Century reached in Japan

Last Monday (26th January), leading Japanese network operator NTT DoCoMo starting selling the F-06A mobile phone. The phone is manufactured by Fujitsu and is based on Symbian OS v9.4.

The F-06A has some notable features, that have been designed with one special type of customer in mind: businesses that worry about the possibility of misuse of phones in the possession of their employees. To reduce the likelihood of information leakage or unsanctioned use of the handset outside approved corporate purposes, businesses can:

• Manage these phones remotely, including initialisation and re-configuration;
• Remotely reset the data on the handset (including contacts, schedule, messages, call log, and media gallery);
• Remotely lock down or limit usage of functions such as camera or infrared connectivity.

At the same time, the phone lacks a memory card slot, and omits support for mass storage PC connectivity mode. Other features that are common on advanced phones in Japan, such as mobile wallet payment, digital TV, and entertainment services, are also omitted or deprioritised. These omissions may lower the attractiveness of the phone in the eyes of some users, but boost the attractiveness of the phone in the eyes of the company purchasing them.

This can be seen as another example of the "less is more" principle: for some markets, you create a better product by removing features, rather than by adding more. The resulting simplicity of operation can have its own attraction. Fujitsu have already benefited richly from applying this same principle in their renowned "Raku Raku" series of easy-to-use phones for the NTT DoCoMo network - initially launched in September 2004, and a runaway success since that time.

To be clear, neither the F-06A nor the Raku Raku phones are technology weaklings. They contain their own extensive mix of advanced hardware, software, and network connectivity. For example, the F-06a has internal and external (3.2 megapixel) cameras, a rotatable 3.2-inch wide VGA TFT screen with 16 million colours, Flash Lite 3, GPS, fingerprint identification, and so on and so on. But the choice of what's included and what's excluded gives this phone its own unique flavour.

The F-06A is significant in the Symbian story in one more way: it's the 100th Symbian-powered phone model to come to the market in Japan. The very first such phone - the FOMA F2051 - went on sale in January 2003, almost six years to the day before the launch of the F-06A. The creators of that first breakthrough phone were also Fujitsu. The internal codename for the F2051 project was "Sakura", which is Japanese for cherry blossom.

About six months before the launch of Sakura, things were looking far less rosy for Symbian in Japan. Any prospect that, before the end of the decade, 100 different Symbian phone models would come to market in Japan, would have seemed far-fetched:

• The underlying theory was strong: a reusable and customisable smartphone platform (Symbian OS) would support a wide range of differentiated products;
• The initial engagement was also strong: no less than five Japanese phone manufacturers had commenced projects to create Symbian phones (and several more were considering doing the same);
• But the reality of smartphone project development turned out very disappointing in these early years. Many of the initial projects foundered, became delayed, and were eventually cancelled;
• There was a depressing period in which it seemed that, every few weeks, another project terminated unsuccessfully: the task of bringing complex new 3G handsets to market was much more difficult than anticipated.

Thankfully, the engineering team in Fujitsu proved highly capable and resilient. Backed by a slowly growing team of expert technical consultants based in the Symbian KK offices in downtown Tokyo, and by an ever-more mature network of Symbian Competence Centres such as K3 (Kanrikogaku Kenkyusho), Fujitsu commenced a long series of successful Symbian phone introductions. In time, they were joined by a range of other Japanese phone manufacturers: Mitsubishi, Sony Ericsson, and Sharp.

To date, the 100 Japanese phone models have, between them, sold more than 40 million phones - with an average sales volume, evidently, of somewhat over 400,000 units. It's an astonishing accomplishment. I'd like to take this opportunity to publicly express my hearfelt gratitude and admiration to all the staff in Symbian KK and in Symbian's Japanese cutomers and partners, past and present, who have laboured long and intelligently in support of this century of successful smartphone development projects. Happily, there's been widespread application of the fine Japanese virtues of step-by-step incremental improvement, and constant learning and innovation. This converted Symbian's Japanese offering from a set of PowerPoint marketing pictures and bullets into a reality of hard-won bone-deep knowledge of the intricacies and complications of smartphone integration. The result, from Sakura onwards, has been a dazzling blossoming of both technology and customer experience.

Package Owners contemplating the world ahead

I've just spent two days at the very first Symbian Foundation "Package Owners workshop", held in a Nokia training facility at Batvik, in the snow-covered countryside outside Helsinki. The workshop proved both thought-provoking and deeply encouraging.

In case the term "package owner" draws a blank with you, let me digress.

Over the last few years, there have been several important structural rearrangements of the Symbian OS software engineering units, to improve the delivery and the modularity of the operating system code. For example, we've tracked down and sought to eliminate instances where any one area of software relied on internal APIs from what ought to have been a separate area.

This kind of refactoring is an essential process for any large-scale fast-evolving software system - otherwise the code will become unmaintainable.

This modularisation process is being taken one stage further during the preparation for opening the sources of the entire Symbian Platform (consisting of Symbian OS plus UI code and associated applications and tools). The platform has been carefully analysed and divided up into a total of around 100 packages - where each package is a sizeable standalone software delivery. Each package will have its own source code repository.

(Packages are only one layer of the overall decomposition. Each package is made up of from 1 to n component collections, which are in turn made up of from 1 to n components. In total, there are around 2000 components in the platform. Going in the other direction, the packages are themselves grouped into 14 different technology domains, each with a dedicated "Technology Manager" employed by the Symbian Foundation to oversee their evolution. But these are stories for another day.)

Something important that's happened in the last fortnight is that package owners have been identified for each of the packages. These package owners are all highly respected software engineers within their domain of expertise.

We're still working on the fine detail of the description of the responsibilities of package owners, but here's a broad summary:

• Publish the roadmap for their package
• Have technical ownership for the package
• Be open to contributions to their package from the wider software community
• Evalutate all contributions, and provide useful feedback to the contributors
• Maintain a good architecture for the package
• Act as feature sponsor in their package area
• Manage package deliveries.

This is a huge task, so most package owners will rely on a network of approved committers and other supporters in order to carry out their role.

(Instead of "package owner", the word "maintainer" is used with a similar meaning by some other open source projects.)

Over the next month, the nominated package owners (along with some of their line managers) are each attending one of three introductory workshops. Each workshop lasts two days. The goal of the workshop is to review and discuss how software development processes will alter, once the source code for the package is available to a much wider audience. Many processes will remain the same as before, but others will alter, and yet others will be brand new.

As I said, the first of these workshops has just finished. There were people from at least three different continents in attendance. I knew a handful before, but for many others, it was the first time for me to meet them. Without exception, they are singularly impressive individuals, with great CVs, and (in most cases) with glittering track records inside Nokia or Symbian.

Not surprisingly, the newly minted package owners brought a variety of different expectations to the event. Several already have considerable experience working with open source software. Others are, naturally, somewhat apprehensive about the changes.

A series of presenters covered matters such as:

• An overview of the operation and architecture of the Symbian Foundation
• Great software developers and open source principles
• Tips on growing a successful community of external contributors
• The importance of meritocracy
• Tools and processes
• IPR considerations, licensing issues, and legal aspects.

There were also small group breakout sessions on topics such as "What are the key challenges and issues facing package owners?" and "What are we going to do differently from before?"

What impressed me the most were the events on the first evening. After a dinner and optional sauna session, the participants gathered again in the seminar room, and spent another three hours reviewing ideas arising from the group breakout sessions from earlier in the day. The passion of the package owners stood out. In their own individual ways, they displayed a shared strong desire to explore new ways of engaging a wider community of software developers, without destabilising the mission-critical projects already being undertaken. These are all busy people, with multiple existing tasks, but they were ready to brainstorm ways to adopt new skills and processes in order to improve the development of their packages. (And I don't think it was just the Lapin Kulta speaking.)

I half expected the fervour of the debate to die down after a while, but the buzz in the room seemed as strong at 10.50pm as at 8pm. There was a constant queue of people trying to get hold of the marker pen which had been designated (with limited success) as giving someone the right to speak to group. The workshop facilitator had to speak up forcefully to point out that the facilities would be locked shut in ten minutes.

With this kind of intelligence and fervour being brought to bear in support of the Symbian Foundation's tasks, I'm looking forward to an exciting time ahead.

2009 - end users modifying their mobile phone apps

Here's a scenario I expect to become increasingly common later this year.

(Elements in the following story are made up, of course, but they serve as placeholders for anticipated real people, real phones, and real apps.)

Vijaya is really fond of her new Nokia N225 based on the latest Symbian Platform Release, and is both intrigued and frustrated by features of the Jomo Player app that's built into that phone. The app does some very clever things, but yet, Vijaya thinks it would serve her own needs better if some of the behaviour and functionality were changed. She also has ideas for tweaking the UI.

If this story were set in 2008, that would probably be the end of the story. Vijaya might write about her ideas on Facebook, and her friend Sunil might send them to someone he knows who has a job in the Nokia Devices R&D lab, but the chances are, the original developers of the Jomo Player app would be far too busy to pay attention to what appear to be idiosyncratic, quaint, or overly personalised change suggestions.

Now let's make this story more interesting. Suppose that Vijaya already knows some Symbian C++. Maybe she took a course on it at the local technical university, which is enrolled into the Symbian Academy program. Or maybe she used to work for a phone manufacturer helping to customise their Symbian devices. So, either way, Vijaya starts writing an alternative Jomo Player app, starting from scratch. Her goal is to embody her own ideas on usability and feature set.

But guess what: her alternative Jomo Player falls far short of the performance and power of the built-in app. It's tough to re-create a complex app. Although Symbian in 2008 is an open platform, with rich APIs, it's not at all obvious to Vijaya how to emulate, in her version of the app, many of the features of the original, which she now comes to increasingly recognise as subtle and refined. Some of Vijaya's friends band together to help, but they eventually abandon the project. The original app, they realise, is doing some incredibly complex things under the surface - and their attempted clone comes nowhere close to matching it. So, in 2008, that really is the end of the story.

Now let's re-run this story sometime later on in 2009. The source code for the original Jomo Player app is available for download from the Symbian Foundation Mercurial code repository, under the open source Eclipse Public Licence. What's more, the publicly available SDKs provide enough header files and libraries that Vijaya and her friends can rebuild the entire app. So the starting point is very different. Rather than struggling to create the whole app from scratch, Vijaya can fairly easily locate the parts of the source code she wants to change. As a result, she has a new version of the Jomo Player on her N225 in less than a week. As a result of using this app some more, with its altered features, she and her friends get yet more ideas - and then a major breakthrough flash. The new app quickly evolves into a dramatically better state.

Shortly afterwards, Vijaya makes her new app available via several application stores. It gets rave reviews. These reviews come to the attention of product managers in one or more phone companies. Both the N226 and a new Samsung phone build this version of the app into their ROMs, and reach millions of happy smartphone customers well before Christmas.

Vijaya started this whole process by scratching a personal itch. She wanted to improve a particular app running on her own phone. However, unexpectedly, she now has three different Symbian development houses competing to hire her into their teams.

In parallel, Mika has altered the Voton Reader app so that it's more usable by his mother. (It turns out, afterwards, to be more usable by almost everyone!) Antony has added a whole series of shortcut keys to the Contacts app. And Alexa has produced a stunning new combination of two originally separate apps.

That's the difference between what can be accomplished by an open platform (with published APIs) and by an open source platform (with published, buildable source code).

As 2009 progresses, the mobile phone platforms that publish their source code will increasingly play host to deeper and more interesting forms of innovation, than those mobile platforms which keep their source code closed. The phones from these open source mobile platforms (such as Symbian) will have the best Mojo Player, Voton Readers, and so on - not because the developers inside Symbian are cleverer than those in other mobile phone platform companies, but because these platforms can take greater advantage of the much wider pool of creative and clever people who are outside the company.

Footnote: Credit for key elements of this vision belong to some of my colleagues on the Symbian Foundation launch team, including William Roberts and Antony Edwards.

Disclaimer: The devil's in the detail. Thoughtful readers will realise there are lots of important details missing from the above story. I look forward to returning to these details.

Daring to twitter

For some time, I've been holding off experimenting with Twitter.

First, because the name of the service still rankles with me.

Second, because I'm fearful that it will turn out to be a distraction.

On the other hand, I remember having similar apprehensions before starting to blog, and before registering on Facebook. These are two experiments that have turned out very positive for me. So I hope to have a similar positive experience with Twitter:

• So I can understand better why so many people speak well of it
• So that I can improve my communication network.

I tried to register the name "dw2-0" for myself on Twitter, but it seemed not to like the hyphen. I've ended up with the simpler Twitter name "dw2".

Robert Scoble and the fallacy of uniqueness

I was surprised to see esteemed blogger Robert Scoble fall into a weird reality distortion field in his recent piece, "Smartphone competition: It’s too late for Nokia and Microsoft, but not too late for Palm in USA".

Here's the core of his argument:

...in the USA there are only these major carriers: AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, T-Mobile.

• AT&T? Gone. Apple has them sewn up.
• Verizon? RIM has them sewn up. I met with RIM’s director of marketing at CES and he was smiling. That should give you a hint.
• Sprint? Palm has them in the Palm of their hands now.
• T-Mobile? Google’s Android is their key smart phone.

So, what does this mean? All the US carriers now have their SmartPhone choices. All the trains have left the station.

Who is out in this game? Microsoft and Nokia.

This argument depends on the fallacious idea that each major network operator can be "sewn up" by just one provider of smartphones - that there will be one uniquely preferred smartphone platform per network operator - and that this choice is already set in stone.

It's true that almost all major network operators, worldwide, have expressed a desire to reduce the number of smartphone platforms that they have to support. The reason for this reduction is to avoid lots of effort being duplicated across different platforms.

However:

1. Most major network operators are aiming at a number of supported smartphone platforms that, while small, is greater than one;
2. One reason for supporting more than one platform is to benefit from an important element of competition - this is particularly relevant while so many smartphone platforms are either relatively new, immature, or going through a significant transition;
3. Another reason for supporting more than one platform is that end users on the network frequently want a choice;
4. Even if a carrier decides not to actively support a given smartphone platform - in the sense of becoming involved in customising phones from that platform to take advantage of specific network features - they often allow phones from that platform to run on their network.

Scoble also dismisses the prospects for future Nokia products:

I’ve seen the new Nokia OS, just a month ago. They don’t have it.

This judgement seems highly premature to me. It also seems that AT&T, for one, maintain an interest in shipping Nokia phones. Witness, for example, the AT&T-branded user’s manual for the Nokia E71.

More fundamentally, there's much more to the future of Nokia than just one initiative ("the new Nokia OS"). There's a whole raft of new initiatives coming. Some will come to light through forthcoming releases of the Symbian Platform. Others will reach the market in many other ways.

Nokia's announcement today of an additional licence for the Qt Platform, in order to strengthen developer interest and participation in that platform, is just one example. To quote Sebastian Nyström, Vice President, Qt Software, Nokia:

Broader use of Qt by even more leading companies will result in valuable feedback and increased contributions, ensuring that Qt remains the best-in-class, cross-platform UI and application framework. The accelerated development of Qt will allow developers, including Nokia, to deliver better devices and applications, reduce time to market and enable a wider deployment base for their solutions.

In short, there are plenty more trains to come.

Symbian Foundation - Open for recruitment

As announced on Jun 24th last year, the Symbian Foundation is expected to start operating during the first half of this year.

In the last few days, plans for the operation of the Symbian Foundation have taken another significant step forwards, with the creation of a recruitment microsite to help attract and identify the best possible people to staff the organisation.

The website describes roles in Technology, Marketing, and Operations. It includes a draft statement of Symbian Foundation values.

The website is still work in progress - some jobs have detailed specifications, whereas others are currently only listed by job title. At time of writing, the jobs listed are all UK-based, but there is mention of roles in San Francisco and Finland too.

I expect the recruitment team at Harvey Nash (who are running the site on behalf of the Symbian Foundation) are going to be busy!

Out with the old, in with the new

The final two hours of 2008 were, for me, the most fraught and tense of any New Years Eve that I remember. A central London car journey that was scheduled to take only 15 minutes became a 2 hour long trauma. We made it to the restaurant 90 minutes late, just one minute before the gongs of Big Ben would ring in 2009.

On paper, the plans for the evening looked clear enough. My mum is staying a few days with us, down from Inverness, so my wife Hyesoon and I planned for the three of us to take in a traditional New Years Eve Viennese Waltz concert at the Barbican, from 7.30-9.15pm, followed by dinner in a classy Belgravia Thai restaurant, the Mango Tree, from 10.30-12.30pm. For some daft reason I decided the trip would be easiest if we drove the whole way. I thought that would allow the greatest flexibility, and that my trusted hi-tech TomTom satnav would guide me through any unfamiliar routes. And in any case, there should be plenty of time for the various parts of the journey: when I checked in advance, both TomTom and Google Maps said that the journey from the Barbican to the Mango Tree would take only 15 minutes. Or so I thought.

The first sign of trouble was in the initial part of the whole journey, from my home in Surbiton (South West London) to the Barbican (East Central London). TomTom predicted 45 minutes. We left home at 6.oo, giving us 90 minutes for that trip. I wasn't sure of the way, but the traffic got thicker and thicker and slower and slower. And slower and slower. After several route recalculations and inspired changes of plan, we finally made it to our seats in the concert hall just as the audience were giving an applause to welcome the leader of the orchestra to the stage. Talk about last minute! Happily, the music was glorious.

Less happily, the concert which I had been told (by Barbican office staff, several days earlier) would finish at 9.15, actually went on till 10pm, by the time the second encore finished. We rushed to the car park to get out ahead of the main crowds, and set off on our anticipated 15 minute journey across central London.

However, the police had erected roadblocks all over the place, to force road traffic away from central London locations such as Trafalgar Square and Parliament Square. Time and again, I had to drive in a different direction to the one I intended. My car wasn't the only one that was frustrated by the re-routings. The few roads that were still open were jammed to a snails pace. We rang the Mango Tree to say we might be, err, 20 minutes, or maybe even 40 minutes late. Come anyway, they said. We're trying, I said. After painfully slow progress along Marylebone Road, Edgware Road and Park Lane, we finally reached the restaurant, just as the DJ was starting the countdown to the chimes signalling 1.1.2009. (Talk about last minute...)

Not unreasonably, the tempo and ambience in the restaurant by that time was a lot noisier than would normally accompany selecting starters from the menu. The staff did a fine job in the circumstances. In the end, I managed at least a grin as the sound system was belting out Mick Jagger's "Honky Tonk Woman" at high volume. And Hyesoon and I got to our feet for some middle-aged boogie to Abba's "Dancing Queen". My mum said, it was quite an experience. Many thanks to both my mum and Hyesoon for being (mainly!) calm and supportive through all this trauma.

Being stuck for so long in slow-moving traffic gives you time for a lot of "if only" thinking. If only I had followed general advice and taken public transport rather than my car. If only I had realised that most routes would be blocked, and had started on a wide berth earlier. If only we had booked a venue closer to home. And, if only my satnav was hooked up with current road and traffic information, rather than relying on hard-wired map information that failed to match the reality of the moment. As a fan of Agile, that's a lesson I ought to have learned already.

I wonder how many other aspects of life will, in 2009, suffer from being similarly misguided by automated or semi-automated responses that are based on out-of-date conceptual maps?

Our collective infrastructure is continuing to change in many ways, probably more than we expect. The market landscape is highly fluid. Items of our economic infrastructure that we thought we could take for granted, are falling away while our attention is focused elsewhere. Woe betide us if we stick on auto-pilot, trusting that our past processes are sufficient to guide us safely through the new terrain.

A few days ago, Kevin Kelleher forecast in GigaOm that 2009 could be "The year of the hacker". In short, our tough new economic climate could result in new creativity from talented people who are struggling in their old jobs (or who lose their jobs completely):

I don’t mean to downplay how hard it is to be unemployed. But with tens of thousands of skilled tech workers being kicked into a hostile job market, the effects could prove to be positive for the Internet and its community over the long term...

I wonder what kind of creativity could be unleashed by workers who, though deprived of a steady paycheck, are freed from tedious tasks. Some could come up with new ideas that help vault the web to a more advanced stage. Others may make micro-contributions that are equally powerful in aggregate. Such creativity could then foster an entirely new generation of startups, which would eventually lure away some of those who had remained at steady jobs all along...

Of course, money will be hard to come by for such labors of love. Some of the best ideas since the last downturn have failed to find a viable business model. A gift economy would be an especially profitless form of innovation. But that notion lies at the heart of the hacking ethic.

Building on Kelleher's ideas, Brad Feld of Mobius Venture Capital plausibly suggests that 2009 could see the "re-rise of open source":

Kevin Kelleher’s article on GigaOm this morning titled 2009: Year of the Hacker made me think back to the rise of open source after the Internet crash of 2001. In the aftermath of the crash, many experienced software developers were out of work for a period of time ranging from weeks to years. Some of them threw themselves into open source projects and, in some cases, created their next job with the expertise they developed around a particular open source project.

We are still in a tense and ambiguous part of the current downturn where, while many developers are getting laid off, some of them are immediately being picked back up by other companies that are in desperate need for them. However, many other developers are not immediately finding work. If the downturn gets worse, the number of out of work developers increases.

If they take a lesson from the 2001 – 2003 time frame, some subset of them will choose to get deeply in an open source related project. Given the range of established open source projects, the opportunity to do this today is much more extensive than it was seven years ago. In addition, most software companies – especially Internet-related ones - now have robust API’s and/or open source libraries that they actively encourage third parties to work with for free. The SaaS-based infrastructure that exists along with maturing source code repositories add to the fun. The ability to hack something interesting together based on an established company’s infrastructure is omnipresent and is one of the best ways to “apply for a job” at an interesting company...

When plans for the Symbian Foundation were announced in June last year, we did not foresee the substantial economic downturn and the fact that many fine software developers would, through no fault of their own, find themselves out of work. This changed landscape, unexpectedly, makes it all the more important for software platforms to be sufficiently open to allow a wide number of developers to engage deeply and easily with the system. If the case was strong last June to open source the Symbian Platform, it has, unexpectedly, become even stronger in the intervening seven months.

If 2009 will be the year of the hacker and/or the year of the re-rise of open source, it changes the priorities of all software systems, to become friendlier to hackers and open source practitioners. The systems that can best leverage this new latent talent pool will be the ones that are the most likely to be flying high in 12 months time when the chimes of Big Ben ring out 2009 and herald in yet another new year. (But on that occasion, I will definitely not be driving anywhere near Central London!)