I went out for went well and I got to see my good friend Manlio for a burger and some beers.
I spent the night there at the Hyatt Regency in the Embarcadero - a neighborhood I much preferred to the one near the Tenderloin I’ve stayed near in the past, where you’re more likely to get shiv’ed with a rusty screwdriver than you are to find a taxi. All in all it was a good (albeit very brief) jaunt to the West Coast.
Anyway, the Hyatt Regency had this great morning coffee set-up in m y room. Nice to see them finding an approach that works for the stationary guest but also pleasantly surprises the folks that heading out on the town for business/pleasure/etc.
Of course it will be months (more likely years) until we see if the internal integration issues can be navigated such that this acquisition is deemed a success but now that everyone has the perspective of a whole day behind them, people have had the chance to take a long(er) look (rather than a quick pass) at yesterday’s announcement and start to figure out how it’s going to affect the other major players in the space.
Nat Torkington of O’Reilly has a thoughtful piece on < a href="http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2008/06/nokia-to-buy-and-open-source-s.html">the state of mobile open source. He even throws a shoutout to dodgeball using a new word to describe the whole affair:
Nokia has hired some absolute geniuses from the ubiquitous computing world to bring network services into people’s lives through the mobile phone, whereas Google’s social acquisition, Dodgeball, was a catastrophe.
Strong words. At least the word “geniuses” also appears somewhere in the sentence, right?
Michael Mace over at Mobile Opportunity has a really great article breaking down exactly what happened, to whom, and who’s better off because of it. If you read one article about the acquisition, I’d read this one. Here’s a quick glimpse at how he sees it affecting the other major players:
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.
If one were to look at their actions over the past two days in a vacuum, you might think Nokia is really concerned about how things are lining up for them with Apple and Google entering a space they’ve dominated for years.
Yesterday they made a move to acquire their way into the LBS space with their Plazes acquisition and today, in what is a clear attack on the market Google is going after with Android, Nokia has acquired the remaining part of Symbian they didn’t already own with plans to take it all open source in the next two years (with certain components coming sooner).
This is potentially really big, particularly on the heels of the recent issues for Google/Android.
I certainly don’t think Android is going to be a non-factor by any means but Nokia’s doing a decent job “battening down the hatches” (something they had to do in my opinion) in preparation for Google’s inevitable launch (we hope) and Apple’s new presence. That being said, acquisitions aren’t always the easiest thing to work into a seamless consumer offering so a lot still remains to be seen but in case there was any doubt, it’s now officially on.
Om Malik has an excellent piece on how the landscape shakes out after Nokia’s recent move.
As companies like Apple continue to to design systems rather than standalone products, the concept of convergence is front and center and presents fascinating challenges to UX designers who have the opportunity to work on such a project.
The challenge is always about figuring out how to have be clever about layering complementary features rather than cramming as many features as possible into each individual device/service/etc.
The folks at Idlemode have a great list of considerations to think about when designing for a convergent system.
Here’s a sneak peek at the list:
- Our devices are an ecosystem.
- Design for reasonable consistency.
- For users, content drives convergence.
- Intelligent discovery encourages adoption.
- Don’t burden users with content formats.
- Context, not just content, is king.
- Redundancy is useful.
Head on over to IdleMode to get all the details on each of them.
I came across this quote framed above my godmother’s desk this weekend. I think I might get a copy for my desk at work. It’s a different way of looking at the “Fast, Cheap or Good? Pick two.” rule you hear a lot in product development (and agencies).
“There is hardly anything in the world that some man cannot make a little worse and sell a little cheaper, and the people who consider price only are this man’s lawful prey.”
- John Ruskin
If you find yourself being the “some man” that Mr. Ruskin is talking about, it might be time to reconsider what you’re doing.
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