dw2-0

An engaging family-friendly vision of the future

2009-07-20T20:59:00.009+01:00

When I was around 11-15 years old, I devoured almost all the science fiction books in the local village library. The experience not only inspired me and stretched my imagination, but pre-disposed me to be open-minded about possible large impacts by technology on how life would be lived in the future.

Much of the technology that will have the biggest impact on the 21st century remains as yet undiscovered. Some of these discoveries will, presumably, be made by people who are currently still children. My hope is that these children will take interest in the kinds of ideas that permeate Shannon Vyff’s fine book “21st century kids: a trip from the future to you”.

The majority of the action in this book is set 180 years in the future – although there are several loop-backs to the present day. Here are just a few of the themes that are woven together in this fast-moving book:

Cryonic suspension, and the problems of eventual re-animation;
Brain implants, that enable a kind of telepathic communication;
Implications if human brains and human bodies could be dramatically improved;
Options for improving the brains of other animal species, even to the point of enabling rich communications between these creatures and humans;
Humans co-existing with self-aware robots and other AIs;
Friendly versus unfriendly AI;
Transferring human consciousness into robots (and back again);
Coping with the drawbacks of environmental degradation;
Future modes of manufacturing, transport, recreation, education, and religion;
Circumstances in which alien civilisations might take an active interest in developments on the Earth.

Adults can enjoy reading “21st century kids”, but there are parts of the book that speak more directly to children as the primary intended readership. Since I’ve long left my own adolescent days behind, I’m not able to fully judge the likely reactions of that target audience. My expectation is that many of them will find the contents engaging, thought-provoking, and exciting. It’s family-friendly throughout.
One unusual aspect of the book is that several of the main characters have the same names (and early life histories) as three of the author’s own children: Avianna, Avryn, and Avalyse. The author herself features in the book, as the (unnamed) “Mom”. I found this occasionally unsettling, but it adds to the book’s vividness and immediacy.

As regards the vision the book paints of the future, it’s certainly possible to take issue with some of the details. However, the bigger picture is that the book is sufficiently interesting that it is highly likely to provoke a lot of valuable debate and discussion. Hopefully it will stretch the imagination of many potential future technologists and engineers, and inspire them to keep an open mind about what innovative technology can accomplish.

Monday night is demo night

2009-06-13T17:12:00.003+01:00

Mobile Monday London is at a new location this Monday (15th June). Most of the MoMoLo events I've attended over the last few years have been at the CBI Conference Centre in the Centrepoint building near Tottenham Court Road tube station. But on this occasion, the venue will be the 10th floor of the Blue Fin Building, 110 Southwark St, SE1 0SU. This venue is south of Tate Modern, and nearby tube stations include Blackfriars, Waterloo, Southwark, Cannon Street and London Brige. The event is being hosted by IPC Media, who are based in the building.

Blue Fin building has its own significance in the Symbian world. The second floor of that building is home to the UK branch of SOSCO - which is an acronym for "S60 on Symbian Customer Operations". Prior to Nokia's acquisition of Symbian Ltd last December, the unit was known by the simpler name of SCO - "Symbian Customer Operations". It's a descendent (via several renamings) of the Technical Consulting ("TC") department which was created on the initial formation of Symbian Ltd back in June 1998. I was responsible for TC at that time, and several of the people from the early days of TC still work in SOSCO. Among other claims to fame, SOSCO engineers recently ported a version of the Symbian platform to run on an off the shelf Atom based motherboard from Intel.

This Monday's event is a demo night. At the last count, the following mobile demos are lined up:

Vopium - like Skype but fully integrated into your mobile's phonebook
Peepr.TV - webcam streaming to mobile
0870.me - standard rate calls instead of 0870
Photofit - photo mashup application
Total Hotspots - Rummble your nearest wifi hotspot
Audioboo - audio micro-blogging as much loved by Stephen Fry amongst others
Artilium - making LBS easy for developers
Proxama - the latest in NFC wallets
Ookl - mobile learning
Singtones - karaoke on your phone
Masabi - rail ticketing
Corebridge - CRM on the go
Spoonfed - London restaurant finder

It will be a fine chance to weigh up some innovative mobile applications and services. There will presumably be some of the latest mobile devices on show too - given that the co-sponsor of the evening (along with IPC Media) is Samsung Mobile Innovator.

The word on the streets is that Samsung Mobile Innovator "will be making a special announcement on Monday evening" - which is another reason for attending. (OK, full disclosure: let me confess my source for this info: it's someone who used to work for SOSCO, but who is now employed by Samsung Mobile Innovator.)

As the official site for the event explains:

Doors will open at 6pm for a prompt start at 6.30pm;
There's a LOT to get through;
Please allow enough time to get through security on the ground floor and take the lift up to the 10th floor;
Also please make sure you are registered well in advance so you can whizz through security;
There is no guarantee of entry unless you are registered in advance.

To register, please visit the event website.

The venue has capacity for 155 participants. As I write this, there are 38 places still available.

The future of medicine

2009-05-29T00:37:00.006+01:00

Someone who believes in the radical transformational potential of technology, and who anticipates that technology will result in very significant improvements in the quality of life in the relatively near future - but who is willing to go beyond predictions and theorising, to roll up his sleeves and become vigorously involved in building better technology.

That's how I'd describe Mike Darwin, the speaker at the Extrobritannia (UKTA) meeting at Birkbeck College in central London this Saturday. In other words, Mike is an eminent engineer as well as a philosopher. Specifically, he's an engineer in the field of preservative medicine.

But there's more. Mike appreciates that the process of refining new medical processes can be intensely messy and flawed. Just because we're surrounded by hi-tech, it's no guarantee that medical trials will be pain-free or mistake-free. Far from it. There are technological uncertainties, organisational impediments, and cultural hurdles. Without a willingness to embrace this ugly fact, there's a real risk that developments in medicine will slow down.

Mike's topic on Saturday is "Whatever happened to the future of medicine"; the subtitle is "Why the much anticipated medical breakthroughs of the early 21st century are failing to materialize". In his own words, here's what the talk will address:

The last half of the 20th Century was a time of explosive growth in growth in high technology medicine. Effective chemotherapy for many microbial diseases, the advent of sophisticated vaccination, the development and application of the corticosteroids, and the development of extracorporeal and cardiovascular prosthetic medicine (cardiopulmonary bypass, hemodialysis, synthetic arterial vascular grafts and cardiac valves) are but a few examples of what can only be described as stunning progress in medicine derived in large measure from translation research.

The closing decades of the last century brought confident predictions from both academic and clinical researchers (scientists and physicians alike) that the opening decade of this century would see, if not definitive cure or control, then certainly the first truly effective therapeutic drugs for cancer, ischemia-reperfusion injury (i.e. heart attack, stroke and cardiac arrest), multisystem organ failure and dysfunction (MSOF/D), immunomodulation (control of rejection and much improved management of autoimmune diseases), oxygen therapeutics and more radically, the perfection of long term organ preservation, widespread use of the total artificial heart (TAH) and the clinical application of the first drugs to slow or moderate biological aging.

So far, so good. But Mike continues:

However, none of these anticipated gains has materialized, and countless drug trials in humans based on highly successful animal models of MSOF/D, stroke, heart attack, cancer, and immunomodulation have failed. Indeed it may be reasonably argued that the pace of therapeutic advance has slowed. By contrast, the growth of technology and capability in some areas of diagnostic medicine, primarily imaging, has maintained its exponential rate of growth and, while much slower than growth in other areas of technological endeavor, such as communications and consumer electronics, progress has been impressive.

Why has translational research at the cutting edge of medicine (and in particular in critical care medicine) stalled, or often resulted in clinical trials that had to be halted due to increased morbidity and mortality in the treated patients? The answers to these questions are complex and multifactorial, and deserve careful review.

And in conclusion:

Renewed success in the application of translational research in humans will require a return to the understanding and acceptance of the inescapable fact that perfection of complex biomedical technologies cannot be modeled solely in the animal or computer research laboratory. The corollary of this understanding must be the acceptance of the unpleasant reality that perfection of novel, let alone revolutionary medical technologies, will require a huge cost in human suffering and sacrifice. The aborted journey of the TAH to widespread clinical application due to the unwillingness on the part of the public, and the now extant bioethical infrastructure in medicine, to accept the years of suffering accompanied by modest, incremental advances towards perfection of this technology, is a good example of what might rightly be described as a societal ‘failure of nerve’ in the face of great benefit at great cost. It may be rightly said, to quote the political revolutionary Delores Ibarruri, that we must once again come to understand that, “It is better to die on our feet than to live on our knees!”

Mike has spoken once before at an Extrobritannia meeting. See here for my write-up. It was a tremendous event. I'm expecting a similar engrossing debate this Saturday too. No doubt some of the discussion will focus on the main thrust of Mike's life work, cryonics: very few people in the world are as knowledgeable about this topic.

If anyone reading this is going to be in or near London on Saturday, it would be great to see you at this meeting.

Immersed in deception

2009-04-26T15:43:00.004+01:00

Over the last few weeks, I've received a lot of flattery and what looks like friendly advice.

Here's an example:

Ah! This is the sort of thing I have been looking for. I'm doing some research for an article. You should add buttons to the bottom of your posts to digg, stumble, etc your content. I think this is great and want to share it, but as it stands, I'm a lazy lazy person. Just kidding!

And here's another:

I've just found your blog and I really like it. This is the first time I've written a comment. I'm not sure what to say, but please keep up the good work!

I found these compliments while checking the comments posted in reply to my own postings - either here, on my personal blog, or on the Symbian corporate blog.

At first, I felt pleased. Then I realised I was being deceived. These comments were being placed on my blogs, simply to tempt unwary readers to click on the links in them. These links lead to sites promoting bargain basement laptops, products made from the Acai "super berry", and numerous other wild and wacky stuff (much of it not suitable for work). Now that I'm aware of these "link bait" comments, I notice them all over the web. They're presumably being generated automatically.

The Symbian corporate blog is hosted by WordPress and relies on a service from Akismet to sort incoming comments into "pending" and "spam". On the whole, it does a remarkably good job. But sometimes (not too surprisingly) it gets things wrong:

There are false positives - genuine messages that are classified onto the spam list
There are false negatives - deceptive messages that are classified onto the pending queue.

The task of sorting comments becomes even harder when "linkbacks" are taken into account. By default, WordPress lists "pingbacks" and "trackbacks", when other blogs reference one of your articles. I haven't yet made up my mind how useful this is. But I do know that it's another avenue for deceptive postings to get their links onto your webpage. Some of these other postings re-use text from the original posting, chopping it up to give the appearance that a human being is providing intelligent analysis of your ideas. But again, it's now my view that these postings are being generated algorithmically, just in order to receive and harvest incoming clicks.

Companies like Akismet are clearly involved in some kind of escalating arms race. As they learn the tricks employed by one generation of spam-creating program, another generation finds ways to mask the intent more skilfully.

I guess it's like the way human intelligence is often thought to have emerged. According to widespread opinion, early humans existing in large groups found it beneficial to be able to:

Deceive each other about their true intentions;
Pretend to be supportive of the ends of the group, but to free-ride on the support of others when they could get away with it;
See through the deceptive intentions of others;
To keep track of what person A thinks about what person B thinks about person C...

This kind of evolutionary arms race was, according to this theory, one of the causes of mushrooming human brain power.

For example, to quote from Mario Heilmann's online paper Social evolution and social influence: selfishness, deception, self-deception:

This paper endeavors to point out that the selfish interests of individuals caused deception and countermeasures against deception to become driving forces behind social influence strategies. The expensive and wasteful nature of negotiation and impression management is a necessary and unavoidable consequence of this arms race between deception and detection.

Natural selection created genetic dispositions to deceive, and to constantly and unconsciously suspect deception attempts. In a competitive, selfish, and war-prone world, these techniques, proven in billions of years in evolution, still are optimal. Therefore they are reinforced by cultural selection and learning. Conscious awareness of deception and countermeasures is not required, often even counterproductive. This is so because conscious deception is easier to detect and carries harsher sanctions.

Humans not only deceive, but also deceive themselves and others about the fact that they deceive, into believing that they do not deceive. This double deception makes the system so watertight, that it tends to evade detection even by psychologists.

Deception may be widespread in human society, but the associated increase in brainpower has had lots of more positive side-effects. I wonder if the same will result from the rapid arms race in electronic deception and counter-deception mechanisms - and whether this will be one means for genuine electronic intelligence to emerge.

The future: neuroengineering and virtual minds

2009-04-10T21:25:00.006+01:00

Because things have been so absorbing and demanding at work, during the setup phase of the Symbian Foundation, I've had little time over the last few months for a couple of activities that I usually greatly enjoy.

First, I've had little time to write articles for this blog (my personal blog). Any time and energy that I've had available for blogging has tended to go, instead, to postings in my work blog. For example, over the last fortnight I've written work-related postings entitled A new software journey, Collaboration at the heart, The first hardware reference design, Who wants to join a movement?, and Simpler and cleaner code. In principle, this blog here is for more personal reflections, and for matters removed from my day-to-day work responsibilities.

Second, I've had little time to read books. Last year, I probably finished on average at least one book and/or audio-book every two weeks. This year, so far, I've only made it to the end of one book: Darwin's Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society, by David Sloan Wilson. (It's a fine book, which is both intellectually challenging and intellectually satisfying, and which also happens to be very relevant to the ongoing debates over "the new atheism". My review of it can be found on the LivingSocial site.)

However, earlier today, in the course of a long flight, I took the time to open a book I've been carrying with me on several previous trips, and I made a good start on it. From what I've read so far, it already seems clear to me that this is a tremendous piece of work, about a field that deserves a significant increase in attention. The author is Bruce F. Katz, adjunct professor at Drexel University, and Chief Artificial Intelligence Scientist at ColdLight. The book is Neuroengineering the future: virtual minds and the creation of immortality.

Wikipedia gives the following definition of the term "Neuroengineering":

Neural engineering also known as Neuroengineering is a discipline that uses engineering techniques to understand, repair, replace, enhance, or treat the diseases of neural systems. Neural engineers are uniquely qualified to solve design problems at the interface of living neural tissue and non-living constructs... Prominent goals in the field include restoration and augmentation of human function via direct interactions between the nervous system and artificial devices.

That's an ambitious set of goals, but Bruce sets out an even grander vision. To give a flavour, here's an extract from the Preface of his book:

I am not the first, and certainly will not be the last, to stress the importance of coming developments in neural engineering. This field has all the hallmarks of a broad technological revolution, but larger in scope and with deeper tentacles than those accompanying both computers and the Internet...

To modify the brain is to modify not only how we perceive but what we are, our consciousnesses and our identities. The power to be able to do so cannot be over-stated, and the consequences can scarcely be imagined, especially with our current unmodified evolutionarily provided mental apparatuses...

Here are just a few topics that we will cover...

Brain-machine interfaces to control computers, exoskeletons, robots, and other devices with thought alone;
Mind-reading devices that will project the conscious contents of one's brain onto a screen as if it was a movie;
Devices to enhance intellectual ability and to increase concentration;
Devices to enhance creativity and insight;
Mechanisms to upload the mind to a machine, thus preserving it from bodily decay and bodily death.

Other writers have addressed these topics before - both in science fiction and in technology review books. But it looks to me that Bruce brings a greater level of rigour and a wider set of up-to-date research information. To continue quoting from the Preface:

The book is divided into three sections:

The first develops the neurophysiological as well as philosophical foundations on which these advances may be made;
The second describes the current state of the art, and neuroengineering developments that will be with us in the near term;
The final part of the book speculates on what will happen in the long-term, and what it will be like to be a post-evolutionary entity...

The futurist will naturally be drawn to the final section, but in their case it is all the more imperative that the initial development be mastered, especially the chapters with a philosophical bent. The uploading of the soul to a chine is not just a matter of creating the proper technology; it is first and foremost figuring out what it means to have a soul...

As an unabashed futurist, I'm greatly looking forward to finding more time (somehow!) to read further into this book!

The industry with the greatest potential for disruptive growth

2009-03-20T23:37:00.004Z

Where is the next big opportunity?

According to renowned Harvard Business School professor and author Clayton Christensen, in a video recorded recently for BigThink:

The biggest opportunities are in healthcare. We are now just desperate to make healthcare affordable and accessible. Healthcare is something that everybody consumes. There are great opportunities for non-consumers to be brought into the market by making things affordable and accessible. I just can’t think of another industry that has those kinds of characteristics where demand is robust, and there's such great opportunities for disruption.

The healthcare industry has many angles. I'm personally fascinated by the potential of smart mobile devices to play significant new roles in maintaining and improving people's health.

Another important dimension to healthcare is the dimension of reducing (or even altogether removing) the impacts of aging. In an article on "10 ideas changing the world right now", Time magazine recently coined the word "amortality" for the growing trend for people who seek to keep the same lifestyle and appearance, regardless of their physical age:

When Simon Cowell let slip last month that he planned to have his corpse cryonically preserved, wags suggested that the snarky American Idol judge may have already tested the deep-freezing procedure on his face. In 2007, Cowell, now 49, told an interviewer that he used Botox. "I like to take care of myself," he said. Cowell is in show biz, where artifice routinely imitates life. But here's a fact startling enough to raise eyebrows among Botox enthusiasts: his fellow Brits, famously unconcerned with personal grooming, have tripled the caseload of the country's cosmetic surgeons since 2003. The transfiguration of the snaggletoothed island race is part of a phenomenon taking hold around the developed world: amortality.

You may not have heard of amortality before - mainly because I've just coined the term. It's about more than just the ripple effect of baby boomers' resisting the onset of age. Amortality is a stranger, stronger alchemy, created by the intersection of that trend with a massive increase in life expectancy and a deep decline in the influence of organized religion - all viewed through the blue haze of Viagra...

Amortals don't just dread extinction. They deny it. Ray Kurzweil encourages them to do so. Fantastic Voyage, which the futurist and cryonics enthusiast co-wrote with Terry Grossman, recommends a regimen to forestall aging so that adherents live long enough to take advantage of forthcoming "radical life-extending and life-enhancing technologies." Cambridge University gerontologist Aubrey de Grey is toiling away at just such research in his laboratory. "We are in serious striking distance of stopping aging," says De Grey, founder and chairman of the Methuselah Foundation, which awards the Mprize to each successive research team that breaks the record for the life span of a mouse...

Notions of age-appropriate behavior will soon be relegated as firmly to the past as dentures and black-and-white television. "The important thing is not how many years have passed since you were born," says Nick Bostrom, director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford, "but where you are in your life, how you think about yourself and what you are able and willing to do." If that doesn't sound like a manifesto for revolution, it's only because amortality has already revolutionized our attitudes toward age.

Just how feasible is the idea of radical life extension? In part, it depends on what you think about the aging processes that take place in humans. Are these processes fixed, or can they somehow be influenced?

One person who is engaged in a serious study of this topic is Dr Richard Faragher, Reader in the School of Pharmacy and Biomolecular Sciences at the University of Brighton on the English south coast. Richard describes the research interests of his team as follows:

We "do" senescence. Why do we do this? Because it has been suggested for over 30 years that the phenomenon of cell senescence may be linked in some way to human ageing. Senescence is the progressive replicative failure of a population of cells to divide in culture. Once senescent, cells exhibit a wide range of changes in phenotype and gene expression which give them the potential to alter the behaviour of any tissue in which they are found. In its modern form the cell hypothesis of ageing suggests that the progressive accumulation of such senescent cells (as a result of ongoing tissue turnover) may contribute to the ageing process.

Richard is the featured speaker at this month's Extrobritannia (UKTA) meeting in Central London, this Saturday (21st March). The title for his talk is "One foot in the future. Attaining the 10,000+ year lifespan you always wanted?":

Dr Richard Faragher, Reader in Gerontology, School of Pharmacy & Biomolecular Sciences, University of Brighton, will review the aging process across the animal kingdom together with the latest scientific insights into how it may operate. The lecture will also review promising avenues for translation into practice over the next few years, and current barriers to progress in aging research will be considered.

I'm expecting a lively but informative discussion!

The China Brain project and the future of industry

2009-03-07T20:15:00.004Z

An intriguing note popped up on my Twitter feed a couple of hours ago. It was from James Clement, owner and manager at Betterhumans LLC:

with U.S. economy hurting, AI programs may move to China to work with Hugo de Garis. He sees house robots as biggest industry in 20 - 30 yrs

And slightly earlier:

de Garis has already received 10.5 million RMB for the China Brain Project. Basically 10k's of neural nets for Minsky style "society of mind"

James is attending the AGI-09 conference in Artificial General Intelligence, which is taking place at Arlington, Virginia.

Casting my eye over the schedule for this conference, I admit to a big pang of envy that I'm not attending!

As James says, one of the most significant talks there could be the one by Hugo de Garis. The schedule has a link to a PDF authored in October last year. Here's a couple of extracts from the paper:

The “China Brain Project”, based at Xiamen University, is a 4 year (2008-2011), 10.5 million RMB, 20 person, research project to design and build China’s first artificial brain (AB). An artificial brain is defined here to be a “network of (evolved neural) networks”, where each neural net(work) module performs some simple task (e.g. recognizes someone’s face, lifts an arm of a robot, etc), somewhat similar to Minsky’s idea of a “society of mind”, i.e. where large numbers of unintelligent “agents” link up to create an intelligent “society of agents”. 10,000s of these neural net modules are evolved rapidly, one at a time, in special (FPGA based) hardware and then downloaded into a PC (or more probably, a supercomputer PC cluster). Human “BAs” (brain architects) then connect these evolved modules according to their human designs to architect artificial brains...

The first author [de Garis] thinks that the artificial brain industry will be the world’s biggest by about 2030, because artificial brains will be needed to control the home robots that everyone will be prepared to spend big money on, if they become genuinely intelligent and hence useful (e.g. baby sitting the kids, taking the dog for a walk, cleaning the house, washing the dishes, reading stories, educating its owners etc). China has been catching up fast with the western countries for decades. The first author thinks that China should now aim to start leading the world (given its huge population, and its 3 times greater average economic growth rate compared to the US) by aiming to dominate the artificial brain industry.

If it's true that the downturn in the economy will cause a relocation of AGI research personnel from other countries to China, this could turn out to be one of the most significant unforeseen consequences of the downturn.

What have operators done for us recently?

2009-03-07T14:13:00.003Z

Mobile Monday in London this Monday evening (9th March) will be on the topic of "What have operators done for us recently?".

To quote from the event website,

What have mobile operators done for innovators and developers, lately? Our next MobileMonday London event will explore this issue. The event will be held on March 9th at CBI conference centre (at Centrepoint Tower) at 6:00 pm, sponsored by O2 Litmus and Vodafone. Panelists will include James Parton from O2, Terence Eden from Vodafone, Steve Wolak from Betavine, David Wood from Symbian Foundation and Jo Rabin representing dotMobi. The event will be chaired by Anna Gudmundson from AdIQ and Dan Appelquist will be your host for the evening.

At the time of writing, there are still a few registration slots left. If you're in or around London on Monday evening, and you're at all interested in the future of the mobile phone industry, you will almost certainly find the meeting worthwhile. From my past experience, these events are great for networking as well as for highlighting ideas and sharply debugging them. The breadth and depth of experience in the room mean that any superficially attractive proclamations from panellists are quickly challenged. I typically leave these meetings wiser than when I went in (and often chastened, too).

Usually people blog meetings after they happen (or whilst they are happening). In this case, I'd like to set down a few thoughts in advance.

Early last year, Symbian commissioned a third party report into the viewpoints and experiences of mobile developers. The report had a Californian bias but the results are familiar even in the context of Europe. The report did not specifically seek out the opinions of developers towards network operators, but these opinions came through loud and clear regardless. Here are some representative comments:

"Everyone in tech has rope burns around their necks from doing business with the carriers [network operators]. They hung themselves trying to do carrier deals."
"The operator is an adversary, not a partner."
"The basic problem with mobile is that operators are in the way."
"The reality is that the mobile operators will screw you, unless they already want to do what you're developing. They always ask, 'What's in it for me?'"

I raise these comments here, not because I endorse them, but because they articulated a set of opinions that seem to be widely held, roughly twelve months ago.

Operators are (of course!) aware of these perceptions too, and are seeking to address these concerns. At the Mobile Monday meeting, we'll have a chance to evaluate progress.

Ahead of the meeting, I offer the following six points for consideration:

1: With their widespread high bandwidth coverage, the wireless networks are a modern-day technological marvel - perhaps one of the seven wonders of the present era. These networks need maintenance and care. For this reason, network operators are justified in seeking to protect access to this resource. If these resources become flooded with too much video transfer, manic automated messaging, or deleterious malware, we will all be the losers as a result.

2: Having invested very considerably in the build-up of these networks, it is completely reasonable for operators to seek to protect a significant revenue flow from the utilisation of these networks - especially from core product lines such as voice and SMS. Anything that risks destroying this revenue flow is bound to cause alarm.

3: The potential upside of new revenue flow from innovative new data services often seems dwarfed by the potential downside from loss of revenues from existing services, if networks are opened too freely to new players. In other words, network operators all face a case of the Innovators' Dilemma. When it comes to the strategic crunch, innovative new business potential often loses out to maintaining the existing lines of business.

4. New lines of revenue for operators - to supplement the old faithfuls of voice and SMS - include the following:

Straightforward data usage charges;
A micro-share of monetary transactions (such as mobile banking, or goods being bought or sold or advertised) that are carried out over wireless network;
Reliable provision of high-quality services (such as would support crystal-clear telephone conference calls);
Premium charges for personalised services (such as answers to searches or enquiries)
A share of the financial savings that companies can achieve through efficiency gains from the intelligent deployment of new mobile services; etc.

But in all cases, the evolution of these new lines of service is likely be faster and more successful, if new entrepreneurs and innovators can be involved and feel welcome.

5. The best step to involving more innovators in the development of commercially significant new revenues - and to solving the case of the Innovators Dilemma mentioned above - is to systematically identify and analyse and (as far as possible) eliminate all cases of friction in the existing mobile ecosystem.

6. Three instances of mobile ecosystem friction stand out:

The diversity (fragmentation) of different operator developer support programmes. Developers have to invest considerable effort in joining and participating in each different scheme. Why can't there more greater commonality between these programmes?
The hurdles involved with getting sophisticated applications approved for usage on networks and/or handsets - developers often feel that they are being forced to go through overly-onerous third party testing and verification hoops, in order to prove that their applications are trustworthy. Some element of verification is probably inevitable, but can't we find ways to streamline it?
The difficulties consumers face in finding and then installing and using applications that are reliably meet their expectations.

In all cases, it's my view that a collaborative approach is more likely to deliver lasting value to the industry than a series of individualist approaches.

A different kind of job title

2009-03-01T23:29:00.006Z

The companies where I've worked for the last twenty years - first Psion PLC, then Symbian Ltd - were, in the end, commercially driven companies, with a mission from shareholders to generate profits. The Symbian Foundation is different: it's a not-for-profit organisation.

That's not to say we are blind to commercial considerations. On the contrary, our task is to support a collection of member organisations, many of which are highly profit-focused. We have to manage our own finances well, and we have to enable our member organisations to earn significant profits (if that's what they want to do). But we're not, ourselves, a fundamentally commercial entity.

With this thought in mind, we took the decision that we ought to rethink other aspects of how we organise ourselves, and how we communicate. We did not want to take it for granted that elements from the setups of our previous companies would automatically also appear in the setup of the Symbian Foundation.

One outcome of this is a decision to avoid overly business-oriented language like "vice president", "officers" and "chiefs", in describing the senior management team. Instead, we've eventually settled on the term "Leadership Team". Hopefully this terminology conveys an emphasis on openness, approachability, and a pioneering spirit.

To designate my own particular area of responsibility, I've taken a deep gulp, and I've plumped for the description:

Catalyst and Futurist, Leadership Team

In brief:

As catalyst, my role is to enable the Symbian software movement to discover and explore innovative solutions for the many challenges and opportunities faced by the mobile industry;
As futurist, my task is to distil compelling visions of the future of technology, business, and society – visions that provide the energy and inspiration for deeply productive open collaboration among the many creators and users of mobile products.

As catalyst, it falls to me to accelerate reactions that might otherwise occur too slowly. These reactions draw on energy that's already present in the ecosystem, but my activities should help to ignite that energy. I've written before about the important role of catalysts in ecosystems, in my review of the book "The starfish and the spider" by Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom.

What's involved in igniting reactions? In part, it's to hold out an attractive vision of a different way of working, a different kind of product, a different software architecture, a different user experience, and so on. That's where the "futurist" part of my job description fits in. In part, it's also to act, on occasion, as an irritant.

From time to time, I'll be acting as an ambassador for Symbian, as an agitator, as a networker, and as an evangelist. I've got mixed views about the term "evangelist". On reflection, here's why I prefer "catalyst":

Evangelists come with pre-cooked solutions - they already know the answers;
Catalysts come with suggestions and ideas, but the answer actually comes from the ecosystem, rather than from the catalyst;
Evangelists listen, but only to improve their prospects for converting the listener;
Catalysts listen, in order to find the ingredients of a solution that no one fully understood in advance.

If I should forget this advice in the future, and speak more forcefully than I listen, I'm sure that members of the ecosystem will find the way to remind me of what true openness really means!

Ambushed

2009-02-28T13:16:00.009Z

The invitation made good sense to me:

Apologies for the short notice but are you free tomorrow afternoon [Friday] after 3pm to meet with us to provide your feedback on MWC please? It should only take 30 mins or so.

It would be a chance to discuss with the Symbian Foundation marcomms team my reflections on our activities at the Mobile World Congress event in Barcelona the previous week: what had gone well, where there was room to improve, what we should try to do differently at future events, and so on. As a big fan of the practice of retrospection, I was happy to carve out 30 minutes in my diary for this purpose.

As I climbed up the stairs to the first floor of #1 Boundary Row - where the marcomms team sits - I briefly rehearsed my thoughts. I had many positive recollections of how everyone had prepared for and then supported the Symbian Foundation presence at Barcelona. (My main negative observation was that the music in the party was, at times, a bit too loud, and impeded networking conversations.)

But when I came into the room, Anatolie Papas asked me to review a press release. I could see there were lots of quotes on it. Then I noticed the title of the release:

DW 2.0 TURNS 5.0

SLIGHTLY BELATED BIRTHDAY PRESS RELEASE FOR IMMEDIATE DISTRIBUTION!

The man who helped put the ‘smart’ in ‘smartphone’ celebrates his half century and becomes a friendly spaceman

and I realised I was being ambushed - but in a very pleasant way!

Then a cake materialised, magnificently decorated with what is becoming an increasingly familiar picture:

A knife and forks appeared, and we collectively set to dividing up the cake and eating it. It was particuarly yummy! (The marcomms team get the credit for the design of the cake, but the manufacture was apparently by Konditor and Cook.)

The endorsements on the "press release" left me (unusually) lost for words. I won't repeat the endorsements here - that would be far too indulgent - but I do nominate Bruce Carney (from Symbian's Foster City office) as the provider of the geekiest quote:

“Congratulations on your 0x32nd birthday and thank you for your tireless contribution to get Symbian to where it is today; ready for the most exciting decade in all of our lives; the 'Internet without wires'”, said Bruce Carney, Symbian^h^h^h^h^h^h^h Nokia.

The upbeat creativity that shone through this "press release" gives me all the more reason to be confident that this team will continue to devise and deliver suberb market communications as the rest of the Symbian Foundation accelerates into top gear over the months ahead.

Symbian Foundation membership documents now available

2009-02-17T12:12:00.005Z

Anyone interested in the process for becoming a member of the Symbian Foundation can now download and view the relevant set of documents here.

These documents comprise:

An electronic membership application form;
A copy of the Symbian Foundation Licence (applicable to the source code in the Symbian Foundation Platform until such time as that code becomes available under the Open Source Eclipse Public Licence);
The Symbian Foundation membership rules;
The Symbian Foundation trademark and compliance policy;
The Symbian Foundation patent policy;
The memorandum of association of Symbian Foundation Limited;
The deed of adherence which an organisation must sign to become a member;
The member contribution agreement (applicable to those organisations that may wish to contribute code to the Symbian Foundation Platform).

Many congratulations to the team who have worked so hard to prepare these documents for publication!

There's a lot of information in these documents. If anyone has questions, the first place to look is the online FAQ.

Deja vu, with a difference

2009-02-15T13:15:00.008Z

As I walked through Barcelona airport this morning, my mind was jostled by sights and sounds remembered from my previous visits here. I'm in town to attend the annual Mobile World Congress trade show. (The show used to be called "3GSM", and before that, "GSM World".)

I've been attending this show every year since 2002. From 2002-05 it was held at Cannes, in France, in increasingly cramped circumstances - as the mobile industry grew and grew and grew. Since 2006 it has taken place 300 miles south west along the Mediterranean coast in Barcelona. So today marks my fourth annual visit to Barcelona airport.

As I walked through the airport, I found myself remembering:

that was the place where on my first visit, I had walked out of the wrong exit, and needed to go back in through a lengthy security screening process again before I could pick up my luggage;
that was the place where, another year, I had queued up to report that my luggage was missing (happily, it was delivered to my hotel by first thing the following morning);
that was the coffee shop where I had relaxed with some colleagues before going to the gate on the way home one year;
that was the restaurant where I had eaten a meal with a slightly different set of colleagues a different year, while awaiting news of delayed departure times; and so on.

The place is full of memories. But there's a big difference this year. The remembrances of similarity mask underlying transitions.

For example, I'll be spending a lot of my time over the next few days at the same hospitality suite as in previous years - AV91 on the main Fira avenue - but the suite has a very different feel this year. Here's a picture of the outside of the suite, taken earlier today:

As you can see, the suite was still under construction - but some elements of the emerging Symbian Foundation branding are visible. The "friendly spaceman" has a side panel all to himself:

Other Symbian Foundation doodle characters are also visible: the inspired toaster, and so on. (No, these names aren't official...)

Again, I'll also be spending time at the same stand location as before - 8A77, in Hall 8 - but, again, the feel has changed:

What's more, many of the colleagues who came with me to previous Mobile World Congress events, aren't attending this year. The other members of the Symbian Leadership Team are primarily engaged these days in important internal integration projects inside Nokia, and have no reason to travel to Barcelona this year. So I'll be sharing my duties - meeting press, analysts, bloggers, partners, and potential new members of the Symbian Foundation community - with a new set of Leadership Team colleagues - the members of the emerging Symbian Foundation Leadership Team.

Finally, the emphasis of these meetings will be less on the number of phones shipped, and more on the growing vibrancy and productivity of the Symbian Foundation community. After all, we can only aspire to provide the most widely used software on the planet if, along the way, we grow the most productive and valuable software movement on the planet.

Footnote: Another visible difference, from last year, is that the number of large advertising hoardings scattered all over the city seems significantly less this year.

I'm a friendly spaceman

2009-02-12T20:10:00.005Z

A box of my new business cards arrived today - one day ahead of schedule.

They have some elements of the new Symbian Foundation branding:

Different people on the Symbian Foundation Launch team have different doodles on their cards. I'm one of the people who ended up with the cartoon that looks to me like a friendly spaceman.

This is probably going to generate some fun talk when I give these out at meetings in Barcelona next week :-)

If you think you could draw a better doodle, then see this invitation.

Footnote: Blogger tells me this is my 100th blog posting. When I wrote the first, back in June last year, I scarcely imagined that my 100th posting would be featuring a friendly spaceman. But as we say in this business, you have to expect the unexpected!

New blog - things are developing nicely

2009-02-12T12:41:00.003Z

Starting today, there's an official Symbian Foundation blog, here.

The blog will give a flavour of the new Symbian Foundation brand. The declared intention of the blog is "to start a proper dialog with the planet, to introduce ourselves, and to let you know what we're up to".

The site also contains the latest press release of endorsements from companies supporting the Symbian Foundation. With this release, the count of these companies has reached 78.

Preparing for Barcelona

2009-02-09T23:22:00.003Z

What's the issue that deserves the fullest attention of the best minds of the mobile industry representatives who will be gathering next week at the Mobile World Congress event in Barcelona?

That was one of the questions that I got asked in a quick-fire practice session last week, by a journalist who was employed for the morning to take part in a "media training session" for people from the Symbian Foundation launch team. The idea of the session was to bombard participants with potentially awkward questions, so we could test out various ways to respond. The questions ranged from tame to taxing, from straightforward to subtle, and from respectful to riotous.

One possible answer to the question at the top of this posting is that it is the issue of user experience which deserves the fullest attention. If users continue to be confronted by inflexible technology with unfriendly interfaces, they won't get drawn in to make fullest use of mobile devices and services.

Another possible answer is that it is the issue of complexity which deserves the fullest attention. In this line of thinking, overly complex UIs are just one facet of the problem of overly complex mobile technology. Other facets include:

Overly difficult development cycles (resulting in products coming late to the market, and/or products released with too many defects), and
Overly exercised CPU cores and overly bloated software (resulting in products with poor battery life and high cost).

However, on reflection, I offer instead the following answer: it is the issue of collaboration which deserves the fullest attention. We need to find better ways for all the good resources of the mobile industry to be productively aligned addressing the same key risks and opportunities, rather than our good intentions ending up pulling in different directions. The problems that we collectively face (including the problems of poor user experience and overly complex software) are surely capable of resolution, if only we can find the way to work together on solutions, rather than our different approaches ending up contradiciting each other and confusing matters.

Open source, whereby people can look at source code and propose changes without having to gain special permission in advance, is part of the solution to improving collaboration. Open discussion and open governance take the solution further. Yet another step comes from collaboration tools that provide first-rate source configuration management and issue tracking.

But collaboration often needs clear leadership to make it a reality: a sufficiently compelling starting point on which further collaboration can take place. Without such a starting point, none of the other items I mentioned can hope to make a lasting difference.

That brings me back to the role of the Symbian Foundation. The Symbian Foundation is offering the entire mobile industry what it claims to be the best possible starting point for further collaboration:

A tried and tested codebase of 40 million lines of code;
Processes and disciplines that cope with pressures from multiple divergent stakeholders;
A visionary roadmap that is informed by the thinking of existing mobile leaders, and which spells out the likely evolution of key mobile technologies.

The Symbian Foundation will be holding a welcome party on Monday evening at Barcelona (8pm-11pm, 16th February). I've been allocated a small number of tickets to this party, to pass to selected bloggers, analysts, and other deep thinkers of the mobile industry. If you'd like to join this party to discuss the points I've made in this posting (or any of the other issues relevant to the formation of the Symbian Foundation), I set you this challenge. Please drop me an email, and provide a link to some of your online writings on applicable topics. (By the way, you don't need to agree with my viewpoint. You just need to demonstrate that you're going to enter into an open-minded, friendly, and constructive debate!)

Smaller is not necessarily more beautiful

2009-02-08T14:16:00.002Z

I've been using a Nokia E61i as my main phone for at least 15 months. I'd grown very fond of it.

However, as part of the integration of Symbian's corporate IS structures into those of Nokia, all Symbian employees who previously ran the BlackBerry Connect push email service on older phones like the E61i have been migrated onto a newer phone - the Nokia E71 - with a "Mail for Exchange" connection to the Nokia email servers.

To avoid too many changes happening at exactly the same time, I left it until Thursday this week to unbox my E71 and start personalising it. For about 24 hours, I switched back and forth between the two phones, but I now think the E61i is switched off for good.

First impressions are that, going from the E61i to the E71, there are scores of small but valuable improvements in the usability and feature set of applications. These improvements add up to a powerful reason not to go back to the E61i. They've been very nicely implemented.

Another big plus point is the built-in GPS.

No wonder the E71 has received so many rave reviews.

But yet, but yet, but yet: I confess to missing the larger keyboard and the larger screen of the older phone. For someone who does a great deal of data entry into my smartphone, the smaller keys (although implemented as a technological marvel) mean that I mis-hit keys more often than before. (And several keys have been removed from the keyboard altogether - you now need to use the "Chr" key to type them in.)

Another slight drawback of the smaller form factor is that, to my mind, the vibrator is less powerful, and more easily missed. So I've missed more incoming phone calls in the last few days than in the preceding week. (I'll need to develop some greater sensitivity...)

Whilst the prevailing wisdom in the smartphone industry is that smaller and lighter phones reach larger markets, I count myself as part of a small but growing sub-market of users that would prefer larger hardware. For us, a larger keyboard and screen - up to a point - add significantly to the overall usability of the device as a high-volume data-input and data-output terminal.

The iPhone is another example of a phone that was larger than prevailing wisdom said would be tolerated by mainstream purchasers. Previous to the launch of the iPhone, industry usability experts held the opinion that a device with the dimensions of the iPhone would inevitably have a limited market. However, as the iPhone shows, if the user experience is good enough, worries about device size tend to fall away.

So I am personally looking forward to seeing the software enhancements of the E71 available in larger devices - whether these devices are called "smartphones" or "MIDs" or whatever.

Small is beautiful - yes - but it's not the only beauty.

Footnote: For an excellent introduction to the E71 from the point of view of an E61i user, see the comprehensive comparative review by Steve Litchfield.

Reviewing architecture

2009-02-06T22:25:00.008Z

I spent two days earlier this week in the company of a group of highly experienced software architects. As you may be aware, software architects are a special breed of people. They're the people who enjoy worrying about the fundamental technical design of a software system. They try to identify, in advance:

The best partitioning of the overall system into inter-connected parts ("divide and conquer");
The approach to the design that will preserve the right amount of flexibility for future evolution of the system ("design for change: expect the unexpected");
The technical decisions that will have the biggest impact on the lifetime success of the system ("finding the biggest bang per buck");
The aspects of the design that will become the hardest to change (and which, therefore, are the most urgent to get right);
The software development processes that will be the most sacrosanct in the creation of the system (the processes that even the best software engineers will be obliged to follow).

People who get these decisions right are among the most valuable members of the entire project team.

The software architects that I met over these two days were employees from eight of the initial board member companies of the Symbian Foundation. This group of architects has been meeting roughly once a month, for around the last six months, to carry out preparatory work ahead of the formal launch of the Symbian Foundation. The grouping goes by the name "Architecture and software collaboration working group". Because that's a bit of a mouthful, it's usually abbreviated to ASW WG.

It's not the only such working group. For example, there's also the FRR WG (looking at Feature, Roadmap and Releases), the FOL WG (Foundation Operational Launch), the FG WG (Foundation Governance), and the IMC WG (Interim Marketing & Communications). In each case, the working group consists of personnel from the initial board member companies, who meet regularly (face-to-face or on a conference call) to progress and review projects.

Several of these working groups will transition into ongoing "councils" when the Symbian Foundation is launched. For example, the ASW WG will transition into the Architecture Council. The Symbian Foundation councils are being formed with the purpose to support the foundation community and grow the competitiveness of the Symbian platform by:

Identifying high-level market, user and technical requirements;
Soliciting contributions that address those requirements;
Coordinating community contributions into regular platform releases;
Providing transparency for all community members regarding future platform developments.

The four main councils can be summarised as follows:

The Feature and Roadmap Council invites proposals for contributions from the community and seeks to coordinate new contributions into a unified platform (or tools) roadmap;
The Architecture Council invites and reviews technical solutions for new contributions in order to ensure the architectural integrity, backward compatibility and fitness-for-purpose of enhancements to the platform;
The User Interface Council invites and reviews descriptions of new user interface elements and develops guidelines to help ensure high quality device user experiences;
The Release Council coordinates the integration of contributions into stable and timely platform and tools releases.

As I said, I attended this week's meeting of the ASW WG. Personnel from eight of the initial board member companies were present. It was evident that some of the architects were already on very familiar terms with each other - they've worked together on previous Symbian projects over the years. Other participants spoke less often, and seemed to be newer to the group - but when they did speak up, their contribution was equally pertinent.

The meeting had a full agenda. About half of the time was devoted to collectively reviewing (and in some cases reworking) documents that are to be published on the Symbian Foundation web infrastructure around the time of the launch of the organisation. These documents included:

The operating charter for the Architecture Council
Foundation device software structuring principles
Template and Example for Technical Solution Descriptions
Foundation Device Compatibility Verification Process
Reference Execution Environment Selection Process
Recommended practice in the use of the software collaboration tools chosen by the Symbian Foundation - including the SCM (Mercurial) and Issue Tracking (Bugzilla) tools.

The rest of the meeting involved:

A discussion of the XML metadata files which are to be maintained (by package owners) for each component in the whole system
A review of progress of the project to create the infrastructure and web services which will be accessed by foundation members and by the general public following the launch of the foundation
A discussion of the principles for identifying and supporting package owners.

From time to time, the gathering briefly bordered on the surreal. For example, it was debated whether packages should most accurately be described as "collections of collections of packages" instead of "collections of packages". And there was a serious discussion of whether "vendor supported environment" should gain a hyphen, to become "vendor-supported environment". But this kind of intense scrutiny is what you'd expect from the highly analytic individuals in attendance - especially when you realise that it's the desire of these architects to communicate their design ideas as clearly and unambiguously as possible.

(I say all this from the standpoint of someone who had "Software Architect" as the job title on my business cards for several years in the early 1990s.)

Indeed, there was a lot of good-natured ribbing between the attendees. The remark "You might hate me for suggesting this, but..." was interrupted by the rejoinder, "Don't worry, I already hate you", followed by laughter.

The meeting became particularly animated, near the end, during the review of the project to create the Symbian Foundation web infrastructure. It became clear to the working group members that the documents they had long debated and refined would soon become published to a much, much wider audience. All the months of careful preparation will culminate in what is anticipated to be a flurry of interest from Symbian Foundation members in the proposals and votes that will take place at the first meetings of the councils:

Although there will be at most 12 voting members on any of these councils, the agendas and supporting documents will be made visible to all Symbian Foundation members in advance of council meetings;
These members will be able to make their own opinions known through channels such as mailing lists;
Over time, the members who repeatedly raise the most insightful comments and suggestions about the business of a council will be invited to formally join that council (and will gain voting rights).

A question for Blogger experts

2009-02-02T13:17:00.002Z

A question for the hive mind:

When I created this blog, I created a Google Account at the same time, with the blog associated with it. The Google Account is defined with my old email address. How do I get it moved to a new email address?

The main reason I want it changed is because I want the notification emails (sent by Blogger whenever anyone posts a comment here) to come direct to my new address, rather than my old one.

At first sight, this seems simple: the "My Account" link on the Blogger home page opens a page which in turn has a "Change email" link on it. Alas, if I type in my intended new email address, an error message is shown:

A user with the email you specified already exists

In a way, this is no surprise, since that new address is being provided by Google Apps. So I've already got two different Google Accounts - one attached to this blog, and the other attached to my new email address. Ideally, I'd like to merge these two accounts, but I doubt this is possible...?

That takes me to plan B: keep the blog associated with the same account as before, but alter this account so that notification emails are sent to a different email address. But at the moment, I don't seem to be able to do that either.

Does anyone have any bright ideas?

Signs of change

2009-02-01T23:40:00.006Z

My main place of work since September 2000 has been Symbian's offices at #2 Boundary Row, a short walk from Southwark tube station in central London. During all that time, the building has displayed signs with the "Symbian" name.

But when I visited the site earlier today, the signs of Nokia's acquisition of Symbian are now very visible: the Symbian signage has been replaced by Nokia signage.

1st February marks the next stage in the integration of Symbian, the company, into Nokia. As with all large changes, the idea is to tackle things stage by stage - to avoid too many things all changing at the same time. Legally, Symbian became a part of Nokia Group back in December. 1st February sees Symbian employees adopting new email addresses, new security passes, and logging into a new network. More changes will occur in the weeks and months ahead - including key dates in the launch of the Symbian Foundation organisation, and the availability of Symbian Platform releases (replacing the previously separate Symbian OS and UI releases).

Joining Nokia's IS network also means retiring Lotus Notes as our mail engine (although we'll keep using Lotus Notes for various internal discussion databases and other groupware purposes). Those of us who are working as part of the launch team for the Symbian Foundation are experimenting with Google Apps as the provider of our email services. I've had a Google Mail account for my personal use for a number of years, so I'm already familiar with this system. It's got some fine features. My first couple of days using it for business purposes, however, are making me wonder if it really is fit for more demanding usage. Time will tell. In the meantime, to my mind it's another illustration that browser-based apps are not yet fit to fully displace locally hosted apps. They're not fit to fully displace such apps on the PC, and they're very definitely not fit to fully displace such apps on mobile devices.

Century reached in Japan

2009-01-30T22:41:00.009Z

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

2009-01-28T15:13:00.005Z

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

2009-01-21T09:05:00.004Z

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

2009-01-15T01:25:00.003Z

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

2009-01-14T23:58:00.004Z

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:

Most major network operators are aiming at a number of supported smartphone platforms that, while small, is greater than one;
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;
Another reason for supporting more than one platform is that end users on the network frequently want a choice;
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

2009-01-08T10:06:00.002Z

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

2009-01-01T10:57:00.005Z

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!)

The best book I read in 2008

2008-12-28T13:56:00.008Z

I've had the pleasure to read through several dozen fine books in 2008 - here's a partial list of reviews. (One reason this list is "partial" is because I often neglected to assign the label "books" to relevant postings.)

As the year draws to a close, I'm ready to declare one book as being the most memorable and thought-provoking that I've read in the entire year: "The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom" by University of Virginia Associate Professor Jonathan Haidt. It's a tour de force in positive psychology.

The endorsement printed on the front cover is probably reason enough for anyone to read this book: "For the reader who seeks to understand happiness, my advice is: Begin with Haidt". The endorsement is from Martin Seligman, Professor of psychology, University of Pennsylvania.

The stated purpose of the book is to consider "ten great ideas" about morality and ethics, drawn from Eastern and Western religious and philosophical traditions, and to review these ideas in the light of the latest scientific findings about the human condition. Initially, I was sceptical about how useful such an exercise might be. But the book quickly led me to set aside my scepticism. The result is greater than the sum of the ten individual reviews, since the different ideas overlap and reinforce.

Haidt declares himself to be both an atheist and a liberal, but with a lot of sympathy for what both theists and conservatives try to hold dear. In my view, he does a grand job of bridging these tough divides.

Haidt seems deeply familiar with a wide number of diverse traditional thinking systems, from both East and West. He also shows himself to be well versed in many modern (including very recent) works on psychology, sociology, and evolutionary theory. The synthesis is frequently remarkable. I found myself re-thinking lots of my own worldwide.

Here are some of the age-old themes that Haidt evaluates:

The mind is divided against itself - "the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak"
Perception is more important than external substance - "Life itself is but what we deem it"
Humans tend to be rank hypocrites - we notice the speck in others' eyes, without paying attention to the plank in our own
The golden rule of "reciprocity" lies at the heart of all morality
Personal fulfilment depends on giving up attachments
Personal happiness is best pursued by seeking to cultivate "virtues"
Lives need suffering and setbacks to allow people to reach higher states of development
Religion plays a unique role in creating cohesive cultures.

To be clear, the evaluation of these themes typically shows both their prevailing strengths and their limitations. (It was a bit of a jolt every time I read a sentence in the book that said something like "What the Buddha failed to appreciate is...")

The ideas that I have taken away from the book include the following:

A vivid metaphor of the mind as being a stubborn elephant of automatic desires, with a small conscious rider sat on top of it (as illustrated in the picture on the front cover of at least some editions of the book);
In any battle of wills, the elephant is bound to win - but there are mechanisms through which the rider can distract and train the elephant;
The most reliable mechanisms for improving our mood are meditation, cognitive therapy, and Prozac;
There are hazards (as well as benefits) to promoting self-esteem;
Although each person has a "happiness set point" to which their emotional status tends to return after some time, there are measures that people can take to drive their general happiness level higher - this includes the kind of personal relations we achieve, the extent to which we can reach "flow" in our work, and the extent to which different "levels" of our lives "cohere";
Alongside the universally recognised human emotions like happiness, sadness, surprise, fear, disgust and anger, that have typically been studied by psychologists, there is an important additional emotion of "elevation" that also deserves study and strengthening;
The usual criticisms of religion generally fail to do justice to the significant beneficial feelings of community, purity, and divinity, that participation in religious activities can nurture - this draws upon some very interesting work by David Sloan Wilson on the role of religions as enabling group selection between different human societies.

Despite providing a lot of clarity, the book leaves many questions unresolved. I see that Haidt is working on a follow-up, entitled "The Righteous Mind: Why good people are divided by politics and religion". I'm greatly looking forward to it.

Footnote: "The happiness hypothesis" has its own website, here.

Revocation infrastructure

2008-12-27T13:30:00.004Z

In the quest to stop bad applications from doing damage to the data or operation of a phone (or running up large bills, or otherwise adversely impacting the phone network), possible approaches divide into two main routes:

Put the main focus on checking and testing software (and the originator of the software) before it is allowed to be distributed or installed;
Be permissive as regards the initial distribution and installation of software, but withdraw (or "revoke") these permissions if it becomes clear that the software has bad effects.

It seems to be the consensus view that it is impractical (if not impossible) to reliably identify bad software by any prior checking system. These checks will always fail on at least one criteria:

The tests will be insufficient to cover all usage conditions; applications which work well on some handsets on some networks may well go wrong on other handsets or other networks;
Any attempt to make the tests more reliable will introduce unacceptable time delays and cost.

The best that an application checking system can hope to accomplish is a quick sanity test - to spot significant errors. Inevitably, this means that some bad software will slip through the system. As a result, any anti-malware system on mobile phones needs to consider at least some revocation component.

In principle, here's what revocation could accomplish:

The process of releasing software (including alpha and beta versions) could be relatively quick and painless;
An application that is subsequently found to generate problems on phones could be removed from distribution lists and application stores, to prevent anyone else from installing it;
Messages could be sent to all phones on the network with the effect that users who have already installed the application could be warned about these problems - and given the opportunity to uninstall it;
In more extreme cases, these messages could cause the applications to be automatically uninstalled, without waiting for the approval of the user;
In yet other cases, the developer who signed the application could be barred from signing any more applications - this could be appropriate in cases where the developer has been caught out making pirated zero-cost versions of commercial software.

This picture is attractive. However, we need to be aware that it relies on the existence of a "revocation infrastructure". One part of this infrastructure is the reliable identification of an application. This is accomplished via tamperproof digital signing. However, this is only the start of what's needed for revocation to work.

It was because of the lack of a developed revocation infrastructure that the original Symbian Signed scheme followed route 1 above - Put the main focus on checking and testing software (and the originator of the software) before it is allowed to be distributed or installed - rather than route 2 - Be permissive as regards the initial distribution and installation of software, but withdraw (or "revoke") these permissions if it becomes clear that the software has bad effects.

Here are some of the issues with the mechanics of revocation:

By default, checking at install time for revoked certificates is currently turned off for most (if not all) shipping Symbian phones;
The user would in principle have to pay for the data traffic to check for revocation;
Operators ought ideally to agree on something like a free dedicated access point which is supported across networks while roaming, etc., before it's acceptable to turn this on for the majority of users;
Revocation checking is done on most phones at software install time, there is limited current support for push revocation;
If the revocation checking was defaulted to on, the user could still turn it off for most (if not all) devices;
Software that deliberately or accidentally broke PlatSec partitioning of processes & data could disable the revocation check.

In addition, there are some issues with the policy of revocation:

There is bound to be controversy over who has the authority to decide to revoke a certificate;
Some applications that run without problems on some networks may cause problems to other networks; does this mean that revocation may need to be specific to individual networks?
Some applications that users like and admire may be viewed as malware by other users;
For example, users may have entered considerable amounts of data into an application, that is subsequently forcibly uninstalled due to being revoked; users may complain about no longer have access to their data;
Some application writers may seek to contest decisions to declare their software as malware.

I'm not saying these issues are insurmountable. There are candidate solutions for all these issues. But I do want to point out that revocation has its own costs.

My own view nowadays is that even a partially working revocation would probably still be a better system than the current reliance on centralised testing of applications before they can be distributed.

By "partially working revocation" I mean a system that works by community reviews. Users who notice problems with applications would be encouraged to publicise these issues, so that the community as a whole can weigh up the evidence. Popular application stores would take this information into account in the material provided to describe the applications available for download.

In principle, users would be willing to pay money for a premium service from application stores, as follows:

The application store remembers which users have downloaded which applications;
If an application is subsequently deemed to be problematic (on, say, particular phones), then relevant users would be sent messages alerting them of this situation.

In some ways, this premium service would be akin to the anti-virus monitoring solutions that are already available from some security specialist companies - although the implementation mechanism would be different.

Note finally that I'm not advocating opening all functionality to all developers, without any vetting. I believe that functionality such as AllFiles, DRM, and TCB, still needs to be carefully controlled, and cannot fall under a system of "use until revoked". One argument in support of this view has already been mentioned (point 6 in the list above of issues with the mechanics of revocation).

Why good people fail to change bad things

2008-12-25T15:22:00.009Z

2008 has been a year of great change in the Symbian world. Important change initiatives that were kicked off in previous years have gathered speed.

2008 has also seen change and trauma at many other levels, throughout the mobile industry and beyond. And the need for widespread change still remains. Daily - perhaps hourly - we encounter items that lead us to wonder: Why isn't someone getting this changed? Why isn't someone taking proper care of such-and-such a personal issue, family issue, social issue, organisational issue, political issue, educational issue, environmental issue, operating system issue, ecosystem management issue, usability issue, and so on?

I've attended quite a few "change facilitation workshops" and similar over the last 24 months. One thinker who has impressed me greatly, with his analysis of the causes of failure of change initiatives - even when good people are involved in these initiatives - is Harvard Business School Professor John Kotter. Kotter describes a series of eight steps which he recommends all significant change initiatives to follow:

Build a sense of urgency

Establish an effective guiding coalition

Create a clear, appealing vision

Communicate, communicate, communicate

Remove obstacles (“empower”)

Celebrate small wins

Follow through with wave after wave of change

Embed the change at the cultural level.

Lots of other writers and speakers have their own different ways of describing the processes of successful change initiatives, but I find Kotter's analysis to be the most insightful and inspiring.

The main book that covers this eight stage process is "Leading Change" - a book that must rank high in the list of the most valuable business books ever written.

Subsequently, Kotter used the mechanism of an easily-read "cartoon book", "Our Iceberg Is Melting: Changing and Succeeding Under Any Conditions", in order to provide a gentle but compelling introduction to his ideas. It's a fable about penguins. But it's a fable with real depth. (I noticed it and purchased a copy in the Inverness airport bookshop one day, and had finished reading it by the time my plane south landed at Gatwick. I was already resolved to find my copy of "Leading Change" and re-read it.)

As Kotter emphasises, the steps in the eight-stage change leadership process have mirror images which are the main eight reasons why change initiatives stumble:

Lack of a sufficient sense of urgency;

Lack of an effective guiding coalition for the change (an aligned team with the ability to make things happen);

Lack of a clear appealing vision of the outcome of the change (otherwise it may seem too vague, having too many unanswered questions);

Lack of communication for buy-in, keeping the change in people’s mind (otherwise people will be distracted back to other issues);

Lack of empowerment of the people who can implement the change (lack of skills, wrong organisational structure, wrong incentives, cumbersome bureaucracy);

Lack of celebration of small early wins (failure to establish momentum);

Lack of follow through (it may need wave after wave of change to stick);

Lack of embedding the change at the cultural level (otherwise the next round of management changes can unravel the progress made).

A few months ago, Kotter released yet another book on the subject of change initiatives that go wrong. Like "Our Iceberg Is Melting", this is another slim book - only having 128 pages, and with large typeface, making it another very quick read. But, again, the ideas have real merit. This book is called "A sense of urgency".

As the name implies, this book focuses more fully on the first stage of change initiatives. The biggest reason why significant change initiatives fail, in Kotter's considered view, is because of a lack of:

a real sense of urgency - a distinctive attitude and gut-level feeling that lead people to grab opportunities and avoid hazards, to make something important happen today, and constantly shed low-priority activities to move faster and smarter, now.

Instead, most organisations (and most people) become stuck in a combination of complacency and what Kotter describes as "false urgency":

Complacency is frequently fuelled by past successes and time-proven strengths - that may, however, prevent organisations from being fully aware of changes in circumstances, technologies, and markets;

False urgency involves more activity than productivity: "It is frenetic. It is more mindless running to protect themselves or attack others, than purposive focus on critical problems and opportunities. Run-run, meet-meet, talk-talk, defend-defend, and go home exhausted."

Kotter provides a helpful list of questions to help organisations realise if they are suffering from over-complacency and/or false urgency:

Are critical issues delegated to consultants or task forces with little involvement of key people?

Do people have trouble scheduling meetings on important initiatives ("Because, well, my agenda is so full")?

Is candour lacking in confronting the bureaucracy and politics that are slowing down important initiatives?

Do meetings on key issues end with no decisions about what must happen immediately (except the scheduling of another meeting)?

Are discussions very inwardly focused and not about markets, emerging technologies, competitors, and the like? ...

Do people run from meeting to meeting, exhausting themselves and rarely if ever focusing on the most critical hazards or opportunities? ...

Do people regularly blame others for any significant problems, instead of taking responsibility and changing? ...

The centrepiece of "A sense of urgency" is a set of four tactics to increase a true sense of urgency:

Bring the outside in. Reconnect internal reality with external opportunities and hazards. Bring in emotionally compelling data, people, video, sights, and sounds.

Behave with urgency every day. Never act content, anxious, or angry. Demonstrate your own sense of urgency always in meetings, one-on-one interactions, memos, and email, and do so as visibly as possible to as many people as possible.

Find opportunity in crises. Always be alert to see if crises can be a friend, not just a dreadful enemy, in order to destroy complaceny. But proceed with caution, and never be naive, since crises can be deadly.

Deal with the NoNos. Remove or neutralise all the relentless urgency-killers: people who are not skeptics but who are determined to keep a group complacent or, if needed, to create destructive urgency.

The rest of the book fleshes out these tactics with examples (taken from Kotter's extensive consulting and research experience) and additional checklists. To my mind, there's a great deal to learn from here.

Footnote: Kotter's emphasis on the topic of "real urgency" may seem to fly in opposition to one of the most celebrated messages of the literature on effectiveness, namely the principle that people should focus on matters that are important rather than matters that are merely urgent. In the renowned "first things first" language of Stephen Covey, people ought to prioritise "Quadrant two" (activities which are important but not urgent) over "Quadrant three" (activities with are urgent but not important).

To my mind, both Kotter and Covey are correct. We do need to start out by figuring what are the most important activities. And then we have to ensure that we keep giving sufficient attention to these activities. Kotter's insight is that organisations and people can address this latter task by means of the generation of a sufficient sense of urgency around these activities. In other words, we should drive certain key targets out of Quadrant two into Quadrant one. That way, we'll be more likely to succeed with our key change initiatives.

Symbian Signed and pirated applications

2008-12-24T21:22:00.003Z

In the spirit of "divide and conquer" I'd like to try again to focus on just one out of the many sub-topics that whirl around discussions of Symbian Signed. On this occasion, the particular sub-topic is:

Is there merit in using (or modifying) Symbian Signed processes to reduce the prevalence of pirated Symbian applications?

I stated the underlying requirement as follows in "Symbian Signed basics":

c. Reducing the prevalence of cracked software

To make it less likely that users will install “cracked” free versions of commercial applications written by third parties, thereby depriving these third parties of income.

The idea is simple enough:

A developer D0 creates an application A0, has it signed, and sells it for a fee
To avoid users making and distributing copies of that application, without paying additional fees to the developer, the developer includes an element of copy protection in the application
This restricts the application to run on a device identified by (say) an IMSI or an IMEI
Some users will be developers in their own right, who possess the programming skills to alter the application to bypass the copy-protection code, creating a cracked version A1
In principle, A1 can be copied and will run on a wider number of devices, thereby depriving the developer of additional income
However, because A1 is a tampered version of A0, the original signature is no longer valid, so A1 will fail to install.

On the other hand, any developer D1 can access the Symbian Signed mechanism to put a different signature onto the application A1, thereby completing the circumvention of the copy-protection mechanism. The lower the expense of obtaining a signature, and the easier that process becomes (for example, by removing an independent testing phase), the more likely it is that cracked but installable applications (like A1) will circulate.

This is where the requirement to "make it easier for developers to carry out widespread beta testing" comes into tension with the requirement to "reduce the prevalence of cracked software".

OK, having laid out the context, it's time for me to state my own opinion on the matter.

I suspect that piggy-backing on Symbian Signed is probably not the best route for a developer D0 to avoid pirate versions of their application A0 circulating. That's for the following reasons:

It seems inevitable that the Symbian Signed mechanism will continue to become cheaper and easier to operate - in order to address the huge demand to "make it easier for developers to carry out widespread beta testing"
The only kinds of apps which will be difficult for cracker developers D1 to re-sign are those which make use of some high-powered capabilities (like AllFiles or DRM or TCB), which in turn only apply to a small proportion of applications like A0.

So developers D0 ought instead to seek to use other copy-protection mechanisms - such as those involving DRM.

At the same time, the pressure for users to seek free copies of applications will reduce, provided the prices levied for these applications seem reasonable to large numbers of users. In turn, one thing that will allow these prices to remain low is if the population of users buying the applications is large, and if there is an efficient marketplace mechanism (akin to the iPhone AppStore) for users to discover and purchase applications.

(Aside: One more avenue to explore is if mechanisms could be put in place for developers to earn a proportion of ongoing network data or advertising revenues from the use of their application.)

To summarise: I'd like to take the question of "Reducing the prevalence of cracked software" off the Symbian Signed discussion table. (But I remain open to being persuaded otherwise.) That table is already cluttered enough, and the more we can remove from it, the easier it will be to reach a satisfactory consensus view.

Footnote: This posting is #3 out of N I expect to be making about Symbian Signed, where N could become as large as 10.

Operators and the iPhone

2008-12-21T21:05:00.003Z

John Strand, independent-minded CEO of Strand Consult, has reached some provocative iconoclastic conclusions about the iPhone.

An edition of "Strand Report" earlier this month was entitled "iPhone: an operator's worst friend". In short, although end-users frequently enjoy using an iPhone, the operators who spend money supporting iPhones on their networks enjoy the experience considerably less.

Since Strand Consult have spent 14 years building up an extensive network of connections among operators worldwide, it's worth taking the time to listen to their opinion on this matter.

Here are a few extracts from the Strand analysis:

Having iPhone customers using large data volumes sounds good, but when data is being sold at a flat rate, a high data consumption results in high production costs without the corresponding increased revenue. You could compare the operators’ attitude towards the iPhone's data consumption with a restaurant owner that has a "all you can eat for 10 Euro” buffet and that is proudest of the customers that eat the most!...

When you examine the iPhone data consumption, you will see that iPhone customers use their browser to view ordinary websites and that they often choose not to view the websites in XHTML - optimised for low bandwidth and mobile phone sized screens. In practice this results in that when an iPhone user browses a typical news site, an ordinary web page will be around 1 MB, while the mobile version of the same page will often be less than 100 Kb. It is significantly cheaper for an operator to produce 100 Kb data than it is to produce 1 MB data and it is much more fun to deliver 100 KB rather than 1 MB when you are selling data at a flat rate...

There are already a number of operators that have issued profit warnings related to their iPhone ventures and our research shows that there is not one single Apple partner in the world among the mobile operators that has increased their overall profit and market share due to the iPhone...

Across the world there is a huge market for unlocked iPhone's. People purchase a phone that has been marketed, sold and subsidised by an operator who thereafter does not receive the data traffic and revenue from that handset. These phones are most often used on other non-Apple partner networks, resulting in the Apple iPhone partner operator ending up with a high SAC, while another non-Apple partner only needs to sell a SIM-only product with a low SAC and attractive voice and data prices...

We know of a great many operators and MVNOs that have done good business on NOT being an Apple and iPhone partner. These operators let other operators subsidise handsets and instead sell SIM cards with inexpensive data traffic at competitive prices. Their low SAC gives them a positive cash flow on the customer far earlier than the Apple partner operators that are subsidising, marketing and selling iPhones...

The conclusion is simple. This is not good business for shareholders of operators that are Apple and iPhone partners - on the contrary it is far better business not to be an Apple and iPhone partner. Operators that choose not to carry iPhone products have an increased probability of serving their shareholders interests over those that move their management’s focus, subsidies, marketing and distribution power on a product that is as beautiful as Paris Hilton, but increases production costs...

Strand Consult return to these themes in their year-end article containing predictions for 2009, "2009 will be the Moment of Truth for many players in the telecoms sector":

Our analyses during 2008 have shown that there is not one operator that has increased their turnover, revenue or improved their market share due to the iPhone. In our latest iPhone analysis LINK we document that a number of operators have issued profit warnings based on the iPhone. We have documented that the closer partnership you have with Apple, the worst business case the iPhone becomes from an operator’s point of view.

I've spent a bit of time searching for substantive rebuttals to this analysis:

Some people have said that operators have indeed generated additional revenues from the iPhone - but that's not the same thing as additional profits;
Some have commented that the iPhone gives great pleasure to end-users, but that misses the point of the analysis;
It's also true that many third party developers have benefited from selling their applications on the iPhone, but, again, that misses the point of the analysis.

I see three possible interpretations:

There are network operators who generate significant additional profits from their support of the iPhone, but they're keeping relatively quiet about this;
The iPhone is indeed better news for developers and end-users than it is for the operators who support it;
We're still in a transitional phase.

I think the third interpretation is the most likely. The mobile industry is in a time of very considerable flux. The iPhone has played an important role of opening people's eyes to the possibilities of smarter mobile devices, but that doesn't mean that operators will continue to be keen to actively support the iPhone. Instead, what I hear is that they're looking for phone platforms that are both complete and highly customisable.

Order from open source chaos

2008-12-17T11:57:00.003Z

Various videos and PDFs from the recent Symbian Partner Event are now available online.

One video that amply repays viewing is Jay Sullivan of Mozilla speaking on "Chaos and order: a Mozilla story". You'll find it on the presentations page of the SPE website.

Mozilla's declared mission - "promote choice and innovation on the Internet" - has a lot in common with what Symbian is trying to do. One size does not fit all. Mozilla's declared methods - involving open source, weak copyleft, and an independent foundation - also resonate with those of the Symbian Foundation. Even the sizes of the organisations are broadly comparable (Jay mentioned that Mozilla has around 175 employees).

Mozilla has been travelling along this particular road a lot longer than Symbian. This helps to explain why many Symbian people in the audience were hanging intently on every word in the presentation.

The questions that the presentation sought to answer included:

How can your organisation harness openness (where more and more things happen in public), rather than fight it?
How do you get your customers to support each other (peer-to-peer support), rather than always going to the centre for support?
How can a comparatively small company take advantage of wide public support to compete with huge existing players?
How can 75 developers inside the company leverage 100s of external daily contributors, 1000s of less frequent contributors, 10s of 1000s of overnight testers, and around one million beta testers?

In part, the answer to these questions is to use appropriate tools. For example, Mozilla relies heavily on the Bugzilla bug-tracking database.

In part, the answer comes down to attitude. Mozilla have adopted widespread openness of information sharing: they use wikis and newsgroups, which are almost all publicly accessible. (The exception is a small amount of personnel information.) Another example: Everyone in the world is able to dial into the company weekly status update meeting. (Jay commented: "We know our competition dials in".)

What I personally found most interesting was Jay's analysis of the potential chaos that ensues from this openness. For example, there can be a great deal of "noise" in the online comments from all sorts of people: it's hard to filter postings that are based on reality, from those based on speculation or fantasy. There's a constant trail of chat, with input from all over the world. Everyone can propose changes to the project. In such an environment, how can real work get done? How can you mediate among 50,000 people who all have ideas to improve a particular dialog box in the UI of an application? How to deal with strongly vocal minorities?

The answers were fascinating (and deeply practical):

Open doesn't mean democracy
Decision-making is messy (but that doesn't mean you should step back from openness)
Be prepared to tolerate some messiness
Treat disagreements as negotiations
Managers of the project need to drive towards definite outcomes - focusing on what is the right outcome rather than who has the right ideas
Organise a chorus (rather than a chaos), around local leaders
Although anyone can propose changes, you need to earn significant amounts of credibility before you are allowed to implement a change
Ensure quality through multiple reviews
Review for performance regressions as well as for functionality
Educate participants about the vision and the mission of the project, which in turn allows greater micro-level decisions
Guide participants towards using the appropriate communication channels for particular topics, and to back up their assertions with research and data
Create small focused teams with responsibility for specific areas of product interest
Create a common language, to allow discussions to be more productive
You still need to have clearly identified decision makers, even though you push as much of the discussion out "to the edge" as possible.

These are good thoughts to keep in mind in the midst of the inevitable turmoil as the Symbian Foundation places 40 million lines of code into open source (and makes corresponding changes in processes) over the next 18 months.

Symbian Signed and control

2008-12-16T08:58:00.002Z

My posting yesterday on "Symbian Signed basics" has attracted more comments (containing lots of thoughtful ideas as well as evident passion) than I can quickly answer.

For now, I'd like to respond to Ian, who raised the following point:

There is no need for signing to ensure safety from malware. That's what (platform) security is for.

Requiring signing without the option of user override is about control, pure and simple.

Can you give me a good reason why people should not have control of their property and why it should be in vendor's hands instead?

The first answer is that, when users purchase a phone, they typically enter into a contract with the supplier, and agree to be bound by the terms of that contract. In cases when the phone is being subsidised or supported by a network operator, the network operator only enters into the relationship on account of a set of assumptions about what the user is going to do with the phone. The network operator can reasonably seek to limit what the user does with the handset - even though the user has paid money for the device.

That's the reason, for example, why T-Mobile stipulated (and apparently received agreement from Google) that no application providing VoIP over cellular data could be installed onto the Android G1. Otherwise, the cost and revenue assumptions of T-Mobile would be invalidated. From Daniel Roth on Wired:

T-Mobile made a big deal about being one of the few carriers embracing open standards and open systems -- which is true. Yet just how open is a (sorry) open question. When I talked to Cole Brodman, the CTO of T-Mobile, after the event about what would stop something like Skype from designing a program that could run on the phone, negating the need for a massive voice plan, he said he had "worked with Google" to make sure Android couldn't run VOIP. "We want to be open in a way that consumers can rely on," is the way Brodman put it to me.

Here's another example. Suppose you spend a lot of money, buying a phone, and two months afterwards, you notice that the battery systematically runs down after only a few hours of use. You're naturally upset with the device, so you take it back to the shop where you bought it from, asking for your money back. Or you spend hours on the phone to the support agents of the network operator trying to diagnose the problem. Either way, the profit made by the handset manufacturer or the network operator from selling you that phone has probably been more than wiped out by the cost of them attending to this usability issue.

But suppose it turns out that the cause of the battery running flat is a third party application you installed which, unknown to you, burns up processor cycles in background. Suppose it also turns out that you have been misled as to the origin of that application: when you installed it, you thought it said "This application has been supplied by your bank, Barclays", but you didn't notice that the certificate from the supplier said (eg) "Barclys" instead of "Barclays". You thought you could trust the website where you found this application, or the people who (apparently) emailed it to you, but it turns out you were wrong. However - and this is the point - you've even forgotten that you installed this app.

The second answer is that, even when we own items, we have social obligations as to what we do with them. We shouldn't play music too loudly in public places. We shouldn't leave garbage in public places. We shouldn't broadcast radio interference over networks. We shouldn't hog more of our fair share of pooled public resources. And, we shouldn't negatively impact the wireless networks (and the associated support infrastructure) on which our mobile phones live.

Both these answers are reasons in principle why users have to accept some limits on what they do with the mobile phones they have purchased.

The more interesting questions, however, are as follows:

To what extent actual do application signing programs meet these requirements - and to what extent do these programs instead support other, less praiseworthy goals?

Could variants of existing signing programs meet these requirements in better ways?

For example, consumers are already familiar with the idea that, when they disassemble the hardware of a device they have purchased, they typically invalidate the manufacturer warranty. (On my Psion Series 5mx, there's still a sticker in place, over a screw, that says "Warranty void if removed".) Would it be possible to educate handset users in a similar way that:

Their handsets start out in a situation of having a manufacturer warranty

However, if they install an unsigned application (or something similar), they are henceforth on their own, as regards support?

Accelerating out of molasses

2008-12-15T16:00:00.004Z

Michael Mace has posted a characteristically thoughtful article on his Mobile Opportunity blog:

Every time I think about Nokia and Symbian, I can't help picturing a man knee-deep in molasses, running as fast as he can. He's working up a sweat, thrashing and stumbling forward, and proudly points out that for someone knee-deep in molasses he's making really good time...

The posting is entitled "Nokia: Running in molasses". It arose from Mike reflecting on some of what he heard at the recent Symbian Partner Event (SPE) in San Francisco. The posting is well worth reading. I appreciate the issues that Mike raises. These issues are significant. But as you might expect, I have a somewhat different perspective on some of them.

Large software doesn't mean that software development has to go slow

Charles Davies, Symbian CTO, pointed out to us that Symbian OS has about 450,000 source files. That's right, half a million files. They're organized into 85 "packages"...

There are economies of scale as well as dis-economies of scale. The point of the careful division of the Symbian Platform software into packages is to enable each of the resulting packages to have greater autonomy - and, therefore, to progress more quickly.

There's one subtle point here. Many of the packages include teams from both Symbian and from S60. This applies to cases where the separation of functionality between the two formerly distinct companies resulted in sub-optimal development. Now that Nokia's acquisition of Symbian has completed, these boundaries can be intelligently re-designed.

Disruption, size, and organisational design

This brings me to a comment on the ideas of Clayton Christensen. Here's another extract from Mike Mace's article:

If the folks at Nokia really think they are well positioned to crush Apple, they need to go re-read The Innovator's Dilemma. Being big is not a benefit in a rapidly-changing market with emerging segments.

Agreed, being big is no guarantee of being able to respond well to changing market conditions. That's why I'm personally a big fan of Agile. Agile can help established companies (whether large or small) to launch and embrace disruptions. As Scott Anthony, one of Christensen's co-authors, has recently commented in his article "Can Established Companies Disrupt?":

The data suggests that it is increasingly common for an established company to launch disruptive innovations. More and more incumbents are learning how to embrace disruptive principles such as:
Put the customer, and their important, unsatisfied job-to-be-done at the center of the innovation equation
Embrace the power of simplicity, convenience, and affordability
Create organizational space for disruptive growth businesses
Consider innovation levers beyond features and functions
Become world class at testing, iterating and adjusting

As I said, being big can have its advantages as well as its disadvantages, so long as individual parts of the company have sufficient autonomy. The hard part is knowing when to seek closer ties, and when to seek looser ties. One of Christensen's later books had some very interesting advice on that score. I can't remember for sure whether that book was "The Innovator's Solution" or "Seeing What's Next". The advice was that where performance remains a critical differentiator, you should look for a tight coupling. Where performance is already "good enough", you should seek a loose coupling - with open APIs and a choice of alternative solutions.

As soon as I read these words, some time around 2003-2004, I had a gut reaction that, one day, the relevant teams in Symbian software engineering and S60 software engineering ought to be combined. It took a long time for that insight to be fulfilled. But now that it's happening, there's plenty of good reason to expect the resulting combined company to start accelerating its development.

Development in parallel with change

Back to Mike Mace, commenting on the SPE presentation by Charles Davies:

Davies talked about the substantial challenges involved in open sourcing a code base that large. He said it will take up to another two years before all of the code is released under the Eclipse license. In the meantime, a majority of the code on launch day of the foundation will be in a more restrictive license that requires registration and a payment of $1,500 for access. There's also a small amount of third party copyrighted code within Symbian, and the foundation is trying to either get the rights to that code, or figure a way to make it available in binary format.

Those are all typical problems when a project is moving to open source, and the upshot of them is that Symbian won't be able to get the full benefits of its move to open source until quite a while after the foundation is launched. What slows the process down is the amount of code that Symbian and Nokia have to move. I believe that Symbian OS is probably the largest software project ever taken from closed to open source. If you've ever dealt with moving code to open source, you'll know how staggeringly complex the legal reviews are. What Nokia and Symbian are doing is heroic, scary, and incredibly tedious. It's like, well, running in molasses.

I have four comments on this:

Even though the full transition to open source may take up to two years from the initial announcement of the foundation (that is, until mid 2010), there are plenty of other things happening in the meantime - with a series of interim releases that progressively convert more of the software from the community-source Symbian Foundation Licence to the open-source Ecliplse Public Licence;
There will be new technologies and new UI features in these interim releases;
The interim releases should already achieve at least some of the considerable benefits of both open source and community source; the first packages which will become available under the EPL are being chosen so that independent developers can do useful things with some of them (including contributing back working code enhancements);
The legal reviews may initially seem daunting, but with the help of modern code-scanning tools and with the advantage of "practice makes perfect", the process is likely to speed up considerably along the way.

Cool stuff in the lab

Mike ends the main part of his article as follows:

Nokia still has a lot of time to get it right. But do they really understand what needs to change? I can't tell, because all I usually get from them is monologues on how big their business is and how much cool stuff they have in the lab.

I accept that analysts must inevitably hedge their bets, regarding the extent of future success of the main mobile operating systems, until a period of proving over the next 12-24 months has shown what these operating systems can actually accomplish. I eagerly look forward to the day when more of the Symbian and Nokia roadmap of stunning new technology, new services, and new user experience attains greater visibility. When that happens, analysts are likely to come down off the hedge.

My own expectation is that the moves to integrate Symbian and Nokia, and to create the Symbian Foundation, will see a substantial speed up of innovation over that time period. But I'm not taking this for granted. After all, I'm well aware of the original subtitle of "The Innovator's Dilemma": "When new technologies cause great firms to fail".

Symbian Signed basics

2008-12-15T09:19:00.004Z

It's not just Symbian that runs into some criticism over the operation of application certification and signing programs. (See eg the discussion on "Rogue Android apps rack up hidden charges".)

This is an area where there ought ideally to be a pooling of insights and best practice across the mobile industry.

On the other hand, there are plenty of conflicting views about what's best:

"Make my network more secure? Yes, please!"
"Make it easier to develop and deploy applications? Yes, please!"

If we go back to basics, what are the underlying requirements that lead to the existence of application certification and signing schemes? I append a list of potential requirements. I'll welcome feedback on the importance of various items on this list.

Note: I realise that many requirements in this list are not addressed by the current schemes.

a. Avoiding users suffering from malware

To avoid situations where users suffer at the hands of malware. By "malware", I mean badly behaved software (whether the software is intentionally or unintentionally badly behaved).

Examples of users suffering from malware include:

Unexpectedly high telephone bills
Unexpectedly low battery life
Inability to make or receive phone calls
Leakage without approval of personal information such as contacts, agenda, or location
Corruption of personal information such as contacts, agenda, or location
Leaving garbage or clutter behind on the handset, when the software is uninstalled
Interference with the operation of other applications, or other impact to handset performance.

b. Establishing user confidence in applications

To give users confidence that the applications they install will add to the value of the handset rather than detract from it.

c. Reducing the prevalence of cracked software

To make it less likely that users will install “cracked” free versions of commercial applications written by third parties, thereby depriving these third parties of income.

d. Avoiding resource-intensive virus scanners

To avoid mobile phones ending up needing to run the same kind of resource-intensive virus scanners that are common (and widely unloved) on PCs.

e. Avoiding networks suffering from malware

To avoid situations where network operators suffer at the hands of malware or unrestricted add-on applications. Examples of network operators suffering from such software include:

Having to allocate support personnel for users who encounter malware on their handsets
The network being overwhelmed as a result of data-intensive applications
Reprogrammed cellular data stacks behaving in ways that threaten the integrity of the wireless network and thereby invalidate the FCC (or similar) approval of the handset
DRM copy protected material, provided or distributed by the network operator, being accessed or copied by third party software in ways that violate the terms of the DRM licence
Revenue opportunities for network operators being lost due to alternative lower-cost third party applications being available.

f. Keeping networks open

To prevent network operators from imposing a blanket rule against all third party applications, which would in turn:

Limit the innovation opportunities for third party developers
Limit the appearance of genuinely useful third party applications.

g. Avoiding fragmentation of signing schemes

To avoid network operators from all implementing their own application certification and approval schemes, thereby significantly multiplying the effort required by third party developers to make their applications widely available; far better, therefore, for the Symbian world to agree on a single certification and approval mechanism, namely Symbian Signed.

The starfish and the spider

2008-12-14T23:43:00.006Z

In my quest to understand the full potential of open and collaborative methods of working, I recently found myself re-reading "The Starfish and the Spider: The unstoppable power of leaderless organisations" by Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom.

I found this book to be utterly engrossing. I expect that its metaphor of the starfish vs. the spider will increasingly enter common parlance - the same way as "Tipping Point" did. In short:

A starfish has a fully de-centralised nervous system, and can survive and prosper when it undergoes an apparent "head-on" attack;
A spider has a CEO and a corporate headquarters, without which it cannot function.

The examples in the book show why there's a great deal at stake behind this contrast: issues of commercial revenues, the rise and fall of businesses, the operation of the Internet, and the rise and fall of change movements within society - where the change movements include such humdingers as Slave Emancipation, Female Equality, Animal Liberation, and Al Qaeda.

There are many stories running through the book, chosen both from history and from contemporary events. The stories are frequently picked up again from chapter to chapter, with key additional insights being drawn out. I found some of the stories to be familiar, but others were not. In all cases, the starfish/spider framework cast new light.

The book contains many implications for the question of how best to inspire and guide an open source ecosystem. Each chapter brought an important additional point to the analysis. For example:

Factors allowing de-centralised organisations to flourish;
The importance of self-organising "circles";
The significance of so-called "catalyst" personalities;
How successful de-centralised organisations often piggy-back pre-existing networks;
How centralised organisations can go about combatting de-centralised opponents;
Issues about combining aspects of both approaches.

Regarding hybrid approaches: the book argues that smart de-centralisation moves by both GE and Toyota are responsible for significant commercial successes in these companies. EBay is another example of a hybrid. Managing an open source community surely also falls into this category.

The book spoke personally to me on another level. As it explains, starfish organisations depend upon so-called "catalyst" figures, who may lack formal authority, and who are prepared to move into the background without clinging to power:

Catalysts enable major reactions to take place, that would otherwise remain dormant;
They trigger the deployments of huge resources from the environment;
They make things happen, not by direct power, but by force of influence and inspiration.

There's a big difference between catalysts and CEOs. Think "Mary Poppins" rather than "Maria from Sound of Music". That gave me a handy new way of thinking about my own role in organisations. (I'm like Mary Poppins, rather than Maria! I tend to move on from the departments that I build up, rather than remaining in place.)

Discovering the adaptive unconscious

2008-12-06T15:19:00.004Z

Like most people, I sometimes behave in ways that surprise and disappoint either myself or other people who are observing me. I'm occasionally dimly aware of strong under-currents of passion, that seem to have a life of their own. Of course I wonder to mysef, what's going on?

The anicent Greek Delphic injunction is "know thyself". Modern writers use the phrase "Emotional intelligence" to cover some of the same ground. As these modern writers point out, people who are manifestly unaware of their own emotions are unlikely to be promoted to positions of major responsibility within modern corporations or organisations.

Timothy Wilson's fascinating 2002 book "Strangers to ourselves - discovering the adaptive unconscious" takes a slightly different tack. Reading this book recently, I quickly warmed to its theme that - as implied in its title - our attempts to perceive and understand our own motivations can be a lot more difficult or counter-productive than we expect.

Through many examples, the book makes a convincing case that, in addition to our conscious mind, we have a powerful, thoughtful, intelligent, feelingful "adaptive unconscious" that frequently operates outside the knowledge of the conscious mind. It can be just as inaccessible to introspection by the conscious mind as is the operation of our digestive system. Because it is inaccessible, we can often be misled about why we do things (subsequently "fabricating" reasons to explain our behaviour, without realising that we are deceiving ourselves in the process). We can also be seriously misled about what we're feeling, and about what will make us happy.

This adaptive unconscious can often be at odds with our conscious mind:

Experiments described in the book show how people, who in their conscious mind are sincerely unprejudiced against (eg) people of other races, can harbour latent prejudices that result in significant discrimation against certain job applicants.
These unnoticed prejudices can even have fatal effects - if, for example, policemen have to react super-quickly to a potentially life-threatening situation, and mistakenly infer that (say) a black person is reaching for a gun in his pocket.

Of course, psychologists such as Freud have written widely on this general topic already. But the great merit of this book is that it provides a very balanced and thoughtful review of experimentation and analysis that has taken place throughout the 20th century into the unconscious mind. It puts Freud's ideas into a fuller context. For example, it shows the limitations of the idea that it is "repression" that keeps the activities of the unconscious mind hidden from conscious reflection. Repression is indeed one factor, but it's by no means the only one.

This book contains lots of thought-provoking examples about people's attempts to understand the well-springs of what motivates them. Here's one, from near the end of the book:

"When Sarah met Peter at a party, she did not think she liked him very much; in many ways he was not her type. However, afterwards, she found herself thinking about him a lot, and when Peter telephoned and asked her out for a date, she said yes. Now that she has agreed to the date, she discovers that she likes him more than she knew. This looks like an example of self-perception as self-revelation, because Sarah uses her behaviour to bring to light a prior feeling of which she was unaware, until she agreed to go our with Peter...

"But another possibility is that Sarah really did not like Peter at all when she first met him. She felt obligated to go out with him because he is the son of her mother's best friend, and her mother thought they would be a good match. Sarah does not fully realise this is the reason she said yes, and she mistakenly thinks. 'Hm, I guess I like Peter more than I thought I did, if I agreed to go out with him.' This would be an example of self-fabrication: Sarah misses the real reason for her behaviour...

"The difference between self-revelation and self-fabrication is crucial from the point of view of gaining self-knowledge. Inferring our internal states from our behaviour can be a good strategy if it reveals feelings of which we were previously unaware. It is not such a good strategy if it results in the fabrication of new feelings."

Another issue with gaining greater self-knowledge is that it can damage our self-confidence. The author argues that it can sometimes be beneficial to us to have a slightly inflated view about our talents. That way, we gain the energy to go about difficult tasks. (However, if the discrepancy between our own view and the reality is too great, that's another matter.)

The book concludes by urging that we follow another piece of advice from ancient times. He quotes Aristotle approvingly: "We acquire [virtues] by first having put them into action... we become just by the practice of just actions, self-controlling by exercising self-control, and courageous by performing acts of courage". In short, "do good, to be good".

He goes on to say, "If we are dissatisfied with some aspect of our lives, one of the best approaches is to act more like the person we want to be, rather than sitting around analyzing ourselves."

The book has struck a real chord with me, but it leaves many questions in my mind. Next on my reading list on this same general field is "The Happiness Hypothesis: finding modern truth in ancient wisdom" by Jonathan Haidt.

All Carbide C++ editions are now free of charge

2008-12-05T14:35:00.003Z

One of the persistent "niggle points" with Symbian OS C++ development has been that developers had to pay significant amounts of money to purchase those features of the Carbide integrated developer environment (IDE) which provided some highly desired functionality such as on-target debugging.

So there's great news today: Carbide v2 now has ZERO licence fee for all editions:

Carbide.c++ 2.0 is now available with support for the latest technologies based on Symbian OS, such as S60 5th Edition and the Qt platform, and it offers significant improvements throughout.
In addition to the technical improvements, Carbide.c++ 2.0 is now available free of charge.

This has already been picked up by various bloggers, including Lucian Tomuta - Carbide.c++ - new and free (yes, like in "free beer") - and Simon Judge - Carbide.c++ 2.0 Free of Charge.

The cost reduction isn't the only piece of good news about this new version. As the Carbide product pages emphasise:

Improvements throughout Carbide.c++ have been designed to make developing Symbian OS C/C++ applications quicker and easier. These improvements include speed and accuracy in code completion, faster response in the Performance Investigator reporting tools, and new connection management for on-device debugging.

This news deserves to run and run.

Accelerating the transformation

2008-12-03T09:59:00.003Z

As noted by Tom Krazit of CNET News, there was lots more news from yesterday's Nokia World event than merely the buzz about the newly announced highly attractive N97. It was also announced that the acquisition of Symbian by Nokia has completed.

One practical impact of the completion of this deal is that preparation can now accelerate - for the forthcoming Symbian Foundation, and for the deep integration of the Symbian and S60 software engineering teams.

As Tom Krazit notes:

After entertaining the world press in Barcelona during the early part of this week, Symbian and Nokia executives will be in San Francisco later this week to discuss their plans for mobile computing and open source, and we'll have reports from the Symbian Partner Event on Thursday.

Personally, I'm about to board my flight to San Francisco for this event. I'm particularly looking forward to open and insightful discussion at this event - including the panel discussion on "Succeeding in the US: the key factors", where I'll be asking for comments and questions from the audience.

Just as I expect very significant amounts of wireless innovation to come from North America in the near future, I also expect very significant amounts to come, perhaps more in the future, from China. Later this month I'll be speaking at an event in Beijing, about "Symbian Platform Development". I'm looking forward to learning a lot - since I plan on listening as well as speaking :-)

In case anyone would like to try to meet up while I'm in San Francisco or in Beijing, please get in touch.

Footnote: There's still time to register for the Partner Event.

Why can't we all just get along?

2008-11-28T20:58:00.005Z

Blogger Tomaž Štolfa asks me, in a comment to one of my previous posts,

I am also wondering why you are not trying to explore a non-os specific scenario?

Developers and service designers do not want to be bound to a single platform when developing a service for the masses. So it would make much more sense to se a bright future with cross-platform standards set by an independent party (W3C?).

If the industry will not agree on standards quickly enough Adobe (or some other company) will provide their own.

It's a good question. I'm actually a huge fan of multi-platform standards. Here's just a few of many examples:

Symbian included an implementation of Java way back in v4 of Symbian OS (except that the OS was called "EPOC Release 4" at the time);
Symbian was a founder member of the Open Mobile Alliance - and I personally served twice on the OMA Board of Directors;
I have high hopes for initiatives such as OMTP's BONDI that is seeking to extend the usefulness of web methods on mobile devices.

Another example of a programming method that can be applied on several different mobile operating systems is Microsoft's .NET compact framework. Take a look at this recent Microsoft TechEd video in which Andy Wigley of Appa Mundi interviews Mike Welham, CTO of Red Five Labs, about the Red Five Labs Net60 solution that allows compact framework applications to run, not only on Windows Mobile, but also on S60 devices.

There's no doubt in my mind that, over time, some of these intermediate platforms will become more and more powerful - and more and more useful. The industry will see increasing benefits from agreeing and championing fit-for-purpose standards for application environments.

But there's a catch. The catch applies, not to the domain of add-on after market solutions, but to the domain of device creation.

Lots of the software involved in device creation cannot be written in these intermediate platforms. Instead, native programming is required - and involves exposure to the underlying operating system. That's when the inconsistencies at the level of native operating systems become more significant:

Differences between clearly different operating systems (eg Linux vs. Windows Mobile vs. Symbian OS);
Differences between different headline versions of the same operating system (eg Symbian OS v8 vs. Symbian OS v9);
Differences between different flavours of the same operating system, evolved by different customers (eg Symbian OS v7.0 vs. Symbian OS v7.0s);
Differences between different customisations of the same operating system, etc, etc.

(Note: I've used Symbian OS for most of these examples, but it's no secret that the Mobile Linux world has considerably more internal fragmentation than Symbian. The integration delays in that world are at least as bad.)

From my own experience, I've seen many device creation projects very significantly delayed as a result of software developers encountering nasty subtle differences between the native operating systems on different devices. Product quality suffered as a result of these project schedule slips. The first loser was the customer, on encountering defects or a poor user experience. The second loser was the phone manufacturer.

This is a vexed problem that cannot be solved simply by developing better multi-os standard programming environments. Instead, I see the following as needed:

Improved software development tools, that alert systems integrators more quickly to the likely causes of unexpected instability or poor performance on phones (including those problems which have their roots in unexpected differences in system behaviour); along this line, Symbian has recently seen improvements in our own projects from uses of the visual tools included in the Symbian Analysis Workbench;
A restructuring of the code that runs on the device in order to allow more of that code to be written in standard managed code environments - Symbian's new Freeview architecture for networking IP is one step in this direction;
Where possible, APIs used by aspects of the different native operating systems should become more and more similar - for example, I like to imagine that, one day, the same device driver will be able to run on more than one native operating system
And, to be frank, we need fewer native operating systems; this is a problem that will be solved over the next couple of years as the industry gains more confidence in the overall goodness of a small number of the many existing mobile operating systems.

The question of technical fragmentation is, of course, only one cause of needless extra effort having to be exerted within the mobile industry. Another big cause is that different players in the value chain are constantly facing temptation to try to grab elements of value from adjacent players. Hence, for example, the constant tension between network operators and phone manufacturers.

Some elements of this tension are healthy. But, just as for the question of technical fragmentation, my judgement is that the balance is considerably too far over to the "compete" side of the spectrum rather than the "cooperate" side.

That's the topic I was discussing a few months back with Adam Shaw, one of the conference producers from Informa, who was seeking ideas for panels for the "MAPOS '08" event that will be taking place 9-10 December in London. Out of this conversation, Adam came up with the provocative panel title, "Can’t We All Just Get Along? Cooperation between operators and suppliers". Here's hoping for a constructive dialog!

Problems with panels

2008-11-23T18:56:00.011Z

As an audience member, I've been at the receiving end of some less-than-stellar panel discussions at conferences in the last few months. On these occasions, even though there's good reason to think that the individuals on the panels are often very interesting in their own right, somehow the "talking heads" format of a panel can result in low energy and low interest. The panellists make dull statements in response to generic questions and ... interest seeps away.

On the other hand, I've also recently seen some outstandingly good panels, where the assembled participants bring real collective insight, and the audience pulse keeps beating. Here are two examples:

During the Web 2.0 Summit three weeks ago (where there also happened to be quite a lot of dull panels), the panel on "The Web And Politics" zipped along with real passion: panel chair John Heilemann catalysed a blizzard of compelling remarks and insightful interplay from Arianna Huffington, Gavin Newsom (mayor of San Francisco), and Joe Trippi;
The following week, at the venerable RSA in London, a panel consisting of four eminent economists and one thought-provoking journalist tackled the subject "The Age of Austerity: Keynes and the Crisis", ably chaired by RSA Chief Executive, Matthew Taylor. The panel gave each member 10 minutes in turn to make an opening statement: Lord Robert Skidelsky, Martin Wolf, Dr Andrew Lilico, Lord Desai, and John Naish. Befitting the pedigree of the speakers, it was a much more cerebral panel, but still full of feist. There followed another 30 of animated question-and-answer from the audience. I found it fascinating - and it seemed (from the hearty applause at the end) that I wasn't alone in this judgement.

The format of this fine RSA panel was in the back of my mind as I prepared, last Monday, to take part in a panel myself: "What's so smart about Smartphone Operating Systems", at the Future of Mobile event in London. I shared the stage with some illustrious industry colleages: Olivier Bartholot of Purple Labs, Andy Bush of the LiMo Foundation, Rich Miner of Android, James McCarthy of Microsoft, and the panel chair, Simon Rockman of Sony Ericsson. I had high hopes of the panel generating and conveying some useful new insights for the audience.

Alas, for at least some members of the audience, this panel fell into the "less-than-stellar" category mentioned above, rather than the better examples:

Tomaž Štolfa, writing in his blog "Funky Karaoke", rated this panel as just 1 out of 5, with the damning comment "a bunch of mobile OS guys, talking about the wrong problems. Where are cross platform standards?!?"; Tomaž gave every other panel or speaker a rating of at least 3 out of 5;
Adam Cohen-Rose, in his blog "Expanding horizons", summed up the panel as follows: "This was a rather boring panel discussion: despite Simon’s best attempts to make the panellists squirm, they stayed very tame and non-committal. The best bits was the thinly veiled spatting between Microsoft and Google — but again, this was nothing new…";
The Twitter back-channel for the event ("#FOM") had remarks disparaging this panel as "suits" and "monologue" and "big boys".

It's true that I can find other links or tweets that were more complimentary about this panel - but none of these comments pick this panel out as being one of the highlights of the day.

As someone who takes communication very seriously, I have to ask myself, "what went wrong?" - and, even more pertinently, "what should I do differently, for future panels?".

I toyed for a while with the idea that over-usage of Twitter by some audience members diminishes the ability of these audience members to concentrate sufficiently and to pick out what's actually genuinely interesting in what's being said. This is akin to Nicholas Carr's argument that "Google is making us stupid":

"Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle..."

After all, I do think that I said something interesting when it was my turn to speak - see the script I prepared in advance. But after more reflection, I gave up on the idea of excusing the panel's poor rating by that kind of self-serving argument (which blames the audience rather than panellists). That was after I remembered my own experience as being on the receiving end of lots of uninspiring panels - as I mentioned earlier. Further, I remembered that, when these panels started to become boring, my own attention would wander ... so I would miss anything more interesting that was said later on.

So on reflection, here are my conclusions, for avoiding similar problems with future panels:

Pre-prepared remarks are fine. There's nothing wrong in itself with having something prepared to say, that takes several minutes to say it. These opening comments can and should provide better context for the Q&A part of the panel that follows;
However, high energy is vital; especially with an audience where people might get distracted, I ought to be sure that I speak with passion, as well as with intellectual rigour; this may be hard when we're all sitting down (that's why sofa panels are probably the worst of all), but it's not impossible;
The first requirement is actually to be sure the audience is motivated to listen to the discussion - the panel participants need to ensure that the audience recognise the topic as sufficiently relevant. On reflection, our "mobile operating systems" panel would have been better placed later on in the agenda for the day, rather than right at the beginning. That would have allowed us to create bridges between problems identified in earlier sessions, and the solutions we wanted to talk about;
"Less is more" can apply to interventions in panels as well as to product specs (and to blogs...); instead of trying to convey so much material in my opening remarks, I should have prioritised at most two or three soundbites, and looked to cover the others during later discussion.

These are my thoughts for when I participate as a panellist on someone else's panel. When I am a chair (as I'll be at the Symbian Partner Event next month in San Francisco) I'll have different lessons to bear in mind!

Emulating the human brain

2008-11-21T19:00:00.003Z

Artificial Intelligence (AI) already does a lot to help me in my life:

The real-time route calculation (and re-calculation) capabilities of my TomTom satnav system are extremely handy;
The automated language translation functionality inside Google web-search, whilst far from perfect, often allows me to understand at least the gist of webpages written in languages other than English;
The intelligent recommendation engine of Amazon frequently brings books to my attention that I am glad to investigate further.

On the other hand, the field of general AI has failed to progress as quickly as some of its supporters over the years had hoped. The Wikipedia article on the History of AI lists some striking examples of significant over-optimism among leading AI researchers:

1958, H. A. Simon and Allen Newell: "within ten years a digital computer will be the world's chess champion" and "within ten years a digital computer will discover and prove an important new mathematical theorem."
1965, H. A. Simon: "machines will be capable, within twenty years, of doing any work a man can do."
1967, Marvin Minsky: "Within a generation ... the problem of creating 'artificial intelligence' will substantially be solved."
1970, Marvin Minsky (in Life Magazine): "In from three to eight years we will have a machine with the general intelligence of an average human being."

Prospects for fast progress with general AI remain controversial. As we gather more and more silicon power into smartphones and other computers, will this mean these devices become more and more intelligent? Or will they simply be fast rather than generally intelligent?

In this context, one interesting line of analysis is to consider a separate but related question: to what extent will it be possible to create a silicon emulation of the brain itself (rather than to focus on algorithms for intelligence)?

My friend Anders Sandberg, Neuroethics researcher at the Future of Humanity Institute, Oxford University, will be addressing this question in a presentation tomorrow afternoon (Saturday 22nd November) in Central London. The presentation is entitled "Emulating brains: silicon dreams or the next big thing?"

Anders describes his talk as follows:

The idea of creating a faithful copy of a human brain has been a popular philosophical thought experiment and science fiction plot for decades. How close are we to actually doing it, how could it be done, and what would the consequences be? This talk will trace trends in computing, neuroscience, lab automaton and microscopy to show how whole brain emulation could become feasible in the mid term future.

The talk is organised by the UKTA. Last weekend, at the Convergence08 "unconference" in Mountain View, California, Anders gave an earlier version of the same talk. George Dvorsky blogged the result:

Convergence08: Anders Sandberg on Whole Brain Emulation
The term 'whole brain emulation' sounds more scientific than it does science fiction like, which may bode well for its credibility as a genuine academic discipline and area for inquiry.
Sandberg presented his whole brain emulation roadmap which had a flowchart like quality to it -- which he quipped must be scientific because it was filled with arrows.
Simulating memory could be very complex, possibly involving chemical transference in cells or drilling right down to the molecular level. We may even have to go down to the quantum level, but no neuroscientist that Anders knows takes that possibility seriously...

As Anders himself told me afterwards,

...interest was high but time limited - I got a lot of useful feedback and ideas for making the presentation better.

I'm expecting a fascinating discussion.

New mobile OSes mean development nightmares

2008-11-19T23:30:00.005Z

Over on TechRadar, Dan Grabham has commented on one of the themes from Monday's Future of Mobile event in the Great Hall in High Street Kensington, London:

The increase in mobile platforms caused by the advent of the Apple iPhone and Google's Android are posing greater challenges for those who develop for mobile. That was one of the main underlying themes of this week's Future of Mobile conference in London.

Tom Hume, Managing Director of developer Future Platforms, picked up on this theme, saying that from a development point of view things were more fragmented. "It's clear that it's an issue for the industry. I think it's actually got worse in the last year or so."

Indeed, many of the panellists representing the major OS vendors said that they expected some kind of consolidation over the coming years as completion in the mobile market becomes ever fiercer.

The theme of collaboration vs. competition was one that I covered in my own opening remarks on this panel. Before the conference, the panel chairman, Simon Rockman of Sony Ericsson, had asked the panellists to prepare a five minute intro. I'll end this posting with a copy of what I prepared.

Before that, however, I have another comment on the event. One thing that struck me was the candid comments from many of the participants about the dreadful user experience that mobile phones deliver. So the mobile industry has no grounds for feeling pleased with itself! This was particularly emphasised during the rapid-fire "bloggers 6x6 panel", which you can read more about from Helen Keegan's posting - provocatively entitled "There is no future of mobile". By the way, Helen was one of the more restrained of that panel!

So, back to my own remarks - where I intended to emphasise that, indeed, we face hard problems within our industry, and need new solutions:

This conference is called the Future of Mobile – not the Present Day of Mobile – so what I want to talk about is developments in mobile operating systems that will allow the mobile devices and mobile services of, say, 5 years time – 2013 – to live up to their full potential.

I believe that the mobile phones of 2013 will make even the most wonderful phones of today look, in comparison, jaded, weak, slow, and clunky. It’s my expectation that the phones used at that time, not just by technology enthusiasts and early adopters, but also by mainstream consumers, will be very considerably more powerful, more functional, more enchanting, more useful, more valuable, and more captivating than today’s smartphones.

To get there is going to require a huge amount of sophisticated and powerful software to be developed. That’s an enormous task. To get there, I offer you three contrasts.

The first contrast is between cooperation and competition.

The press often tries to portray some kind of monster, dramatic battle of mobile operating systems. In this battle, the people sitting around this table are fierce competitors. It’s the kind of thing that might sell newspapers. But rather than competition, I’m more interested in collaboration. The problems that have to be solved, to create the best possible mobile phone experiences of the next few years, will require cooperation between the people in the companies and organisations represented around this table – as well as with people in those companies and organisations that don’t have seats here at this moment, but which also play in our field. Instead of all of us working at odds with each other, spreading our energies thinly, creating incomplete semi-satisfactory solutions that are at odds with each, it would be far better for us to pool more of our energies and ideas.

I’m not saying that all competition should be stopped – far from it. An element of competition is vital, to prevent a market from becoming stale. But we’ve got too much of it just now. We’ve got too many operating systems that are competing with each other, and we’ve got different companies throughout the value chain competing with each other too strongly.

Where the industry needs to reach is around 3 or 4 major mobile operating systems – whereas today the number is somewhere closer to 20 – or closer to 200, if you count all the variants and value-chain complications. It’s a fragmentation nightmare, and a huge waste of effort.

As the industry consolidates over the next few years, I have no doubt that Symbian OS will be one of the small number of winning platforms. That brings me to my second contrast – the contrast between old and new – between past successes and future successes.

Last year, Symbian was the third most profitable software company in the UK. We earned licensing revenues of over 300 million dollars. We’ve been generating substantial cash for our owners. We’re in that situation because of having already shipped one quarter of a billion mobile phones running our software. There are at present some 159 different phone models, from 7 manufacturers, shipping on over 250 major operator networks worldwide. That’s our past success. It grows out of technology that’s been under development for 14 years, with parts of the design dating back 20 years.

But of course, past success is no guarantee of future success. I sometimes hear it said that Symbian OS is old, and therefore unsuited to the future. My reply is that many parts of Symbian OS are new. We keep on substantially improving it and refactoring it.

For example, we introduced a new kernel with enhanced real-time capabilities in version 8.1b. We introduced a substantial new platform security architecture in v9.0. More recently, there’s a new database architecture, a new Bluetooth implementation, and new architectures for IP networking and multi-surface graphics. We’re also on the point of releasing an important new library of so-called “high level” programming interfaces, to simplify developers’ experience with parts of the Symbian OS structure that sometimes pose difficulty – like text descriptors, active objects, and two-phase object construction and cleanup. So there’s plenty of innovation.

The really big news is that the pace of innovation is about to increase markedly – for three reasons, all tied up with the forthcoming creation of the Symbian Foundation:

The first reason is a deeper and more effective collaboration between the engineering teams in Symbian and S60. This change is happening because of the acquisition of Symbian by Nokia. By working together more closely, innovations will reach the market more quickly.
The second reason is because of a unification of UI systems in the Symbian space. Before, there were three UI systems – MOAP in Japan, UIQ, and S60. Now, given the increased flexibility of the latest S60 versions, the whole Symbian ecosystem will standardise on S60.
The third reason is because of the transition of the Symbian platform – consisting of Symbian OS together with the S60 UI framework and applications – into open source. By adopting the best principles of open source, Symbian expects to attract many more developers than before to participate in reviewing and improving and creating new Symbian platform code. So there will be more innovation than before.

This brings me to the third of the three contrasts: openness vs. maturity.

Uniquely, the Symbian platform has a stable, well-tested, battle-hardened software base and software discipline, that copes well with the hard, hard task of large-scale software integration, handling input from many diverse and powerful customers.

Because of that, we’ll be able to cope with the flood of innovation that open source will send our way. That flood will lead to great progress for us, whereas for some other software systems, it will probably lead to chaos and fragmentation.

In summary, I see the Symbian platform as being not just one of several winners in the mobile operating system space, but actually the leading winner – and being the most widely used software platform on the planet, shipping in literally billions of great mobile devices. We’ll get there, because we’ll be at the heart of a huge community of impassioned and creative developers – the most vibrant developer ecosystem on the planet. Although the first ten years of Symbian’s history has seen many successes, the next ten years will be dramatically better.

Footnote: For other coverage of this event, see eg Tom Hume, Andrew Grill, Vero Pepperrell, Jemima Kiss, Dale Zak, and a very interesting Twitter channel (note to self: it's time for me to stop resisting Twitter...)

Schrodinger's Rabbits

2008-11-16T21:22:00.008Z

Long before I ever heard of smartphones, or the C++ programming language, or even C, I was intrigued by quantum mechanics. In November 1979, as a sophomore undergraduate, I was fascinated to read an article in the latest edition of the Scientific American: "The Quantum Theory and Reality", written by French theoretical physicist Bernard d'Espagnat. As recorded in the Wikipedia article on d'Espagnat, this article contains the stunning quote,

The doctrine that the world is made up of objects whose existence is independent of human consciousness turns out to be in conflict with quantum mechanics and with facts established by experiment.

What particularly struck me was the claim that "facts established by experiment" were at odds with common-sense ideas about reality. These experiments involved the now-famous "correlation at a distance" experiments inspired by a paper originally authored in 1935 by Albert Einstein and two co-workers: Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen. The initials of the authors - EPR - became synonymous with these experiments. Particularly when viewed through the analysis of John Bell, who devised some surprisingly counter-intuitive inequalities applicable to correlations between results in EPR experiments, these experiments seemed to defy all explanation.

Early in 1980, Professor Mary Hesse of the History and Philosophy of Science department at Cambridge, gave one of the then-frequent lunchtime presentations on mathematical topics, to students (like me) sufficiently interested in such topics to give up their free time in pursuit of greater understanding of mathematics. Prof Hesse chose the philosophical problems of quantum mechanics as her subject for the meeting. I listened carefully, to find out if there were any good rebuttals to the claims made by d'Espagnat. My conclusion was that the whole area was decidedly weird. As months passed, I also asked various maths lecturers about this - but their advice was generally not to think about these questions!

Several years later, I chose Philosophy of Science as the area for my postgraduate studies, with a particular focus on trying to make sense of quantum mechanics. During that time, I even made my first trip to Finland - not to visit Nokia (since I had never heard of them at that time), but to attend a conference in 1985 in pictureseque Joensuu. It was a conference to commemorate 50 years since the publication of the EPR paper. Nathan Rosen, then aged 76, was the guest of honour.

The more I studied the philosophical problems of quantum mechanics, the more I came to respect what initially seemed to be the weirdest and most unlikely solution of all. This is the so-called "Many worlds" interpretation (though, as it turns out, the name is misleading):

Originally proposed by Hugh Everett III, in 1957;
It refuses to introduce some kind of demarcation between the quantum realm, where superposition ("wavelike behaviour") is allowed, and the classical realm, where things need to be more definite;
Instead, it takes very seriously the idea that macroscopically large objects also spread out over a range of diverse states - in a so-called quantum superposition;
This includes the shocking and apparently absurd notion that even we humans end up (all the time) in a superposition of different states;
For example, although I subjectively feel, as I type these words now, that this is the unique instance of myself, there are countless other instances of myself, spread out in a wider multiverse, all having diverged from this particular instance as a result of cascading quantum interactions;
In some of these other instances, I am employed by companies other than Symbian (my employer for the last ten years in this instance); in yet other instances, Symbian was never created, or I remained in academia instead of joining the world of business, or human civilisation was destroyed when the Cuban missile crisis went wrong, or the values of physical constants were not capable of giving rise to complex mater - and so on.

If objections to this idea come to your mind, it's very likely that the same objections came to my mind during the years I pursued my postgraduate studies. For example, to the objection "why don't we feel ourselves splitting", comes the reply given by Hugh Everett himself:

Well, Copernicus made the analysis that the Earth was moving around the sun, undoing thousands of years of belief that the sun was going around the Earth, and people asked him, If the Earth is moving around the sun, then why don't I feel the Earth move?

In time, I deprioritised my postgraduate studies, to take a series of jobs, first as a part-time university supervisor, then as a maths tutor at a sixth form college, and then (from 1988) as a software engineer. But occasionally, I come across a link that re-awakens my fascination with quantum theory and the many worlds interpretation. Recently, there have been quite a lot of these links:

The son of Hugh Everett is a reasonably famous singer and guitarist in his own right - Mark Everett, also sometimes known as "Mr E" or just "E";
Mark Everett has just released an autobiography "Things the Grandchildren Should Know" which addresses his growing awareness of his father's remarkable thinking (Hugh Everett died, of a heart attack, in 1982, when Mark was just 19);
There has also been a PBS documentary on this same topic, "Parallel worlds, parallel lives", which has generated considerable media interest (such as this piece in the Scientific American);
Coincidentally, various conferences have taken place in the last year or so, commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of Everett's original thesis;
For example, several people I remember from my own postgraduate studies days took part in a conference "Everett at 50" at Oxford.

With this growing abundance of material about Everett's ideas, I'd like to highlight what I believe to be among the best book on the subject. It's "Schrodinger's Rabbits: The Many Worlds of Quantum", written by Colin Bruce. It deserves to be a lot better known:

The author has a pleasant writing style, mixing in detective story writing and references to science fiction stories, with analysis of philosophical ideas;
There's no complex maths to surmount - though the reader will have to think carefully, going through various passages (the effort is worth it!);
Unlike many books which seem to repeat the same few themes spread over many chapters, each chapter in this book introduces important new concepts - which is another reason why it's rewarding to read it;
The book highlights some significant difficulties faced by the many worlds theories, but still (in my view) makes it clear that these theories are more likely to be true than false.

Alternatively, for a book that is even wider in its scope (though less convincing in some of its arguments), try "The Fabric of Reality: The Science of Parallel Universes and Its Implications" by David Deutsch - who in addition to breaking new ground in thinking about the philosophy of quantum mechanics, also happens to be a pioneer of the theory of quantum computing.

Finally, for a book that generally leaves readers in no doubt that any "common sense" interpretation of quantum mechanics fails, take a look at the stunningly well-written "Quantum Reality: Beyond the New Physics" by Nick Herbert.

Symbian Partner Event, San Francisco, 4th Dec

2008-11-11T13:59:00.006Z

Historically, admission to Symbian Partner Events has been restricted to signed-up members of Symbian's Partner Network. However, for our event at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco on Thursday 4th December, we're going to open up participation.

Some parts of the day will still be restricted to signed partners. However, most of the proceedings on the day will be open to a wider group of attendees - such as mobile developers, journalists, the open source community, and representatives of companies that may be considering partnering with Symbian.

Space will be limited so anyone thinking of attending should register their interest as soon as possible via the event website.

Full details of speakers, panellists, and other sessions at the event will be published on the event website shortly. In the meantime, here are a few highlights:

Keynote presentations from a leading member of the open source community, senior representatives from network operators and phone manufacturers, Symbian executives, and the management of the Symbian Foundation;
"Fast Forward" technology seminars
An open roundtable discussion on "Succeeding in the US: the key factors"
"Symbian Foundation Platform Architecture Overview"
"Symbian Foundation Q&A".

There will also be an exhibition of partner products and solutions, as well as ample opportunity to network with movers-and-shakers of the global mobile industry.

Footnote: Here's the LinkedIn entry for this event.

Mobile 2.0 keynote

2008-11-03T23:32:00.007Z

Earlier today, I had the privilege to deliver the opening keynote at the Mobile 2.0 event in San Francisco. This posting consists of a copy of the remarks I prepared.

The view from 2013

My topic is Open Source, as a key catalyst for Mobile Innovation 2.0.

Let’s start by fast forwarding five years into the future. Imagine that we are gathered for the 2013 “Mobile 2.0” conference – though the name may have changed by that time, perhaps to Mobile 3.0 or even Mobile 4.0 – and perhaps the conference will be taking place virtually, with much less physical transportation involved.

Five year into the future, we may look back at the wonder devices of today, 2008: the apparently all-conquering iPhone, the Android G1, the Nokia E71, the latest and greatest phones from RIM, Windows Mobile, and so on: all marvellous devices, in their own ways. From the vantage point of 2013, I expect that our thoughts about these devices will be: “How quaint! How clunky! How slow! How did we put up with all the annoyances and limitations of these devices?”

This has happened before. When the first Symbian OS smartphones reached the market in 2002 – the Nokia 7650, and the Sony Ericsson P800 – they received rave reviews in many parts of the world. These Symbian smartphones were celebrated at the time as breakthrough devices with hitherto unheard of capabilities, providing great user experiences. It is only in retrospect that expectations changed and we came to see these early devices as quaint, clunky, and slow. It will be the same with today’s wonder phones.

Super smart phones

That’s because the devices of five years time will (all being well) be so much more capable, so much slicker, so much more usable, and so much more enchanting than today’s devices. If today’s devices are smart phones, the devices of 2013 will be super smart phones.

These devices will be performing all kinds of intelligent analysis of data they are receiving through their sensors: their location and movement sensors, their eyes – that is, their cameras – and their ears – that is, their always-on recording devices.

They’ll also have enormous amounts of memory – both on-board and on-network. Based on what they’re sensing, and on what they know, and on their AI (artificial intelligence) algorithms, they’ll be guiding us and informing us about all the things that are important to us. They’ll become like our trusted best friends, in effect whispering insight into our ears.

We can think of these devices as like our neo neo-cortex. Just as primates and especially humans have benefited from the development of the neo-cortex, as the newest part of our brains in evolutionary terms, so will users of super smartphones benefit from the enhanced memory, calculation powers, and social networking capabilities of this connected neo neo-cortex.

In simple terms, these devices can be seen as adding (say) 20 points to our IQs – perhaps more. If today’s smartphones can make their users smarter, the super smartphones of 2013 can make their users super smart.

Solving hard problems

That’s the potential. But the reality is that it’s going to be tremendously hard to achieve that vision. It’s going to require an enormously sophisticated, enormously capable, mobile operating system.

Not everyone shares my view that operating systems are that important. I sometimes hear the view expressed that improvements in hardware, or the creation of new managed code environments, somehow reduce the value of operating systems, making them into a commodity.

I disagree. I strongly disagree. It's true that improvements in both hardware and managed code environments have incredibly important roles to play. But there remain many things that need to be addressed at the operating system level.

Here are just some of the hard tasks that a mobile operating system has to solve:

Seamless switching between different kinds of wireless network – something that Symbian’s FreeWay technology does particularly well;

Real-time services, not only handling downloads of extremely large quantities of data, but also manipulating that data in real time – decompressing it, decrypting it, displaying it on screen, storing it in the file system, etc;

All this must happen without any jitter or delay – even though there may be dozens of different applications and services all talking at the same time to several different wireless networks;

All this rich functionality must be easily available to third party developers;

However, that openness of developer access must coexist with security of the data on the device and the integrity of the wireless networks;

And, all this processing must take place without draining the batteries on the device;

And without bamboozling the user due to the sheer scale and complexity of what’s actually happening;

And all this must be supported, not just for one device, but in a way that can be customised and altered, supporting numerous different form factors and usage models, without fragmenting the platform.

Finally, please note that all this is getting harder and more complex: every year, the amount of software in a top-range phone approximately nearly doubles. So in five years, there’s roughly up to 32 times as much software in the device. In ten years, there could be 1000 times as much software.

Engaging a huge pool of productive developers

With so many problems that need to be solved, I will say this. The most important three words to determine the long-term success of any mobile operating system are: Developers, Developers, Developers. To repeat: the most important three words for the success of the Symbian platform are: Developers, Developers, Developers.

We need all sorts and shapes and sizes of developers – because, as I said, there are so many deep and complex problems to be solved, as the amount of software in mobile phone platforms grows and grows.

No matter how large and capable any one organisation is, the number of skilled developers inside that organisation is only a small fraction of the number outside. So it comes down to enabling a huge pool of productive and engaged developers, outside the organisation, to work alongside the original developers of the operating system – with speed, creativity, skill, and heartfelt enthusiasm. That’s how we can collectively build the successful super smart phones of the future.

Just two weeks ago, the annual Symbian Smartphone Show put an unprecedented focus on developers. We ran a Mobile DevFest as an integral part of the main event. We announced new developer tools, such as the Symbian Analysis Workbench. We will shortly be releasing new sets of developer APIs (application programming interfaces) in new utility libraries, to simplify interactions with parts of the Symbian programming system that have been found to cause the most difficulty – such as text descriptors, two phase object construction and cleanup, and active objects.

The critical role of open source

But the biggest step to engage and enthuse larger numbers of developers is to move the entire Symbian platform into open source.

This will lower the barriers of entry – in fact, it will remove the barriers of entry. It will allow much easier study of the source code, and, critically, much easier participation in the research and creation of new Symbian platform software. We are expecting a rapid increase in collaboration and innovation. This will happen because there are more developers involved, and more types of developers involved.

That’s why the title of my talk this morning is “Open Source: Catalyst for Mobile Innovation 2.0”. The “2.0” part means greater collaboration and participation than ever before: people not just using the code or looking at the code, but recommending changes to it and even contributing very sizeable chunks of new and improved code. The Open Source part is one of the key enablers for this transformation.

Necessary, but not sufficient

However, Open Source is only one of the necessary enablers. Open Source is a necessary but not sufficient ingredient. There are two others:

A stable and mature software base, with reliable processes of integration, which I’ll talk more about in a moment;

Mastery of the methods of large-scale Agile development, allowing rapid response to changing market needs.

Fragmentation inside an operating system

Here’s the problem. Fragmentation is easy, but Integration is hard.

Fragmentation means that different teams or different customers pull the software in different directions. You end up, in the heat of development in a fast-moving market, with different branches, that are incompatible with each other, and which can’t be easily joined together. The result is that solutions created by developers for one of these branches, fail to work on the other branches. A great deal of time can be wasted debugging these issues.

Here, I speak from bitter experience. During the rapid growth days of Symbian, we lost control of aspects of compatibility in our own platform – despite our best efforts. For example, we had one version called 7.0s and another called 7.0, but lots of partners reported huge problems moving their solutions between these two versions. Because of resulting project delays, major phones failed to come to the market. It was a very painful period.

Nowadays, in the light of our battle-hardened experience, Symbian OS is a much more mature and stable platform, and it is surrounded and supported by an ecosystem of very capable partners. In my view, we have great disciplines in compatibility management and in codeline management.

The result is that we have much better control over the integration of our platform. That puts us in a better position to handle rapid change and multiple customer input. That means we can take good advantage of the creativity of open source, rather than being pulled apart by the diverse input of open source. Other platforms may find things harder. For them, open source may bring as many problems as it brings solutions.

Fragmentation across operating systems

This addresses the fragmentation inside a single operating system. But the problem remains of fragmentation across different operating systems.

Although competition can be healthy, too many operating systems result in developers spreading their skills too thinly. The mobile industry recognises that it needs to consolidate on a smaller number of mobile operating systems moving forwards. The general view is that there needs to be consolidation on around three or (at the most) four advanced mobile operating systems. Otherwise the whole industry ends up over-stretched.

So, which will be the winning mobile operating systems, over the next five years? In the end, it will come down to which phones are bought in large quantities by end users. In turn, the choices offered to end users are strongly influenced by decisions by phone manufacturers and network operators about which operating systems to prefer. These companies have four kinds of issues in their minds, which they want to see mobile operating systems solve:

Technical issues, such as battery life, security, and performance, as well as rich functionality;

Commercial issues, such as cost, and the ability to add value by differentiation;

Political issues, in which there can be a perception that the future evolution of an operating system might be controlled by a company or organisation with divergent ulterior motivations;

Reliability issues, such as a proven track record for incrementally delivering new functionality at high quality levels in accordance with a pre-published roadmap.

A time for operating systems to prove themselves

Again, which will be the winning operating systems, over the next five years? My answer is that is slightly too early to say for sure. The next 12-18 months will be a time of mobile operating systems proving themselves. Perhaps three or four operating systems will come through the challenge, and will attract greater and greater support, as customers stop hedging their bets. Others will be de-selected (or merged).

For at least some of the winning smartphone operating systems, there will be an even bigger prize, in the subsequent 2-3 years. Provided these operating systems are sufficiently scalable, they will become used in greater and greater portions of all phones (not just smartphones and high-end feature phones).

Proving time for the Symbian Foundation platform

Here’s how I expect the Symbian platform to prove itself in the next 12-18 months. Our move to open source was announced in June this year, and we said it could take up to two years to complete it. Since then, planning has been continuing, at great speed. Lee Williams, current head of the S60 organisation in Nokia, and formerly of Palm Inc and Be Inc, has been announced as the Executive Director of the Symbian Foundation.

The Foundation will make its first software release midway through the first half of 2009. Up till that point, access to internal Symbian OS source code is governed by our historical CustKit Licence and DevKit Licence. There’s a steep entry price, around 30,000 dollars per year, and a long contract to sign to gain access, so the community of platform developers has been relatively small. From the first Symbian Foundation release, that will change.

The source code will be released under two different licenses. Part will be open source, under the Eclipse Public Licence. This part has no licence fee, and is accessible to everyone. The other part will be community source, under an interim Symbian Foundation Licence. This is also royalty free, but there is a small contract that companies have to sign, and a small annual fee of 1,500 dollars. I expect a large community to take advantage of this.

This interim community source part will diminish, in stages, until it vanishes around the middle of 2010. By then, everything will be open source. We can’t get there quicker because there are 40 million lines of source code altogether, and we need to carry out various checks and cleanups and contract renegotiations first. But we’ll get there as quickly as we can.

There’s one other important difference worth highlighting. It goes back to the theme of reducing fragmentation. Historically, there have been three different UIs for Symbian OS: S60, UIQ, and MOAP(S) used in Japan. But going forwards, there will only be one UI system: S60, which is nowadays flexible enough to support the different kinds of user models for which the other UI systems were initially created.

To be clear, developers don’t have to wait until 2010 before experimenting with this software system. Software written to the current S60 SDK will run fine on these later releases. We’ll continue to make incremental compatible releases throughout this time period.

What you should also see over this period is that the number of independent contributors will increase. It won’t just be Nokia and Symbian employees who are making contributions. It will be like the example of the Eclipse Foundation, in which the bulk of contributions initially came from just one company, IBM, but nowadays there’s a much wider participation. So also for the Symbian Foundation, contributions will be welcome based on merit. And the governance of the Foundation will also be open and transparent.

The view from 2013

I’ll close by returning to the vision for 2013. Inside Symbian, we’ve long had the vision that Symbian OS will be the most widely used software platform on the planet. By adopting the best principles of open source, we expect we will fulfil this vision. We expect there will in due course be, not just 100s of millions, but billions of great devices, all running our software. And we’ll get there because we’ll be at the heart of what will be the most vibrant software ecosystem on the planet – the mobile innovation ecosystem. Thank you very much.

Watching Google watching the world

2008-10-31T18:07:00.005Z

If there was a prize for the best presentation at this week's Informa "Handsets USA" forum in San Diego, it would have to go to Sumit Agarwal, Product Manager for Mobile from Google. Although there were several other very good talks there, Sumit's was in a class of its own.

In the first place, Sumit had the chutzpah to run his slides directly on a mobile device - an iPhone - with a camera relaying the contents of the mobile screen to the video projector. Second, the presentation included a number of real-time demos - which worked well, and even the ways in which they failed to work perfectly became a source of more insight for the audience (I'll come back to this point later). The demos were spread among a number of different mobile devices: an Android G1, the iPhone, and a BlackBerry Bold. (Sumit rather cheekily said that the main reason he carried the Bold was for circumstances in which the G1 and the iPhone run out of battery power.)

One reason the talk oozed authority was because Sumit could dig into actual statistics, collected on Google's servers.

For example, the presentation included a graph showing the rate of Google search inquiries from mobile phones on different (anonymised) North American network operators. In September 2007, one of the lines started showing an astonishing rhythm, with rapid fluctuations in which the rate of mobile search inquiries jumped up sevenfold - before dropping down again a few days later. The pattern kept repeating, on a weekly basis. Google investigated, and found that the network operator in question had started an experiment with "free data weekends": data usage would be free of charge on Saturday and Sunday. As Sumit pointed out:

The sharp usage spikes showed the latent demand of mobile users for carrying out search enquiries - a demand that was previously being inhibited by fear of high data charges;
Even more interesting, this line on the graph, whilst continuing to fluctuate drastically at weekends, also showed a gradual overall upwards curve, finishing up with data usage signifcantly higher than the national average, even away from weekends;
The takeaway message here is that "users get hooked on mobile data": once they discover how valuable it can be to them, they use it more and more - provided (and this is the kicker) the user experience is good enough.

Another interesting statistic involved the requests received by Google's servers for new "map tiles" to provide to Google maps applications. Sumit said that, every weekend, the demand from mobile devices for map tiles reaches the same level as the demand from fixed devices. Again, this is evidence of strong user interest for mobile services.

As regards the types of textual search queries received: Google classifies all incoming search queries, into categories such as sports, entertainment, news, and so on. Sumit showed spider graphs for the breakdown of search queries into categories. The surprising thing is that the spider graph for mobile-originated search enquiries had a very similar general shape to that for search enquiries from fixed devices. In other words, people seem to want to search for the same sorts of things - in the same proportion of times - regardless of whether they are using fixed devices or mobile ones.

It is by monitoring changes in server traffic that Google can determine the impacts of various changes in their applications - and decide where to prioritise their next efforts. For example, when the My Location feature was added to Google's Mobile Maps application, it had a "stunning impact" on the usage of mobile maps. Apparently (though this could not be known in advance), many users are fascinated to track how their location updates in near real-time on map displays on their mobile devices. And this leads to greater usage of the Google Maps product.

Interspersed among the demos and the statistics, Sumit described elements of Google's underlying philosophy for success with mobile services:

"Ignore the limitations of today": don't allow your thinking to be constrained by the shortcomings of present-day devices and networks;
"Navigate to where the puck will be": have the confidence to prepare services that will flourish once the devices and networks improve;
"Arm users with the data to make decisions": instead of limiting what users are allowed to do on their devices, provide them with information about what various applications and services will do, and leave it to the users to decide whether they will install and use individual applications;
"Dare to delight" the user, rather than always seeking to ensure order and predictability at all times;
"Accept downside", when experiments occasionally go wrong.

As an example of this last point, there was an amusing moment during one of the (many) demos in the presentation, when two music-playing applications each played music at the same time. Sumit had just finished demoing the remarkable TuneWiki, which allows users to collaborate in supplying, sharing, and correcting lyrics to songs, for a Karaoke-like mobile experience without users having to endure the pain of incorrect lyrics. He next showed an application that searched on YouTube for videos matching a particular piece of music. But TuneWiki continued to play music through the phone speakers whilst the second application was also playing music. Result: audio overlap. Sumit commented that an alternative design philosophy by Google might have ensured that no such audio overlap could occur. But such a constraint would surely impede the wider flow of innovation in mobile applications.

And there was a piece of advice for application developers: "emphasise simplicity". Sumit demoed the "AroundMe" application by TweakerSoft, as an illustration of how a single simple idea, well executed, can result in large numbers of downloads. (Sumit commented: "this app was written by a single developer ... who has probably quintupled his annual income by doing this".)

Google clearly have a lot going for them. Part of their success is no doubt down to the technical brilliance of their systems. The "emphasise simplicity" message has helped a great deal too. Perhaps their greatest asset is how they have been able to leverage all the statistics their enormous server farms have collected - not just statistics about links between websites, but also statistics about changes in user activity. By watching the world so closely, and by organising and analysing the information they find in it, Google are perhaps in a unique position to identify and improve new mobile services.

Just as Google has benefited from watching the world, the rest of the industry can benefit from watching Google. Happily, there's already a great deal of information available about how Google operates. Anyone concerned about whether Google might eat their lunch can become considerably wiser from taking the time to read some of the fascinating books that have been written about both the successes and (yes) the failures of this company:

Start with "The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture" by John Battelle (2005);
For a different take on the foundation and astonishing growth of the company, see "The Google Story: Inside the Hottest Business, Media, and Technology Success of Our Time" by David Vise and Mark Malseed (2006);
For a more recent analysis, see "The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google" by Nicholas Carr (January 2008);
Most recently, there's "Planet Google: One Company's Audacious Plan To Organize Everything We Know" by Randall Stross (September 2008).

I finished reading the Stross book a couple of weeks ago. I found it an engrossing easy-to-read account of many up-to-date developments at Google. It confirms that Google remains an utterly intriguing company:

For example, one thought-provoking discussion was the one near the beginning of the book, about Google, Facebook, and open vs. closed;
I also valued the recurring theme of "algorithm-driven search" vs. "human-improved search".

It was particularly interesting to read what Stross had to say about some of Google's failures - eg Google Answers and Google Video (and arguably even YouTube), as a balance to its better-known string of successes. It's a reminder that no company is infallible.

Throughout most of the first ten years of Symbian's history, commentators kept suggesting that it was only a matter of time before the mightiest software company of that era - Microsoft - would sweep past Symbian in the mobile phone operating system space (and, indeed, would succeed - perhaps at the third attempt - in every area they targeted). Nowadays, commentators often suggest the same thing about Google's Android solution.

Let's wait and see. And in any case, I personally prefer to explore the collaboration route rather than the head-on compete route. Just as Microsoft's services increasingly run well on Symbian phones, Google's services can likewise flourish there.

A market for different degrees of openness

2008-10-29T03:52:00.004Z

To encourage participants to speak candidly, the proceedings at the Rutberg "Wireless Influencers" conferences are held away from the prying eyes of journalists. A few interesting ideas popped up during the discussions at the 2008 event over the last two days - but because of the confidentiality rules, I'm not able to name the people who raised these ideas (so I can't give credit where credit is due).

The common theme of these ideas is the clash of openness and regulation - and (in some cases) the attempt to find creative solutions to this clash.

The first example arose during a talk by a representative from a major operator. The talk described the runaway success one of their products was experiencing in a third world country. This product involves the use of mobile phones to transfer money. The speaker said that the main reason this product could not be deployed in more developed countries (to address use cases like simplifying the payment of money to a teenage baby sitter, or transfering cash to your children) is the deadhand of financial regulations: banks aren't keen to allow operators to take over some of the functions that have traditionally been restricted to banks, so operators are legally barred from deploying these applications.

I found this ironic. Normally operators are the companies that are criticised for setting up regulatory systems that have the effect of maintaining their control over various important business processes (and thereby preserving their profits). But in this case, it was an operator who was criticising another part of industry for self-interestedly sheltering behind regulations.

Later in the day, one of the streams at the event discussed whether operators could ever allow users to install whatever applications they want, on their phones. The analogy was made with the world of the PC: the providers of network services for PCs generally have no veto over the applications which users choose to install. On the other hand, in some enterprise situations, a corporate IS department may well wish to impose that kind of control. In other words, for PCs, there is a range of different degrees of openness, depending on the environment. So, could a similar range of different degrees of openness be set up for mobile phones?

The idea here is that several different networks could form. In some, the network operator would impose restrictions on the applications that can be installed on the phones. In others, the network operators would be more permissive. In the second kind of network, users would be told that it was their own responsibility to deal with any unintended consequences from applications they installed.

Ideally, a kind of market would be formed, for networks that had different degrees of openness. Then we could let normal market dynamics determine which sort of network would flourish.

Could such a market actually be formed? Could closed networks and open networks co-exist? It seems worth thinking about.

And here's one more twist - from a keynote discussion on the second day of the event. Rather than a network operator (or some other central certification authority) deciding which applications are suitable for installation on users' phones, how about using the power of community ratings to push bad applications way down the list of available applications?

That's an intriguing Web 2.0 kind of idea. On a network operating with this principle, most users would only see apps that had already received positive reviews. Apps that had bad consequences would instead receive bad reviews - and would therefore disappear off the bottom of the list of apps displayed in response to search queries. "Just like on YouTube".

The Singularity will go mainstream

2008-10-26T13:49:00.004Z

The concept of the coming technological singularity is going to enter mainstream discourse, and won't go away. It will stop being something that can be dismissed as freaky or outlandish - something that is of interest only to marginal types and radical thinkers. Instead, it's going to become something that every serious discussion of the future is going to have to contemplate. Writing a long-term business plan - or a long-term political agenda - without covering the singularity as one of the key topics, is increasingly going to become a sign of incompetence. We can imagine the responses, just a few years from now: "Your plan lacks a section on how the onset of the singularity is going to affect the take-up of your product. So I can't take this proposal seriously". And: "You've analysed five trends that will impact the future of our company, but you haven't included the singularity - so everything else you say is suspect."

In short, that's the main realisation I reached by attending the Singularity Summit 2008 yesterday, in the Montgomery Theater in San Jose. As the day progressed, the evidence mounted up that the arguments in favour of the singularity will be increasingly persuasive, to wider and wider groups of people. Whether or not the singularity will actually happen is a slightly different question, but it's no longer going to be possible to dismiss the concept of the singularity as irrelevant or implausible.

To back up my assertion, here are some of the highlights of what was a very full day:

Intel's CTO and Corporate VP Justin Rattner spoke about "Countdown to Singularity: accelerating the pace of technological innovation at Intel". He described a series of technological breakthroughs that would be likely to keep Moore's Law operational until at least 2020, and he listed ideas for how it could be extended even beyond that. Rattner clearly has a deep understanding of the technology of semiconductors.

Dharmendra Modha, the manager of IBM's cognitive computing lab at Almaden, explained how his lab had already utilised IBM super-computers to simulate an entire rat brain, with the simulation running at one tenth of real-time speed. He explained his reasons for expecting that his lab should be emable to simular an entire human brain, running at full speed, by 2018. This was possible as a result of the confluence of "three hard disruptive trends":

Neuroscience has matured
Supercomputing meets the brain
Nanotechnology meets the brain.

Cynthia Breazeal, Associate Professor of Media Arts and Sciences, MIT, drew spontaneous applause from the audience part-way through her talk, by showing a video of one of her socially responsive robots, Leonardo. The video showed Leonardo acting on beliefs about what various humans themselves believed (including beliefs that Leonardo could deduce were false). As Breazeal explained:

Up till recently, robotics has been about robots interacting with things (such as helping to manufacture cars)
In her work, robotics is about robots interacting with people in order to do things. Because humans are profoundly social, these robots will also have to be profoundly social - they are being designed to relate to humans in psychological terms. Hence the expressions of emotion on Leonardo's face (and the other body language).

Marshall Brain, founder of "How Stuff Works", also spoke about robots, and the trend for them to take over work tasks previously done by humans: MacDonalds waitresses, Wal-Mart shop assistants, vehicle drivers, construction workers, teachers...

James Miller, Associate Professor of Economics, Smith College, explicitly addressed the topic of how increasing belief in the likelihood of an oncoming singularity would change people's investment decisions. Once people realise that, within (say) 20-30 years, the world could be transformed into something akin to paradise, with much greater lifespans and with abundant opportunities for extremely rich experiences, many will take much greater care than before to seek to live to reach that event. Interest in cryonics is likely to boom - since people can reason their bodies will only need to be vitrified for a short period of time, rather than having to trust their descendants to look after them for unknown hundreds of years. People will shun dangerous activities. They'll also avoid locking money into long-term investments. And they'll abstain from lengthy training courses (for example, to master a foreign language) if they believe that technology will shortly render as irrelevant all the sweat of that arduous learning.

Not every speaker was optimistic. Well-known author and science journalist John Horgan gave examples of where the progress of science and technology has been, not exponential, but flat:

nuclear fusion
ending infectious diseases
Richard Nixon's "war on cancer"
gene therapy treatments
treating mental illness.

Horgan chided advocates of the singularity for their use of "rhetoric that is more appropriate to religion than science" - thereby risking damaging the standing of science at a time when science needs as much public support as it can get.

Ray Kurzweil, author of "The Singularity is Near", responded to this by agreeing that not every technology progresses exponentially. However, those that become information sciences do experience significant growth. As medicine and health increasingly become digital information sciences, they are experiencing the same effect. Although in the past I've thought that Kurzweil sometimes overstates his case, on this occasion I thought he spoke with clarity and restraint, and with good evidence to back up his claims. He also presented updated versions of the graphs from his book. In the book, these graphs tended to stop around 2002. The slides Kurzweil showed at the summit continued up to 2007. It does appear that the rate of progress with information sciences is continuing to accelerate.

Earlier in the day, science fiction author and former maths and computing science professor Vernor Vinge gave his own explanation for this continuing progress:

Around the world, in many fields of industry, there are hundreds of thousands of people who are bringing the singularity closer, through the improvements they're bringing about in their own fields of research - such as enhanced human-computer interfaces. They mainly don't realise they are advancing the singularity - they're not working to an agreed overriding vision for their work. Instead, they're doing what they're doing because of the enormous incremental economic plus of their work.

Under questioning by CNBC editor and reporter Bob Pisani, Vinge said that he sticks with the forecast he made many years ago, that the singularity would ("barring major human disasters") happen by 2030. Vinge also noted that rapidly improving technology made the future very hard to predict with any certainty. "Classic trendline analysis is seriously doomed." Planning should therefore focus on scenario evaluation rather than trend lines. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Vinge suggested that more forecasters should read science fiction, where scenarios can be developed and explored. (Since I'm midway through reading and enjoying Vinge's own most recent novel, "Rainbows End" - set in 2025 - I agree!)

Director of Research at the Singularity Institute, Ben Goertzel, described a staircase of potential applications for the "OpenCog" system of "Artificial General Intelligence" he has been developing with co-workers (partially funded by Google, via the Google Summer of Code):

Teaching virtual dogs to dance
Teaching virtual parrots to talk
Nurturing virtual babies
Training virtual scientists that can read vast swathes of academic papers on your behalf
And more...

Founder and CSO of Innerspace Foundation, Pete Estep, gave perhaps one of the most thought-provoking presentations. The goal of Innerspace is, in short, to improve brain functioning. In more detail, "To establish bi-directional communication between the mind and external storage devices." Quoting from the FAQ on the Innerspace site:

The IF [Innerspace Foundation] is dedicated to the improvement of human mind and memory. Even when the brain operates at peak performance learning is slow and arduous, and memory is limited and faulty. Unfortunately, other of the brain's important functions are similarly challenged in our complex modern world. As we age, these already limited abilities and faculties erode and fail. The IF supports and accelerates basic and applied research and development for improvements in these areas. The long-term goal of the foundation is to establish relatively seamless two-way communication between people and external devices possessing clear data storage and computational advantages over the human brain.

Estep explained that he was a singularity agnostic: "it's beyond my intellectual powers to decide if a singularity within 20 years is feasible". However, he emphasised that it is evident to him that "the singularity might be near". And this changes everything. Throughout history, and extending round the world even today, "there have been too many baseless fantasies and unreasonable rationalisations about the desirability of death". The probable imminence of the singularity will help people to "escape" from these mind-binds - and to take a more vigorous and proactive stance towards planning and actually building desirable new technology. The singularity that Estep desires is one, not of super-powerful machine intelligence, but one of "AI+BCI: AI combined with a brain-computer interface". This echoed words from robotics pioneer Hans Moravec that Vernor Vinge had reported earlier in the day:

"It's not a singularity if you are riding the curve. And I intend to ride the curve."

On the question of how to proactively improve the chances for beneficial technological development, Peter Diamandis spoke outstandingly well. He's the founder of the X-Prize Foundation. I confess I hadn't previously realised anything like the scale and the accomplishment of this Foundation. It was an eye-opener - as, indeed, was the whole day.

"Symbian too old" - a mountain worth climbing

2008-10-25T15:03:00.006+01:00

In case I had forgotten how little mindshare Symbian has in many parts of North America, the recent Robert X. Cringely piece "Why Windows Mobile will die" contained yet another stark reminder.

As usual with Cringely, the piece mixes potential insight with a lot of conjecture and then some fancy. Most of the article discusses Windows Mobile, iPhone, and Android. But it squeezes in a dismissive paragraph about Symbian:

...donning flameproof clothing: Symbian is simply too old. The OS is getting slower and slower with each release. The GUIs are getting uglier and are not user-friendly. The development environment is particularly bad, which wouldn't hurt if there weren't others that are so much better. Symbian C++, for example, is not a standard C++. There is little momentum in the Symbian developer community, maybe because coding for Symbian is a pain. Yes, there are way more Symbian phones in circulation, but those phones will be gone 18 months from now, probably replaced by phones with a different OS. Lately, Symbian's success has been primarily based on the high quality of Nokia hardware, on the loyalty of NTT DoCoMo, and now on the lure of being recently made open source and therefore free. But if open source developers don't flock now to Symbian (they aren't as far as I can see -- at least not yet) then the OS is doomed.

And if that weren't a sufficiently strong reminder of Symbian's lack of mindshare, I found scant encouragement in the 65 comments posted (so far) to Cringely's piece.

Allow me a few moments to respond to individual points in this paragraph, before I return to the bigger picture.

"Symbian is simply too old" - but it has been undergoing a constant internal renewal, with parts of the architecture and code being refactored and replaced with each new point release. Just a few examples: we introduced a new kernel in v8.1b, a new security architecture in v9.0, new database (SQL) architecture in v9.3, new Bluetooth in v9.4, substantially revised graphics architecture and networking architecture in v9.5, and so forth.

"The OS is getting slower and slower with each release" - on the contrary, many parts of the operating system are humming much quicker in the newer releases, as a result of a specific and pervasive focus on performance across the whole system. Deliverables include speed ups due to smart incorporation of demand paging, file system caching, data scalability improvements, and wider adoption of separation of activity into three planes (data plane, control plane, and management plane).

"The GUIs are getting uglier and are not user-friendly" - but the UI system is increasingly flexible, which allows customers to experiment with many different solutions (whilst retaining API compatibility). New developments such as the S60 Fifth Edition touch interface, and the recently announced support for Qt on Symbian OS, take things further in the user-friendly direction.

"The development environment is particularly bad" - but documentation and tools for Symbian OS have markedly improved over the last two years.

"Symbian C++, for example, is not a standard C++" - but watch out for our forthcoming annoucements about EUserHL that go a long way to address this particular gripe.

"There is little momentum in the Symbian developer community" - but that's not the impression given by the media reports from people who attended the Symbian Smartphone Show last week.

"Yes, there are way more Symbian phones in circulation, but those phones will be gone 18 months from now, probably replaced by phones with a different OS" - but I beg to differ, based on my knowledge of development projects underway at phone manufacturers across the world. For just one example, consider the recent remarks from Li Jilin, Huawei Communications Vice President (note: Huawei has previously not been a user of Symbian OS):

"Huawei is excited by the plans for the Symbian Foundation. We look forward to participating in the work of the Symbian Foundation and using the foundation's platform to deliver a portfolio of devices for mobile network operators around the world. We believe that the Symbian Foundation ecosystem will enable innovation which will benefit users and drive increased customer satisfaction."

"If open source developers don't flock now to Symbian (they aren't as far as I can see -- at least not yet) then the OS is doomed" - but this is far too impatient. It's too early to make this judgement. You can't expect the open source developers to flock to us before more plans are published for the roadmap to put our source code into open source.

As for the bigger picture: despite the above individual points of fact, I don't expect significant changes in mindset (except among the far-sighted) until there are more Symbian devices in the hands of North Americans.

It was the amazing array of devices at the partner showcase stands at the Smartphone Show last week that caused the biggest buzz of all - bigger than the announcements from the keynote hall next door. Thankfully, AT&T have publicly mentioned their "plan to introduce more Symbian phones". North American users shouldn't have too long to wait. And there are encouraging signs of independently-minded North American writers actually (shock horror) liking the latest Symbian phones. For example, the renowned software essayist Joel Spolsky called the Nokia E71 "the best phone I’ve ever had - I’m loving it".

In the meantime, the Symbian Foundation has a big mountain to climb, in public perception. But it's a mountain well worth climbing!

Smartphones and the recession

2008-10-24T02:17:00.004+01:00

"Symbian Smartphone Show - Recession? what recession?" That was the title of the characteristically perceptive summary of this week's Smartphone Show prepared by analyst Richard Windsor of Nomura Securities.

In his summary, Richard made a series of positive comments about the show:

The vision of the Symbian foundation was put forward by all its members to an audience that has certainly grown in numbers compared to last year.
By putting Symbian and s60 together with the elimination of UIQ and MOAPs, it is hoped that licensees will have one system upon which to develop phones and applications.
At the same time the new structure means that the access to the software will be much more even, giving everyone a better chance at effectively competing.

However, he also noted:

The floor was abuzz with the prospect of the growing opportunity for smartphones but seemed oblivious to the possibility that an economic recession could materially dent growth.
While the talk is all about growth and the new opportunity, very little was said about the coming recession and the effect that ever increasing hardware specification will have on the ability for smartphones to continue getting cheaper and cheaper.
We see a negative impact from two sides:
First the fact that consumers have less disposable income to spend on high end devices.
Second, the pressure to compete with Apple, whose iPhone volumes has over taken RIM, is causing more technology to be crammed into phones earlier.
This has the effect of increasing the cost to build smartphones which means that price declines to consumers will slow or stop entirely.

So, is there any possible justification for paying so little attention to the likely onset of economic hard times?

Here's one argument to consider. The Symbian Foundation is about, not the next ten months, but the next ten years. The general buzz at the show derives from expectation of a potentially huge long-term payback, rather than any evaluation of short-term rewards. Just as the original vision of Symbian, on its formation in 1998, contemplated up to ten years into the future, the creation of the Symbian Foundation likewise has an eye on market evolution up to 2018. Any recession between now and then is a lesser effect.

Well, I'm sympathetic to that view. However, it gives us no reason to breezily overlook the likely pain and disruption caused to the smartphone industry by an economic downturn.

After all, I vividly remember the distress inside Symbian during the crash of the dot com bubble. During that time, smartphone phone projects were being cancelled thick and fast - even when the projects looked to be full of real promise. These projects were cancelled on account of lack of finances to back more speculative developments. Development resources in our customers (and also in our customers' customers) became focused instead on "safe bets" rather than on innovative high-risk high-reward projects. Symbian faced a real crisis. It took several long years to put that time behind us.

Could the same happen again? Perhaps. But I see several key differences:

This time, it will be the Symbian projects that are viewed as the safe bets: the Symbian software system is much more stable and proven than before
This time, many of the Symbian projects will be the lower costs ones - because of reduced needs to integrate large swathes of new functionality (beyond that already provided in the core offering), and also because of the lower hardware requirements of the high-performance Symbian software
This time, consumers are already familiar with smartphone technology, and are increasingly enamoured with it, rather than this technology only appealing to a narrow segment of the population.

I hope this doesn't make me look complacent. Believe me, I'm not. I know it's going to be hard, to turn the above prognosis into reality. But the enthusiasm and skills of the Symbian ecosystem (as manifest at the show) give me grounds for optimism.

In short, consumers may tend to prefer lower-cost smartphones, and this will benefit Symbian. Even though the Symbian phones will be comparatively inexpensive, they will deliver enough features (and a sufficiently good user experience) to win over end-users.

Winners of Symbian student essay contest

2008-10-22T07:25:00.007+01:00

At the Smartphone Show yesterday, Symbian announced the results of our first Student Essay Contest, and called for entrants to a new contest - with an entry submission deadline of 31st January 2009.

The theme for the 2008 contest was "The next wave of smartphone innovation". The prize winners are as follows (listed in alphabetical order of surname):

Benoît Delville, Ecole Centrale de Lille, France: The hardware tech of smartphones. Benoît’s essay examines four factors which threaten to prevent the fuller adoption of smartphones.
Alexander Erifiu, University of Applied Sciences, Hagenberg, Austria: New interaction concepts in mobile games. Alexander’s essay describes a project the author carried out with some colleagues to increase the suitability of smartphones for certain types of games.
Andreas Jakl, Johannes Kepler University, Linz, Austria: Optical translator: word spotting and tracking on smartphones. Andreas’s essay considers some developments that will enable advanced new applications that take advantage of the high quality camera technology that is currently widely available on smartphones.
Florian Lettner, University of Applied Sciences, Hagenberg, Austria: Smartphones in home automation. Florian’s essay investigates the possible use of smartphones in a number of practical situations, including several in the home.
Pankaj Nathani, Bhavnagar University, Gujarat, India: Improved development and delivery methodologies. Pankaj’s essay focuses on the fact that developers can face many challenges in developing and delivering novel or evolved services on smartphones.
Milen Nikolov, The College at Brockport, State University of New York, Brockport, USA: Exploiting social and mobile ad hoc networking to achieve ubiquitous connectivity. Milen’s essay examines a particular example of what is known as a ‘Mobile Ad hoc Network’ (MANET) involving smartphones.
Aleksandra Reiss, Petrozavodsk State University, Russia: The next waves of smartphone innovation. Aleksandra’s essay is targeted at discovering what new functionality can be added to smartphones in the near future.
Sudeep Sundaram, University of Bristol, UK: Situation aware maintenance mate. Sudeep’s essay reviews possible uses of a smartphone in coordination with a head mounted display, where for example, a user could see the positioning of electrical wires in a wall and carry out diagnostics.
Iftekhar Ul Karim, BRAC University, Dhaka, Bangladesh: Opportunities with smartphone technologies for the base of the pyramid. Iftekhar’s essay challenges readers to consider novel uses of smartphones for users in the so-called ‘base of the pyramid’ – the four billion poorest people on the planet.
Alejandro Vicente-Grabovetsky, University of Cambridge, UK: The smartphone of the future: A powerhouse or a mere terminal? Alejandro’s essay explores the potential for the smartphone to act as a ‘social computer’ as opposed to merely copying features from the ‘personal computer’.

My congratulations to the prizewinners! There are thought-provoking elements in all of the winning essays. For extracts and summaries, see developer.symbian.com/essays.

The contest received many other essays that also contained interesting and valuable observations. My recommendations to entrants of future contests is that that essays are more likely to be awarded prizes if they:

Concentrate on making a small number of points well, rather than on trying to cover a large number of different points;
Address specific issues, rather than describing abstract theories;
Have a clear structure and a logical flow of argument;
Back up their claims by providing evidence (for example, references).

My goal for the 2008 contest were threefold:

To encourage university students to carry out research on topics of interest to Symbian, its wider community and the mobile industry;
To find out where the most interesting research was being carried out;
To stimulate interest in Symbian’s emerging University Research Relations programme.

Following the success of our 2008 contest, we're repeating it in 2009. The deadline for submission for the next Symbian Student Essay Contest is 31st January 2009. The overall theme for this new contest is “Architectures to enable breakthroughs for mobile converged devices.” Students are encouraged to address one or more of the following topics in their essays:

Software development that takes best advantage of multiple processor cores
Allocation of responsibilities between managed code and native code
Delivering maximum power from the hardware and the networks to applications
Security and privacy concerns in mobile device architectures
Taming the complexity of mobile system architecture: the role of open source
Enabling devices, applications and services that appeal to huge new groups of users
The role of system architecture in significantly improving consumer experience.

Winners of the 2009 contest will receive £1,000 with runners up earning special commendations. For the rules of this contest, see www.symbian.com/universities.

Open Source: necessary but not sufficient

2008-10-21T06:57:00.006+01:00

Building the software system for complex smartphone products is one of the toughest engineering challenges on the planet. The amount of software in a high-end phone has been roughly doubling, each year, for the last ten years. In order to reap market success, smartphone software has to meet demanding requirements for performance, reliability, and usability. What’s more, to avoid missing a fast-moving market window, the software needs to pass through its integration process and reach maturity in a matter of months (not years). As I said, it’s a truly tough problem.

[Author's note: a version of this article is appearing in print today, to mark the first day of the Symbian Smartphone Show. I thought that people might like to read it online too.]

In broad terms, there are two ways in which a company can seek to solve this kind of tough problem:

Seek to keep careful control of the problem, and rely primarily on resources that are under the tight direction and supervision of the company;
Seek to take advantage of resources that are outside the control of the company.

The attraction of the first approach is that it’s easier to manage. The attraction of the second approach is that, in principle, the company can take better advantage of the potential innovation created by users and developers that are outside the company.

Writers and academics who study how innovation works in industry sometimes use the terms “closed innovation” and “open innovation” to describe these two approaches. In his pioneering book “Open innovation, the new imperative for creating and profiting from technology”, Henry Chesbrough lists the following contrasts between open innovation and closed innovation:

The “closed innovation” mindset:

The smart people in our field work for us
To profit from R&D we must discover it, develop it, and ship it ourselves
If we discover it ourselves, we will get to the market first
The company that gets an innovation to market first will win
If we create the most and the best ideas in the industry, we will win
We should control our IP, so that our competitors don’t profit from our ideas.

The “open innovation” mindset:

Not all the smart people work for us. We need to work with smart people inside and outside our company
External R&D can create significant value; internal R&D is needed to claim some portion of that value
We don’t have to originate the research to profit from it
Building a better business model is better than getting to market first
If we make the best use of internal and external ideas, we will win
We should profit from others’ use of our IP, and we should buy others’ IP whenever it advances our own business model.

In the modern world of hyper-complex products, easy communication via the Internet and other network systems, and the “Web 2.0” pro-collaboration zeitgeist, it is easy to understand why the idea of open innovation receives a lot of support. It sounds extremely attractive. However, the challenge is how to put these ideas into practice.

That’s where open source enters the picture. Open source removes both financial and contractual barriers that would otherwise prevent many users and external developers from experimenting with the system. For this reason, open source can boost open innovation.

However, in my view, there’s a lot more to successful open innovation than putting the underlying software platform into open source. We mustn’t fall into the trap of thinking that, because both these expressions start with the same adjective (“open”), the two expressions are essentially equivalent. They’re not.

Indeed, people who have studied open innovation have reached the conclusion that there are three keys to making open innovation work well for a firm (or platform):

Maximising returns to internal innovation
Incorporating external innovation in the platform
Motivating a supply of external innovations.

Let’s dig more deeply into the second and third of these keys.

Incorporating external innovation in the platform

The challenge here isn’t just to stimulate external innovation. It is to be able to incorporate this innovation into the codelines forming the platform. That requires the platform itself to be both sufficiently flexible and sufficiently stable. Otherwise the innovation will fragment the platform, or degrade its ongoing evolution.

It also requires the existence of significant skills in platform integration. Innovations offered by users or external developers may well need to be re-engineered if they are to be incorporated in the platform in ways that meet the needs of the user community as a whole, rather than just the needs of the particular users who came up with the innovation in question.

This can be summarised by saying that a platform needs skills and readiness for software codeline management, if it is to be able to productively incorporate external innovation.

Codeline management in turn depends on skills in:

Codeline gate-keeping: not accepting code that fails agreed quality criteria – no matter how much political weight is carried by the people trying to submit that code
Reliable and prompt code amalgamation: being quick to incorporate code that does meet the agreed criteria – rather than leaving these code submissions languishing too long in an in-queue
API management, system architecture, and modular design – to avoid any spaghetti-like dependencies between different parts of the software
Software refactoring – to be able to modify the internal design of a complex system, in the light of emerging new requirements, in order to preserve its modularity and flexibility – but without breaking external compatibility or losing roadmap momentum.

Motivating a supply of external innovations

The challenge here isn’t just to respond to external innovations when they arise. It is to give users and external developers sufficient motivation to work on their ideas for product improvement. These parties need to be encouraged to apply both inspiration and perspiration.

Just as the answer to the previous issue is skilled software codeline management, the answer to this issue is skilled ecosystem management.

Ecosystem management involves a mix of education and evangelism. It also requires active listening (also known as “being open-minded”), and a willingness by the platform providers to occasionally tweak the underlying platform, in order to facilitate important innovations under consideration by external parties. Finally it requires ensuring that third parties can receive suitable rewards for their breakthroughs – whether moral, social, or financial. This involves the mindset of “growing the pie for mutual benefit” rather than the platform owner seeking to dominate the value for its own sake.

But neither software codeline management nor ecosystem management comes easy. Neither fall out of the sky, ready for action, just by virtue of a platform being open source. Nor can these skills be acquired overnight, by spending lots of money, or hiring lots of intrinsically smart people.

Conclusion: On account of a legacy of more than ten years of trial and error in building and enhancing both a mobile platform and an associated dynamic ecosystem, the Symbian Foundation should come into existence with huge amounts of battle-hardened expertise in both software codeline management and ecosystem management. On that basis, I expect the additional benefits of open source will catalyse a significant surge of additional open innovation around the Symbian Platform. In contrast, other mobile platforms that lack this depth of experience are likely to find that open source brings them grief as much as it brings them potential new innovations. For these platforms, open source may result in divisive fragmentation and a dilution of ecosystem effort.

Footnote: For more insight about open innovation, I recommend the writings of Henry Chesbrough (mentioned above), Wim Vanhaverbeke, and Joel West.

Serious advice to developers in tough times

2008-10-11T19:57:00.011+01:00

As I mentioned in my previous article, the FOWA London event on "The Future of Web Apps" featured a great deal of passion and enthusiasm for technology and software development systems. However, as I watched the presentations on Day Two, I was repeatedly struck by a deeper level of seriousness.

For example, AMEE Director Gavin Starks urged the audience to consider how changes in their applications could help reduce CO2 emissions. AMEE has exceptionally large topics on its mind: the acronym stands for "Avoiding Mass Extinctions Engine". Gavin sought to raise the aspiration level of developers: "If you really want to build an app that will change the world, how about building an app that will save the Earth?" But this talk was no pious homily: it contained several dozen ideas that could in principle act as possible starting points for new business ventures.

On a different kind of serious topic, Mahalo.com CEO Jason Calacanis elicited some gasps from the audience when he dared to suggest that, if startups are really serious about making a big mark in the business world, they should consider firing, not only their "average" employees, but also their "good" employees - under the rationale that "good is the enemy of the great". The resulting audience Q&A could have continued the whole afternoon.

But the most topical presentation was the opening keynote by Sun Microsystems Distinguished Engineer Tim Bray. It started with a bang - with the words "I'm Scared" displayed in huge font on the screen.

With these words, Tim announced that he had, the previous afternoon, torn up the presentation he was previously planning to give - a presentation entitled "What to be Frightened of in Building A Web Application".

Tim explained that the fear he would now address in his talk was about global economic matters rather than about usage issues with the likes of XML, Rails, and Flash. Instead of these technology-focused matters, he would instead cover the subject "Getting through the tough times".

Tim described how he had spent several days in London ahead of the conference, somewhat jet lagged, watching lots of TV coverage about the current economic crisis. As he said, the web has the advantage of allowing everyone to get straight to the sources - and these sources are frightening, when you take the time to look at them. Tim explicitly referenced http://acrossthecurve.com/?p=1830, which contains the following gloomy prognosis:

...more and more it seems likely that the resolution of this crisis will be an historic financial calamity. Each and every step which central banks and regulators have taken to resolve the crisis has been met with failure. In the beginning, the steps would produce some brief stability.

In the last several days, the US Congress (belatedly) passed a bailout bill, the Federal Reserve has guaranteed commercial paper and in unprecedented coordination central banks around the globe slash base lending rates. Listen to the markets respond.

The market scoffs as Libor rises, stocks plummet and IBM is forced to pay usurious rates to borrow. There is no stability and no hiatus from the pain. It continues unabated in spite of the best efforts of dedicated people to solve it.

We are in the midst of an unfolding debacle. It is happening about us. I am not sure how or when it ends, but the end, when it arrives, will radically alter the way we live for a long time.
Whoever wins the US election and takes office in January will need prayers and divine intervention.

As Tim put it: "We've been running on several times the amount of money that actually exists. Now we're going to have to manage on nearer the amount of money that does exist." And to make things even more colourful, he said that the next few days could be like the short period of time in New Orleans after hurricane Katrina had passed, but before the floods struck (caused by damage brought about by the winds). For the world's economy, the hurricane may have passed, but the flood is still to come.

The rest of Tim's talk was full of advice that sounded, to me, as highly practical, for what developers should do, to increase their chances of survival through these tough times. (There's a summary video here.) I paraphrase some highlights from my notes:

Double down and do a particularly good job. In these times, slack work could put your company out of business - or could cause your employer to decide your services are no longer necessary.

Large capital expenditures are a no-no. Find ways to work that don't result in higher management being asked to sign large bills - they won't.

Waterfalls are a no-no. No smart executive is going to commit to a lengthy project that will take longer than a year to generate any payback. Instead, get with the agile movement - pick out the two or three requirements in your project that you can deliver incrementally and which will result in payback in (say) 8-10 weeks.

Software licences are a no-no. Companies will no longer make large commitments to big licences for the likes of Oracle solutions. Open source is going to grow in prominence.

Contribute to open source projects. This is a great way to build professional credibility - to advertise your capabilities to potential new employers or business partners.

Get in the cloud. With cloud services, you only pay a small amount in the beginning, and you only pay larger amounts when traffic is flowing.

Stop believing in technology religions. The web is technologically heterogeneous. Be prepared to learn new skills, to adopt new programming languages, or to change the kinds of applications you develop.

Think about the basic needs of users. There will be less call for applications about fun things, or about partying and music. There will be more demand for applications that help people to save money - for example, the lowest gas bill, or the cheapest cell phone costs.

Think about telecomms. Users will give up their HDTVs, their SUVs, and their overseas holidays, but they won't give up their cell phones. The iPhone and the Android are creating some great new opportunities. Developers of iPhone applications are earning themselves hundreds of thousands of dollars from applications that cost users only $1.99 per download. Developers in the audience should consider migrating some of their applications to mobile - or creating new applications for mobile.

The mention of telecomms quickened my pulse. On the one hand, I liked Tim's emphasis on the likely continuing demand for high-value low-cost mobile solutions. On the other hand, I couldn't help noticing there were references to iPhone and Android, but not to Symbian (or to any of the phone manufacturers who are using Symbian software).

Then I reflected that, similarly, namechecks were missing for RIM, Windows Mobile, and Palm. Tim's next words interrupted this chain of thought and provided further explanation: With the iPhone and Android, no longer are the idiotic moronic mobile network operators standing in the way with a fence of barbed wire between developers and the people who actually buy phones.

This fierce dislike for network operator interference was consistent with a message underlying the whole event: developers should have the chance to show what they can do, using their talent and their raw effort, without being held up by organisational obstacles and value-chain choke-points. Developers dislike seemingly arbitrary regulation. That's a message I take very seriously.

However, we can't avoid all regulation. Indeed - to turn back from applications to economics - lack of regulation is arguably a principal cause of our current economic crisis.

The really hard thing is devising the right form of regulation - the right form of regulation for financial markets, and the right form of regulation for applications on potentially vulnerable mobile networks.

Both tasks are tough. But the solution in each case surely involves greater transparency.

The creation of the Symbian Foundation is intended to advance openness in two ways:

Providing more access to the source code;
Providing greater visibility of the decisions and processes that guide changes in both the software platform and the management of the associated ecosystem.

This openness won't dissolve all regulation. But it should ensure that the regulations evolve, more quickly, to something that more fully benefits the whole industry.

In search of software glamour

2008-10-09T21:51:00.004+01:00

I keep running into the "glamour question". Scott from Mippin raised it again the other day, in a shrewd comment in response to Roger Nolan's recent analysis "Symbian’s open source challenge":

I think that one inherent disadvantage for Symbian compared to Apple and Android is the glamour factor. This can be demonstrated by looking at the comments stream to this excellent post. If it had been talking about Apple or Android it would have people crawling over themselves to comment. Symbian just does not elicit the same excitement. This means - more meaningfully perhaps - that developers gain more kudos for developing for one of the glamour platforms than for Symbian (despite its market share).

Scott suggests that one reason for the reduced excitement over Symbian lies "the complexity of Symbian. It is just too complex and developers stay away". Previously, I've offered my own list of "Symbian passion killers" that can hinder developers from becoming fully inspired (and therefore fully productive) about creating software for Symbian OS. As I've said before, the plans for "Symbian 2.0" in the wake of the creation of the Symbian Foundation include several important projects to address passion killers.

I heard quite a lot more, today, about developer passion. I was attending Day One of FOWA - the Future of Web Apps expo, taking place at London's ExCeL conference centre. I experienced considerable déjà vu at this event, since the annual Symbian Smartphone Shows were held there from 2002 to 2007. The layout of the keynote hall and the so-called "university sessions" reminded me a lot of similar layouts from bygone Smartphone Shows. The audience seemed of comparable size too. But whereas the motivation of many who attend the Smartphone Show is to make business connections and to promote the success of their companies, the motivation I sensed from many of the FOWA attendees was rather different: it was to explore new technologies, and to exult in new products and new processes.

For example, Edwin Aoki, AOL Technology Fellow, included the following remarks in his keynote speech "Web apps are dead, long live web apps":

What drives developers? It's not just money. It's building out communities. It's building pride. It's dedication and passion, not dollars and pounds.

And I couldn't help noticing how frequently speakers used words like "amazing", "exciting", "awesome", "kickass", and "cool". At first I wondered if they were joking or being ironic, but then I realised they were un-selfconscious. They were simply being enthusiastic.

Blaine Cook, ex Chief Engineer at Twitter, and Joe Stump, Lead Architect of Digg, performed a dynamic two-hander on the subject of "Languages don't scale". Taking turns, they ripped into features of programming languages that, in their words, made the languages "suck". Thus "here's why PHP sucks..." and "here's why Ruby sucks..." and "Python sucks as well...". But this was just a prelude to their main theme, which is that you should beware asking committed developers to switch from one language to another. Language choice is often personal - and often heartfelt. According to the speakers, scale performance issues that sometimes bedevil web applications, only rarely come down to language issues; instead, they usually depend on hardware architecture or network architecture. Hence the advice:

Value happy coders! Happy coders are productive coders. Let them work with the languages they love!

Many of the speakers oozed passion. I was particularly impressed by Francisco Tolmasky, co-founder of 280 North. His presentation title hardly sounded earth-shattering: "Building Desktop Caliber Web Applications with Objective-J and Cappuccino". However, the delivery was captivating and uplifting. (And the technology of their product does look attractive...)

All this brings back to mind the glamour question: To what extent can Symbian's developer events match this kind of enthusiasm - an enthusiasm driven by love of product and love of technology, rather than (just) love of market opportunity and commercial reward? To what extent can Symbian OS become viewed as glamorous and exciting, rather than just some kind of incumbent?

Happily, there's a lot of fascinating technology on Symbian's roadmap. There are also new tools that should appeal to various different kinds of developers. For those who value choice of languages, there's a growing range of language options available for Symbian OS. For those who are interested in the hardware, there are literally scores of new phone models in the pipeline. Some of this will fall under public spotlight in under two weeks' time at the 2008 Smartphone Show.

This year, the show has moved from ExCeL to Earls Court. The more significant change is that, this year, there's a "Mobile Devfest" which is running alongside the main show:

Mobile DevFest is Symbian’s premier conference for developers and has been designed to provide developers with deep technical training and information on building mobile software solutions for the next generation of mobile phones powered by Symbian OS.
Mobile DevFest is the ideal developer event for anyone engaged in building, or interested in building mobile applications on Symbian OS.
Mobile DevFest is the best way to stay ahead of today’s mobile technologies. It provides in-depth technical sessions, delivered by industry experts in the mobile development space.

I'm eagering looking forward to taking part - and to gauging the degree of passion at the show. And in the meantime, if you think your own new product or solution for the Symbian space is particularly exciting, I'll be pleased to hear about it!

iWoz inspires iMAX

2008-10-05T09:57:00.008+01:00

Last Wednesday, Apple co-Founder Steve Wozniak addressed a gathering of several hundred business people in London's large-format IMAX cinema, as part of a series of events organised by the London Business Forum. The theme was "Apple Innovation". Since the IMAX is just 15 minutes walk from Symbian's HQ, this opportunity was too good for me to miss. I hoped Wozniak's account of Apple culture might shed some new light on the all-conquering iPhone. I was not disappointed.

Wozniak spoke for more than an hour, without slides, running through a smorgasbord of anecdotes from his own life history. It was rivetting and inspiring. Later I realised that most of the material has already been published in Wozniak's 2006 book "iWoz: Computer geek to cult icon: How I invented the personal computer, co-founded Apple, and had fun doing it", which was given out at the event.

I warmed to Wozniak early on in his talk, when he described one of his early experiments in software - writing a program to solve the "Knight's tour" around a chessboard. I remembered writing a program to try to solve the same problem while at roughly the same age - and had a similar result. In my case, programs were sent off from school to the local Aberdeen University, where clerical staff typed them in and submitted them on behalf of children in neighbouring schools. This program was returned several days later with the comment that there was no output - operators had terminated it.

A few weeks later, there was a short residential course at the university for sixth form students, which I attended. I modified my program to tackle a 5x5 board instead, and was happy to see computer quickly spitting out numerous solutions. I changed the board size to 6x6 instead and waited ... and waited ... and after around 10 minutes, a solution was printed out. Wozniak's experience was several years before mine. As he describes it, the computer he was using could do one million calculations a second - which sounded like a huge number. So the lack of any output from his program was a big disappointment - until he calculated that it would actually take the computer about 10^25 years to finish this particular calculation!

More than half the "iWoz" book covers Wozniak's life pre-Apple. It's in turn heart-warming and (when describing Wozniak's pranks and phreaking) gob-smacking.

The episode about HP turning down the idea of the Apple I computer was particularly thought-provoking. Wozniak was working at HP before Apple was founded, and being loyal to his company (which he firmly admired for being led by engineers who in turn deeply respected other engineers) he offered them the chance to implement the ideas he had devised outside work time for what would become, in effect, the world's first useful personal computer. Although his managers at HP showed considerable interest, they were not able to set aside their standard, well-honed processes in order to start work on what would have been a new kind of project. Wozniak says that HP turned him down five times, before he eventually resigned from the company to invest his energy full-time into Apple. It seems like a classic example of the Innovator's Dilemma - in which even great companies can fail "by doing everything right": their "successes and capabilities can actually become obstacles in the face of changing markets and technologies".

Via numerous anecdotes, Wozniak describes a set of characteristics which are likely to lead to product success:

Technical brilliance coupled with patience and persistence. (Wozniak tells a fascinating account of how he and one helper - Randy Wigginton, at the time still at senior high school - created a brand new floppy disk drive controller in just two weeks, without any prior knowledge of disk drives);
A drive for simplicity of design (such as using a smaller number of parts, or a shorter algorithm) and superb efficiency of performance;
Users should feel an emotional attachment to the product: "Products should be obviously the best";
Humanism: "The human has to be more important than the technology".

There's shades of the iPhone experience in all these pieces of advice - even though the book iWoz was written before the iPhone was created.

There's even stronger shades of the iPhone experience in the following extracts from the book:

The Apple II was easy to program, in both BASIC (100 commands per second) and machine language (1M commands per second)... Within months dozens of companies started up and they were putting games on casette tape for the Apple II; these were all start-up companies, but thanks to our design and documentation, we made it easy to develop stuff that worked on our platform...
... the computer magazines had tons of Apple II product ads for software and hardware. Suddenly the Apple II name was everywhere. We didn't have to buy an advertisement or do anything ourselves to get the name out. We were just out there, thanks to this industry of software programs and hardware devices that sprang up around the Apple II. We became the hot fad of the age, and all the magazines (even in the mainstream press) started writing great things about us. Everywhere you looked. I mean, we couldn't buy that kind of publicity. We didn't have to.

In this way, the Apple II quickly reached sales figures far higher than anyone had dared to predict. One other factor played a vital role:

VisiCalc was so powerful it could only run on the Apple II: only our computer had enough RAM to run it.

But sales bandwaggons can lose their momentum. The iPhone bandwaggon will falter, to the extent that other smartphones turn out to be more successful at running really valuable applications (such as, for example, applications that can run in background, in ways that aren't possible on the iPhone).

Apple also lost some of its momentum in the less reliable Apple III product that followed the Apple II. Wozniak has no doubts about the root causes for the failure of the Apple III: "it was developed by committee, by the marketing dept". This leads on to the disappointing advice that Wozniak gives in the final chapter of his book: "Work alone"!

Here, I part company with Wozniak. I've explained before my view that "design by committee" can achieve, with the right setup, some outstanding results. That was my experience inside Psion. However, I do agree that the process needs to involve some first-class product managers, who have a powerful and authentic vision for the product.

Open source religion

2008-10-02T22:52:00.006+01:00

Roger Nolan, my long-time former colleague from both Psion and Symbian, raised some challenging points in his recent piece "Symbian’s open source challenge" on the VisionMobile blog. As Roger sees it, the challenge for Symbian is to get the best out of open source without becoming so fixated by the idea of open source that we fail to address the burning requirement for improved user experience. The worry is that technological or process considerations will get in the way of creating simply delightful products.

In Roger's own words - comparing the possible future evolution of Symbian software with the history of Nokia's Linux-based "maemo" platform for mobile Internet tablets:

Sadly Maemo is ... driven from a technology soapbox. This time, it’s not a features arms race, it’s open-source-or-die. The Maemo team did not sit down and say “Let’s build a great UI for an internet tablet” they sat down and said “What can we do with open source” - open source is the religion, not ease of use and making great devices that are delightful to use.

As Symbian becomes the Symbian foundation and transitions to an open source model, I hope that the open source community will take some of the burden of implementing every last codec and piece of middle-ware and the Symbian foundation can focus on UIs and ease of use. Unfortunately, I fear that they will be overcome following Maemo’s open-source religion.

In other words, is Symbian going on an free software crusade, or are we adopting open source for solidly pragmatic reasons?

My answer is that it's a bit of both, but with a strong emphasis on the pragmatic side of the scale.
The archetypal free software crusader, of course, is Richard Stallman. The 2002 book "Free as in Freedom" by Sam Williams is a sympathetic, interesting and easy-to-read account of Stallman and his very considerable impact on the world of software - but it's no hagiography.

The early chapters in the book take a friendly approach to Stallman's personal idiosyncracies. Reading these chapters, it's easy to develop a strong liking for this pioneering crusader. To my surprise, I found a lot of resonance between Stallman's life experiences and, in smaller scale, my own; for example, we share backgrounds as prodigious mathematicians who were not afraid to be outsiders. (And it seems we're both interested in life extension.)

The last few chapters provide a kind of balance, by highlighting some of the problems caused within the Free and Open Source movements by Stallman's inflexibility, apparent micro-management, and under-developed project management skills.

The narrative in the book jumps around a lot, moving backwards and forwards in time all over the place. Some readers may find that distracting, but I liked it, since it helps to show the remarkable wholeness and integrity to Stallman's conceptions.

The entire text of this book is available online at http://www.faifzilla.org/. Chapter 8 contains a stark example of the clash between the "quasi-religious" approach and the pragmatic one:

Stallman says competitive performance and price, two areas where free software operating systems such as GNU/Linux and FreeBSD already hold a distinct advantage over their proprietary counterparts, are red herrings compared to the large issues of user and developer freedom.

"It's not because we don't have the talent to make better software," says Stallman. "It's because we don't have the right. Somebody has prohibited us from serving the public. So what's going to happen when users encounter these gaps in free software? Well, if they have been persuaded by the open source movement that these freedoms are good because they lead to more-powerful reliable software, they're likely to say, 'You didn't deliver what you promised. This software's not more powerful. It's missing this feature. You lied to me.' But if they have come to agree with the free software movement, that the freedom is important in itself, then they will say, 'How dare those people stop me from having this feature and my freedom too.' ..."

...the underlying logic of Stallman's argument - that open source advocates emphasize the utilitarian advantages of free software over the political advantages - remains uncontested. Rather than stress the political significance of free software programs, open source advocates have chosen to stress the engineering integrity of the hacker development model. Citing the power of peer review, the open source argument paints programs such as GNU/Linux or FreeBSD as better built, better inspected and, by extension, more trustworthy to the average user...

When an audience member asks if, in shunning proprietary software, free software proponents lose the ability to keep up with the latest technological advancements, Stallman answers the question in terms of his own personal beliefs. "I think that freedom is more important than mere technical advance," he says. "I would always choose a less advanced free program rather than a more advanced nonfree program, because I won't give up my freedom for something like that. My rule is, if I can't share it with you, I won't take it."

Such answers, however, reinforce the quasi-religious nature of the Stallman message. Like a Jew keeping kosher or a Mormon refusing to drink alcohol, Stallman paints his decision to use free software in the place of proprietary in the color of tradition and personal belief. As software evangelists go, Stallman avoids forcing those beliefs down listeners' throats. Then again, a listener rarely leaves a Stallman speech not knowing where the true path to software righteousness lies.

Now the nearest thing to a Symbian religion is the published list of our corporate values: Excellence, Innovation, Passion, Integrity, Collaboration, People. We take these values very seriously - as we do our vision - that Symbian OS will be the most widely used software platform on the planet.

Questions such as the extent of our adoption of open source, or usage of proprietary software, are, in the end, weighed up against that list of values. Open source will lead, we believe, to greater collaboration, and to more innovation. That's a good reason to support it. But it's not an end in itself.

Indeed, adopting selected open source principles is only one of the big change initiatives that are taking place in Symbian. As I've mentioned before, we're also adopting selected principles of enterprise agile. What's more, we're looking forward to significantly closer inter-working between the development teams in Symbian and in S60, which will allow faster delivery of important new technology to the market. And last - but definitely not least - there's a whole series of measures to enable improved user experience on Symbian-powered phones. The UI that's on the just-announced Nokia 5800 XpressMusic device is a significant step in this direction.

The student syndrome

2008-10-01T18:13:00.009+01:00

Entries for Symbian's 2008 Student Essay Contest have just closed. The deadline for submission of entries was midnight (GMT) on 30 September 2008.

The contest has been advertised since June. What proportion of all the entries do you suppose were submitted in the final six hours before the deadline expired? (Bear in mind that, out of a total competition duration of more than three months, six hours is about 1/400 of the available time.)

I'll give the answer at the end of this article. It surprised me - though I ought to have anticipated the outcome. After all, for many years I've been telling people about "The Student Syndrome".

I became familiar with the concept of the student syndrome some years ago, while reading Eliyahu Goldratt's fine business-oriented novel "The Critical Chain":

Like all Goldratt's novels, Critical Chain mixes human interest with some intriguing ways of analysing business-critical topics. The ideas in these books had a big influence on the evolution of my own views about how to incorporate responsiveness and agility into large software projects where customers are heavily reliant on the software being delivered at pre-agreed dates.

Here's what I said on the topic of "variable task estimates" in the chapter "Managing plans and change" in my own 2005 book "Symbian for software leaders":

A smartphone project plan is made up from a large number of estimates for how long it will take to complete individual tasks. If the task involves novel work, or novel circumstances, or a novel integration environment, you can have a wide range of estimates for the length of time required.
It’s similar to estimating how long you will take to complete an unfamiliar journey in a busy city with potentially unreliable transport infrastructure. Let’s say that, if you are lucky, you might complete the journey in just 20 minutes. Perhaps 30 minutes is the most likely time duration. But in view of potential traffic hold-ups or train delays, you could take as long as one hour, or (in case of underground train derailments) even two hours or longer. So there’s a range of estimates, with the distribution curve having a long tail on the right hand side: there’s a non-negligible probability that the task will take at least twice as long as the individual most likely outcome.
It’s often the same with estimating the length of time for a task within a project plan.
Now imagine that the company culture puts a strong emphasis on fulfilling commitments, and never missing deadlines. If developers are asked to state a length of time in which they have (say) 95% confidence they will finish the task, they are likely to give an answer that is at least twice as long as the individual most likely outcome. They do so because:
Customers may make large financial decisions dependent on the estimate – on the assumption that it will be met;
Bonus payments to developers may depend on hitting the target;
The developers have to plan on unforeseen task interference (and other changes);
Any estimate the developers provide may get squashed down by aggressive senior managers (so they’d better pad their estimate in advance, making it even longer).
Ironically, even though such estimates are designed to be fulfilled around 95% of the time, they typically end up being fulfilled only around 50% of the time. This fact deserves some careful reflection. Even though the estimates were generous, it seems (at first sight) that they were not generous enough. In fact, here’s what happens:
In fulfilment of “Parkinson’s Law”, tasks expand to fill the available time. Developers can always find ways to improve and optimise their solutions – adding extra test cases, considering alternative algorithms and generalisations, and so forth;
Because there’s a perception (in at least the beginning of the time period) of there being ample time, developers often put off becoming fully involved in their tasks. This is sometimes called “the student syndrome”, from the observation that most students do most of the preparation for an exam in the time period just before the exam. The time lost in this way can never be regained;
Because there’s a perception of there being ample time, developers can become involved in other activities at the same time. However, these other activities often last longer than intended. So the developer ends up multi-tasking between two (or more) activities. But multi-tasking involves significant task setup time – time to become deeply involved in each different task (time to enter “flow mode” for the task). So yet more time is wasted;
Critically, even when a task is ready to finish earlier than expected, the project plan can rarely take advantage of this fact. The people who were scheduled for the next task probably aren’t ready to start it earlier than anticipated. So an early finish by one task rarely translates into an early start by the next task. On the other hand, a late finish by one task inevitably means a late start for the next start. This task asymmetry drives the whole schedule later.
In conclusion, in a company whose culture puts a strong emphasis upon fulfilling commitments and never missing deadlines, the agreed schedules are built from estimations up to twice as long as the individually most likely outcome, and even so, they often miss even these extended deadlines...
This line of analysis is one I've run through scores of times, in discussions with people, in the last four or five years. It feeds into the argument that the best way to ensure customer satisfaction and predictable delivery, is, counter-intuitively, to focus more on software quality, interim customer feedback, agile project management, self-motivated teams, and general principles of excellence in software development, than on schedule management itself.

It's in line with what Steve McConnell says,
IBM discovered 20 years ago that projects that focused on attaining the shortest schedules had high frequencies of cost and schedule overruns;
Projects that focused on achieving high quality had the best schedules and the highest productivities.
Symbian's experience over many years bears out the same conclusion. The more we've focused on achieving high quality, the better we've become with both schedule management and internal developer productivity.
As for the results of the student syndrome applied to the Symbian Essay Contest:
54% of the essays submitted to the competition were received in the final six hours (approximately the final 1/400 of the time available)
Indeed, 16% of the essays submitted were received in the final 60 minutes.
That's an impressively asymmetric distribution! (It also means that the competition judges will have to work harder than they had been expecting, right up to the penultimate day of the contest...)

Market failure and mobile operating systems

2008-09-29T22:57:00.006+01:00

In seeking to talk about economics, and about market failure, I'm moving way outside my depth. There seem to be so many different viewpoints about economics, each appearing reasonably plausible to me (when I read them in isolation), yet all contradicting each other. It's a tough subject! What one writer sees as a market failure, another writer sees instead as a failure of individual actors within that market - and so on.

However, one of my correspondents has made a series of thought-provoking comments about market failure in the particular field of mobile operating systems. I believe these comments are sufficiently unusual and also sufficiently intriguing, to deserve consideration by a wider audience - despite my reticence to broach the subject of economics. The comments arose in the responses to an earlier posting of mine, "De-fragmenting the mobile operating system space". To quote from these responses:

Currently, mobile developers withstand very high development costs due to a very fragmented mobile ecosystem, meanwhile mobile OSes enjoy a much lower developing cost than they would if they had to built compatible OSes between versions: therefore, a de-fragmentation process would move developing costs from mobile developers to mobile OS developers, that is, mobile OS companies/foundations would have to internalize those costs.

But developing an OS with full source or binary compatibility between versions is an order of magnitude more expensive than building one with broken compatibility, and it gets worse with time and versions. Moreover, building a de-fragmented mobile OS requires committing considerable resources (people, money, time) in the present, sunk costs that must have positive expected returns in the future (at least to cover developing costs and money opportunity costs).
Will foundations/consortiums (Symbian, LiMo, OHA/Android), given their non-profit nature, carry these investments in the present to obtain stable software platforms in the future? As Adam Smith wrote, displaying good will and hope is not enough: mobile foundations/consortiums/companies committing resources in the present must charge higher prices in their future and profit handsomely from their risky investments, otherwise the effort will stop...

To paraphrase:

Economic incentives on individual mobile operating systems will lead these operating systems to diverge from each other;
This divergence will mean that application developers (and providers of middleware, etc) will suffer greater difficulties, because of having to spread their efforts across larger numbers of diverse mobile operating systems;
As things stand, no one who is in a position to actually do something to reduce the divergence of mobile operating systems, has a sufficient financial incentive to make that happen;
So we can actually expect things to get worse for application developers, rather than better.

(I'm over-simplifying what my correspondent actually says; see the original for the full argument.)

Tentatively, I have the following answers:

I believe that things will actually get better for application developers, rather than worse;
It's my experience that major players in the mobile phone industry can, on occasion, take actions based on strategy rather than business case;
This requires strong self-discipline on the part of these companies, but it's not unknown;
Action on strategic grounds becomes more likely, the more clearly the argument is made that the actions that make sense in the short-term are actually detrimental to longer term interests;
The other key factor in this decision is whether the various actors can have a high degree of confidence in at least the medium-term viability of the software system they're being asked to collectively support.

So, in line with what I've argued here, what we need to do is to keep on pushing (in creative and diverse ways) the merits of the case in favour of de-fragmenting mobile operating systems - and to keep on highlighting the positive features of the mobile operating systems (such as Symbian OS) that are most likely to enable at least medium-term success for the whole industry.

Incidentally, one big contribution that the shareholders and customers of Symbian are taking, towards that end, is to agree to standardise on S60 as the UI framework for the future. They've taken that decision, even though both UIQ and MOAP(S) have much to commend them as alternative UI frameworks on top of Symbian OS. They've taken that decision for the greater common good. New phones based on the UIQ and MOAP(S) UI frameworks will continue to appear for a while, during a transitional period, but the Symbian Foundation platform software is standardising on the S60 framework. Elements of both UIQ and MOAP(S) will be available inside the Symbian Foundation platform, but the resulting system will be compatible with S60, not UIQ or MOAP(S). That's a decision that will bring some pain, but the shareholders and customers have been able to support it because:

S60 is now (in contrast to the earlier days) sufficiently flexible and mature, to support the kinds of user experience which previously were available only via UIQ or MOAP(S);
Indeed, S60 now has flexibility to support new types of UI experiences, whilst maintaining common underlying APIs;
Distribution of S60 will pass out of the hands of Nokia, into the hands of the independent Symbian Foundation.

I also believe that the disciplines of binary compatibility that have been built up in Symbian, over several years, are significantly reducing the difficulties faced by developers of add-ons and plug-ins for Symbian software. Because of this discipline, it now costs us less to maintain compatibility across different versions of our software. It's true that some practical issues remain here, with surprising incompatibilities still occasionally arising in parts of the software stack on Symbian-powered phones other than Symbian OS itself. But progress is being made - and the leading nature of the Symbian platform will become clearer and clearer.

To finish, I'll give my response to one more comment:

Samsung is gaining market share and producing S60 devices. Let's suppose that Samsung starts snatching portions of market share from Nokia, do you really think anyone believes that Nokia would refrain from intentionally breaking compatibility to derail Samsung, if that would be necessary?

I can see that there might be some temptation towards such a behaviour, inside Nokia. But I don't see that the outcome is inevitable. Nokia would have to weigh up various possible scenarios:

Symbian Foundation quality assurance tests will notice the compatibility breaks, and will refuse to give Symbian accreditation to this changed software;
The other licensees could create their own fork of the software (which would have official endorsement from the Symbian Foundation) and build up a lot of momentum behind it.

Instead, Nokia - like all users of Symbian Foundation software - should be inclined to seek differentiation by providing their own unique services on top of or alongside Symbian platform software rather than by illicitly modifying the platform software itself. That's a far better way to deploy skilled software engineers.

Beyond smartphones

2008-09-27T10:39:00.015+01:00

Smartphones constitute a huge market place. Bear in mind, not just the enormous number of smartphones sold each year, but also the fact that manufacturers earn considerably larger profits, for each smartphone sold, than they do for ordinary phones. Plausibly, although smartphones account for only around 10-15% by units of the 1B+ total annual market of all mobile phones, they provide upwards of 20-25% of the sales revenues for all mobile phones - and perhaps more than 40% of the profits. What's more, users of smartphones typically run up significantly larger monthly usage bills than users of other kinds of mobile phones.

For this reason, the 1996 strategic decision by Psion Software to focus future development of the EPOC32 software system on smartphones turns out to have been marvellously prescient. I'm proud to have been part of that strategic review. The easy decision at the time would have been to continue to focus on the category of devices where EPOC software had historically flourished (in both its 16-bit and 32-bit variants) - in smart handheld organisers, known as "palmtops" or "PDAs". But the decision was taken to target a market that did not exist at the time, and which was expected in due course to dwarf the PDA market. This sowed the seeds for the corporate transformation, 18 months later, of Psion Software into Symbian.

As is often the case with market transformations, the new device category took longer to materialise than had been anticipated. But eventually smartphone sales exceeded all our expectations. It's as computing pioneer Joseph Licklider, stated back in 1965:

"People tend to overestimate what can be done in one year and to underestimate what can be done in five or ten years."

However, the concept of palmtop computing devices has not gone away. It keeps re-emerging, with new names, such as subnotebooks, UMPCs (Ultra Mobile Personal Computers), and MIDs (Mobile Internet Devices), or in new variants such as PNDs (Personal Navigation Devices) or Kindle-like mobile e-book readers. On the LinkedIn forums discussing the forthcoming 2008 Symbian Smartphone Show, Malik Kamal Saadi of Informa raises the following question:

What OSs will be addressing Mobile-Internet-Devices and UMPCs?

Operators and vendors are now looking to extend their opportunities beyond the traditional mobile handsets market by adding new device categories to their portfolios: MIDs and UMPCs. Silicon suppliers such as Qualcomm, Intel, and TI see these devices as the next big convergent device segment. However it is not clear yet which OS type will be more suitable for this type of devices: ARM based (e.g. Symbian, mobile Linux such Android, maemo, etc)? or X86 based (e.g. light version of Microsoft Windows, or Apple MAC)?

Symbian is more suitable for mobile phones but I was wondering if , with Symbian Foundation, this OS could be upgraded to address the MID and UMPC market?

For simplicity, for now, I'll use the term "MID" to cover all of these emerging categories of smart handheld devices which major on functionality other than phone communications (in other words, they aren't smartphones). As I see it, the question of MIDs breaks down into three:

After many previous false starts, are there reasons for us to take MIDs seriously as a device category in the foreseeable future?

Even if the market for MIDs grows in absolute terms, will it be significant enough to warrant distracting resources onto that market, away from other growth areas that might be even more significant?

What operating system is the likely winner in the MID space?

1. The history of false starts with MIDs

The ill-fated Palm Foleo (which was cancelled before it came to market) and Sony mylo are but two of many examples of devices in this same general space:

Announced with a lot of fanfare
Pitched as finding an exciting new "sweet spot" in between laptop computers and smartphones
But failing to live up to the vision - achieving at best lack-lustre market success.

As another example, it's no secret that Nokia's maemo-powered Internet Tablet devices, although providing a great learning experience for working with open source, make only a limited contribution to Nokia's overall revenues.

However, I see the delays with market success of MIDs as being temporary - akin, in fact, to the delays before the eventual market success of smartphones:

The declining cost of key items of hardware, which has led to smartphones becoming ever more affordable, will likewise move many types of MIDs inside the budget range of larger and larger pools of potential purchasers;

Some specific technical and ergonomic problems needed to be solved, before the appeal of a device can extend beyond the early technology enthusiasts; these include better screens (for mobile e-book readers), improved GPS fix technology, and better mobile internet browsing;

Just as smartphones grow in numbers as a result of increased word-of-mouth recommendations by users of these devices, various MIDs will benefit from similar crescendos of user endorsement;

An industry that is dedicated to the creation and marketing of these devices takes some time to come into being and establish itself (in the analysis of Bhaskar Chakravorti, this takes roughly twice as long to happen, as you might expect from just looking at Moore's Law technology curves) ; but virtuous cycle effects do eventually emerge.

I have one other reason for believing in the commercial future of MIDs - particulary those which are PDAs. I've personally derived great utility from the Psion Series 5mx that I've been using virtually every waking hour for the last nine years. The device supplements my memory, keeps track of my appointments, gathers my thoughts and ideas, marshalls my to-do items, and much, much more. There's no doubt in my mind that there are many other people who would, similarly, benefit from the highly useful PIM (personal information management) capabilities of such devices:

A proportion of users will be satisfied by the PIM capabilities of a single multi-purpose smartphone device. These users will just carry one smart mobile device.

But a significant proportion of users will prefer to carry a separate PDA-like device, in addition to a smartphone. They'll value the additional benefits from a device with a larger screen and larger keyboard.

2. Other directions beyond smartphones

MIDs are one potential direction of market expansion beyond existing smartphones. But they're not the only one. Indeed, there are two other directions which have consistently held higher importance in Symbian's thinking:

The drive towards mass-market smartphones - in which smartphone technology is used inside ordinary-looking phones used by larger and larger numbers of consumers;
The drive towards super-smartphones - in which additional computing powers, new peripherals and sensors, and other hardware and software enhancements combine to provide new experiences and services for sophisticated and demanding users at the always-fluid yet lucrative top end of the market.

It would have been a major strategic error for Symbian to lose focus on either of these two growth areas. What merit an additional 10-20 million units of sales of PDA-like devices, if this diversion of attention caused us to miss the chance of the next 200-500 million units of smartphones?

On the other hand, these markets (MIDs and smartphones) are not separate. They've had elements in common in the past, and they're becoming increasingly connected. An important meaning of the word "convergence" that is (rightly) oft-applied to the smart mobile device industry, is that the technology and solutions applicable to one type of smart mobile device will increasingly be applicable to all other types of smart mobile device. There's less need for highly optimised distinct solutions: Moore's Law and faster network speeds mean there's less need to worry over every jot and tittle of hardware and network capacity. Even though various devices look quite different from each other and are operated differently by users, the underlying hardware and software can be similar.

In other words, it can be argued that the days when hardware and software had to be uniquely tailored to each different mobile device category are receding. If that's true, then benefits of scale, in developing the same technology solution for different kinds of smart mobile devices (both smartphones and MIDs), may outweigh the advantages of having the best solution for each different device. And if that is true, we can expect the same mobile operating system to take the lead in all these different areas. So Symbian can no longer stand aside from the general MID category.

Happily, the creation of the Symbian Foundation come at exactly the right time, changing industry dynamics to make it much more likely that Symbian platform software will be adopted, not just in standard smartphones, mass-market smartphones, and super-smartphones, but also in various kinds of MID. What Symbian itself could not do, the newly enlarged and newly empowered Symbian ecosystem will take in its stride.

3. Picking the winning operating system for MIDs

In selecting the software system for their devices (MIDs, smartphones, or otherwise), manufacturers generally have four kinds of criteria in mind:

Technology factors: which software delivers superior performance, battery life, security, low defect count, improved user experience, etc?
Commercial factors: which software results in low total cost of development, manufacture, deployment, and maintenance; and which provides good opportunities for value-adding differentiation?
Political factors: which software is least likely to have its evolution controlled by corporations or organisations that fail to share common goals with the manufacturer?
Reliability factors: which software is likely to be delivered on schedule and to pre-agreed quality levels, in fulfilment of a multi-year evolutionary roadmap of changes?

An operating system will need to score well on all four counts, before it is adopted for any large ("bet the farm") projects in commercially mature companies.

The planned creation of the independent Symbian Foundation, with royalty-free licensing of the Symbian platform software, increases the attractiveness of this software to manufacturers considering MIDs:

The commercial and contractual barriers of entry will be lowered
If a manufacturer finds a need to change some part of the software system, to address a specific niche device need, that will be much easier than before, given the open access to the source code
The improved openness will attract a larger ecosystem than before, which will in turn be able to assist with the development and customisation of MID-specific distributions of Symbian platform software.

These changes allow the various technical merits and reliability merits of Symbian software to shine through more clearly, freed from any cloud of uncertainty over commercial or political questions:

These technical merits include long battery life, platform security, networking bearer mobility, real-time services, and support for multiple different models of application development;
The reliability merits include an admirable track record of shipping software on time.

Both these sorts of merits count for a great deal, even in a world where the hardware and network capabilities have increased substantially from just several years ago. That applies for MIDs as well as for smartphones. Indeed, these increases in hardware and network capacity bring more stress and strain onto the software, and make it all the more important that the software is fully fit for purpose. For all these reasons, I believe that Symbian can be the winning operating system for MIDs, as well as for smartphones.

Revealing secrets

2008-09-25T09:58:00.003+01:00

I'm increasingly looking forward to the unveiling of lots of secrets about Symbian software. The more I hear about specific ideas third party developers have for add-on and plug-in software for Symbian devices, the more I realise that their needs will be better served once the Symbian secrecy kimono is swept away.

Take one example, from my browsing of the Forum Nokia Developer Community Discussion Board. User "jas76" asks a question:

Hi, I need to mute downlink audio (i.e. from remote end) during call; and play music on music player. Remote voice is currently mixed with music and couldn't find a way around it with any public API/SDK plugin. All discussion thread finaly result in to microphone mute. (mute mic is possible though via SDK plugin)
Is this possible from any private API that we could request? or there is no API that could achieve it? Any experince from Nokia partners in this area?

Less than 90 minutes later, there's an answer on the Forum, from one of the Forum Nokia Experts, "symbianyucca":

I'm rather sure there are not such an API available.

Needless to say, jas76 had been hoping for a different kind of answer. He followed up:

Hi Symbianyucca, Thanks for your inputs. So disappointing that such a simple functionality/requirement and Nokia made it not difficult but impossible. If this is because of security reason they could lock it under some capability. But making it impossible is really really disappointing.
Thanks anyways for your response. Anyone else tried to get API from Nokia for this purpose?

And the thread goes cold.

Is the answer on the Forum correct? Is the particular aspiration of the third party developer one that is reasonable, from a technical point of view? The point is, it's really hard to tell, without gaining access to information that is currently not available to the majority of participants of this kind of forum.

By the way, before going further, I must say that I am impressed by the helpfulness, knowledge, friendliness, diligence, and upbeat humour shown on these forums by the Forum Nokia champions - who are generally providing answers on a voluntary (unpaid) basis. These individuals do a fine job, oiling the wheels of discussion, and making lots of useful suggestions, to nurture and expand a spirit of community self-help. However, there are often limits on the help that can be provided in this way. That's because of current restrictions on distributing the source code of Symbian OS and S60. Without access to this source code, many discussions become stalled.

Take another example. Significant numbers of developers (including researchers at universities) are keen to explore the interesting possibilities of the information known to the phone about its location. The phone itself is usually in contact with several different cell towers. If applications could access this full set of information, it would allow them to determine the position of the phone more accurately than is possible by just using information from a single cell tower. However, I'm told that no APIs are available that provide this richer set of information. On the other hand, internal Nokia applications do seem to be able to benefit from this information. (Note: I understand that this information will be available to third parties in Symbian OS v9.5 - but that's of little comfort to developers who are trying to develop location-aware applications on existing Symbian phones.)

That's two examples. There are many more. I probably not have picked the best examples. I'm not sure about the details of each example, and I may got some of the details wrong. However, the general points seem clear:

Developers will in principle benefit considerably from being able to delve into currently restricted information on Symbian and S60 APIs, once the code is placed into open source;
This will avoid the situation where, at present, too many interesting discussion threads become stalled, and enthusiasm withers away before it has the chance to create an important innovation.

On the other hand, there are of course drawbacks to this kind of openness. There are often good reasons why internal APIs have not been publicised.

For example, as soon as they are published in official SDKs, APIs become subject to tight compatibility change control. This change control is vital, for the stability of add-on and plug-in applications that depend on these APIs. But it also restricts the freedom of internal Symbian and S60 developers to evolve and improve these APIs. Especially while APIs are at an early stage in their life, there can be compelling reasons for developers to completely change their design. So there will need to be a careful education campaign, that explains that internal APIs (and many other pieces of information which developers obtain by browsing the source code) can change without warning - and may even change between two apparently similar versions of the same phone (distinguished, perhaps, only by a minor build number)!

For this reason, I expect that discussion forums will collect and publicise information about the ways these internal APIs change between different phones.

Secondly, some part of the code of a phone will not be made public. Like it or not, the owners of some parts of the code may decide that the code would allow leakage of knowledge of commercially sensitive algorithms, data structures, or whatever. However, the good news is that, in the world of the Symbian Foundation, the extent of this kind of withheld code will be very much less than at present. Whereas the current bias often seems to be, "in case of any doubt, withhold", the new bias will be, "release the code, unless there's a very strong specific reason not to do so".

So we can look forward to moving from a situation where developers are often constrained by lack of information, towards one in which the primary constraint will be their own ability. That's a much better situation.

That leaves the question: how long will we need to wait? Given that it may take up to two years (from the initial SyFo announcement on 24th June) for the completion of the exercise to move Symbian platform code into open source, it may seem this is a far-off future vision. But many things will be happening before the end of that two year period. Parts of the source code will be released, in a staged manner, at various phases during 2009. We'll be moving as fast as we can, subject to due care and attention - and subject to continuing to meet our very important "business as usual" commitments of interim deliveries of technologies and customer support.

Open source coexistence with marvellous non-free add-ons

2008-09-22T18:25:00.004+01:00

"Has Symbian thought open source through?" That's the question David Meyer of ZDNet asks this morning. David explains the context of his question:

Last week I visited Symbian's labs here in London. The assembled hacks were shown some very interesting stuff, such as what could be done with a quad core mobile chipset... There was also some cool stuff with mobile-based audio EQ, which always pleases me.

We also got shown some of the fruits of Symbian's work with Scalado on the graphics front. The engineer demonstrated very quick loading of and zooming into a 21-megapixel picture, which was very impressive but raised ... unanswered questions: ... what precisely is to happen with this valuable work once Symbian goes open source?
Given that [going open source] will involve stripping out all the third-party, proprietary stuff that can't go open source, why is Symbian still bothering with such partnerships?

Here's my answer. First, I'm sure that there are aspects of going open source which we in Symbian have yet to think through properly. Moving some 400,000 files of source code into open source is bound to pose a whole host of unexpected problems. However, this particular question is one that has received considerable thought.

The highly impressive Scalado mobile imaging software which Symbian licensed earlier this year is only one of a large number of add-on or plug-in solutions which are available, either as part of Symbian OS itself, or as a pre-integrated supplementary solution. For obvious reasons, I won't say anything more about Scalado, but I'll address the general question of an add-on solution A from vendor V, which may be included in a phone created by customer C of Symbian. Suppose that A is currently subject to a license fee F, which is payable:

Either from C direct to V,
Or from Symbian to V, with the costs in this case currently being covered as part of the Symbian OS licence fee paid by C to Symbian.

So what happens to this licence fee F once the Symbian platform becomes open source, and there's no longer any licence fee for Symbian platform?

It turns out there are quite a few options available.

For example, the Symbian platform may exclude A, but may instead include a more basic version A0. This will be good enough for many purposes - and will allow customers to build many kinds of successful phones. But customers who want particularly responsive or feature-rich behaviour in the area covered by A will be able to pay fee F directly to V, and will apply A in place of A0 in their phones. So long as the code for A is independent of the Symbian platform code for A0 (in legal terms, so long as A is not a derivative work of A0), there's no obligation on V to licence their code using the EPL applicable to the Symbian platform itself. That is, they won't need to make their source code available.

Is this somehow at variance with the motivation of Symbian in creating an open source platform? It depends what you think the primary motivation is for this move. If you think that motivation is to drive out all cost from phones, you may be surprised by this option. However, once you realise that the main drivers are actually to lower barriers of entry and experimentation, to boost innovation, to deepen collaboration, to raise quality, and to accelerate time-to-market, you won't be so surprised. Open source does not imply low-value! And nor does open source imply that anything which builds on top of it, needs to be zero cost.

Another option is that vendor V will make A available royalty-free as part of the open source platform, but will earn revenues:

From consultancy work in the area of A
Or, from making available a chargeable new version A1 that provides even better performance and/or new features.

In short, there will be plenty of ways for creative partner companies to continue to earn handsome income from their add-on and plug-in solutions to Symbian platform software.

I'll close by returning to the last part of the initial question: "...why is Symbian still bothering with such partnerships?" It's because these partnerships collectively generate a huge quantity of impressive add-on and plug-in solutions, which allow our customers to customise and optimise their phones in numerous ways. And that's good for everyone.

Five reasons open source won't work in mobile(?)

2008-09-17T22:44:00.007+01:00

John Bruggeman, Chief Marketing Officer of Wind River, gave the stand-out presentation on Day One of OSiM (Open Source in Mobile) conference in Berlin today. It was an extraordinary piece of theatre, that captivated the audience - who were already in the midst of a feast of interesting and thought-provoking presentations from other speakers.

Officially entitled "How open source can drive your next device innovation breakthrough", the majority of the presentation focused on an artful walkthrough of what John called "Five reasons why open source won't work in mobile".

These reasons were presented, with great eloquence and wit, as a wake-up call - "to uncover the ugly truth".

Here's the context. Speakers earlier in the day had outlined enchanting prospects for Open Source Linux to reach an installed base of 10 billion mobile devices within perhaps just five years (that's right - it would involve many people having more than one device - such as separate mobile phones and MIDs). But John said that such prospects were illusory, and he gave the following reasons:

1. Linux phones will never be as good as the iPhone

Here, despite what you might first think, "good" means "good for application developers". Apple iPhone application developers can be confident that, with just one version of their code, they can reach every member of the 15M+ iPhone user community. But in the Linux space, there are already 96 different major and minor variants (based on 10 different mobile Linux platforms). So application developers will have to work much harder, even to begin to reach all Linux phone users.

[Although John was exaggerating some of his rhetoric, for effect, he was quite clear that the figure of 96 was bona fide - and he said that his Wind River colleague Jason Whitmire would show a slide to justify that figure in another presentation later in the day. Unfortunately I missed that later presentation, since I was in another stream at that time.]

2. The mobile industry has been confused and misled by the Symbian Foundation announcement

Previously, open source endeavours in mobile were united (albeit in a highly fragmented sense - see point 1) around the vision of Linux being at the heart of any praiseworthy phones. But with the announcement that the Symbian platform will become open source, everyone has become confused.

[John actually said that "Symbian have polluted the open source message by telling everyone open source is easy" and "Symbian has a gigantic community, but in an evil and dirty way, Symbian is attracting children with candy". As I said, it was an extraordinary piece of theatre - with lots of exaggeration for effect.]

3. Operators insist on hedging their bets

Because there are so many platform choices, without clear winners, operators are fearful of the risk of standardising on the wrong choices. That's a big risk for them. So they bet on multiples - perpetuating the fragmented status quo.

4. Phone manufacturers won't let go of the past

Phone manufacturers have built up huge amounts of legacy code, on numerous operating systems, and they insist on keeping on using these systems. Just like the operators, they fear the risk of giving up what turns out to be a winning system - and in this way, they keep the whole industry confused.

5. Too many people in the mobile value chain just don't get it

Too many people have been confused by the word "free" and have thought that, because Linux itself has zero licensing cost, everything else of value in the emerging new mobile value chain should also be free of cost. They don't realise that the real meaning of "free" is "free access". This distracts people from being able to generate the new kinds of revenues that will strengthen the companies who have key roles to play in the open source mobile value chain.

In summary, "We are all to blame".

After the wake-up call

Was that the end of the talk? (After all, due to previous sessions over-running, it was now well into the time allocated for the lunch session.)

Well, after some dramatic suspense, John went on to offer another set of five points - things that, whilst hard for us to do (he said), would make open source work in mobile after all:

Hire new product marketers, who deeply understand the different world of open source;

Hire new engineering directors, who (likewise) deeply understand the different world of open source. We need to realise that developing open source software solutions is fundamentally different from the processes in proprietary projects;

Stop looking over your shoulder, and learn to innovate;

Change your low cost platform into a high value play;

Think outside the phone - there are incredible lessons that we can learn from adjacent and complementary markets.

Evaluation

My own view is that the proposed solutions are a lot less convincing than the list of problems. True, open source introduces and demands new thinking models. However, many of the disciplines of large-scale system software development apply in fairly similar ways across both closed-source and open-source projects.

As I see it, the real solution to platform fragmentation is clear platform leadership. Once it becomes clear to operators and handset manufacturers that a given platform is going to allow them strong opportunities for meaningful differentiation, speedy product development, good quality output, and significant revenues, they'll naturally gravitate towards that platform, and other platforms will fade from the scene.

Remember the old adage: the best marketing tool is a winning product. That beats a bunch of pretty powerpoint slides anyday. If you don't have a winning product, then you'll inevitably struggle. Historically, the Symbian platform has been advanced by the visible market successes of a series of breakthrough phone models. (And the very first phone manufacturers who came to us, had all taken a close look at the Psion Series 5 PDA, and liked what they saw.) The longer term success of the Symbian platform will be determined by whether or not there are new breakthrough commercially successful phones in the next 12-24 months. With 92 separate products (*) under development by our customers at the last count, I see plenty of grounds for optimism.

And by the way, if anyone ever does hear me (or anyone else from Symbian) giving the impression that "open source is easy", please pull me up. Building world-beating smartphones is hard, however you go about the business. Recognising that it is a hard task is, paradoxically, part of the beginning of the real solution. Sad to say, clinging to the hope that there's an easy route to smartphone success has been the downfall of many a project.

Footnote: (*) Symbian uses the following principle to count the number of products under development (as opposed to those which are merely "prospects" or "roadmap items"):

Models in development are defined by Symbian as phones prior to launch where licensees

have committed a minimum development team; and
have a visible plan to launch; and
have a minimum expected lifetime shipment for the phone.