Mobile Opportunity - News And Views from Google MO

Today Adobe announced a series of changes to its emerging web applications platform. The changes include:

–The next version of the mobile Flash runtime will be free of license fees. Adobe also confirmed that the mobile version of the Air runtime will be free.

–Adobe changed its licensing terms and released additional technical information that will make it easier for companies to create their own Flash-compatible products.

–The company announced a new consortium called Open Screen supporting the more open versions of Flash and Air. Members of the new group include the five leading handset companies, three mobile operators (including NTT DoCoMo and Verizon), technology vendors (including Intel, Cisco, and Qualcomm), and content companies (BBC, MTV, and NBC Universal). Google, Apple, and Microsoft are not members. It’s not clear to me what the consortium members have actually agreed to do. My guess is it’s mostly a political group.

Adobe said that the idea behind the announcements is to create a single consistent platform that lets developers create an application or piece of content once and run it across various types of devices and operating systems. That idea is very appealing to developers and content companies today. It was equally appealing two years ago, when then-CEO of Adobe Bruce Chizen made the exact same promise (link):

If we execute appropriately we will be the engagement platform, or the layer, on top of anything that has an LCD display, any computing device — everything from a refrigerator to an automobile to a video game to a computer to a mobile phone.

If Adobe had made the Open Screen announcement two years ago, I think it could have caught Microsoft completely flat-footed, and Adobe might have been in a very powerful position by now. But by waiting two years, Adobe gave Microsoft advance warning and plenty of runway room to react — so much so that ArsTechnica today called Adobe’s announcement a reaction to Microsoft Silverlight (link).

Also, the most important changes appear to apply to the next version of mobile Flash and the upcoming mobile version of Air — meaning this was in part a vaporware announcement. Even when the new runtime software ships, it will take a long time to get it integrated into mobile phones. So once again, Microsoft has a long runway to maneuver on.

Still, the changes Adobe made are very useful. There’s no way Flash could have become ubiquitous in the mobile world while Adobe was still charging fees for it. The changes to the Flash license terms remove one of the biggest objections I’ve seen to Flash from open source advocates (link). The Flash community seems excited (link, link). And the list of supporters is impressive. Looking through the obligatory quotes attached to the Adobe release, two things stand out:

–Adobe got direct mentions of Air from ARM, Intel, SonyEricsson, Verizon, and Nokia (although Nokia promised only to explore Air, while it’s on the record promising to bundle Silverlight mobile).

–The inclusion of NBC Universal in the announcement will have Adobe people chuckling because Microsoft signed up NBC to stream the Olympics online using Silverlight. So NBC is warning Microsoft not to take it for granted, and Adobe gets to stick its tongue out.

What does it all mean?

Nothing much in the short term. As I mentioned earlier, this is mostly a vaporware announcement (other than the license changes). Some people are speculating that this will put pressure on Apple to make Flash available on the iPhone (link). That’s possible, if Apple’s real concern was that they didn’t like Flash Lite. Now they can port full Flash, or someone else can do it. But if Apple is in reality unwilling to let anyone else’s platform run on the iPhone then we’ll see other objections to Flash emerge.

The marketing competition to control the future of web apps is continuing to heat up. Microsoft is trying to take the whole thing proprietary by creating a comprehensive architecture, Adobe is trying to drive its own platform, Sun is trying to re-energize Java, Google is making its own moves, and so on (link). Plus, of course, most web app developers today are happy with what they’re using now and have little interest in switching to any of the new architectures (check out the dandy commentary by Joel Spolsky here).

It’s an enormously complex situation, and it’s going to take months, if not years, before we can start to see who’s winning and who is losing. Rubicon is working on a white paper that will try to clarify the situation a bit. I’ll let you know when it’s published.

In the meantime, enjoy the marketing fireworks. The intense competition is forcing companies to innovate faster and open up their products, as Adobe did today. I think that process is good for just about everyone in the industry.

There’s so much hype in the mobile industry that I’m always reluctant to use a word like “shocking,” but nothing else fits Nokia’s announcement today that it will support Microsoft Silverlight.

If you missed the press release (link), Nokia said that it’s going to make Microsoft Silverlight available for all of its mobile platforms — Series 40 (the low-end phone OS), S60 (the high-end OS), and its Maemo Internet tablet. (It’s not clear if Silverlight will be bundled or just offered as a download.) Silverlight is a web app graphics and interface layer, intended to displace Adobe Flash.

The announcement was shocking for several reasons:

–Up until now, Nokia and Adobe had worked together closely. Nokia is one of the few companies paying to bundle Flash on its phones, and Nokia had featured Adobe prominently at some of its developer events in Silicon Valley. So the announcement I was expecting was that Nokia would bundle Air, the next evolution of Flash, rather than its competitor.

–Nokia has generally treated Microsoft as the spawn of the devil. The whole Symbian OS consortium was designed primarily as a way to prevent Microsoft from getting a controlling role in mobile software. Now Nokia gives Microsoft’s software layer a huge boost?

–Although Microsoft had hinted vaguely about taking Silverlight mobile, it had given no definite plans at all. So this is a huge step forward for Silverlight.

–Just a few weeks ago, Nokia bought TrollTech and announced that its software was going to unify development across Series 40 and S60. Now Nokia endorses Silverlight, which will also run across Series 40 and S60. Which one are developers supposed to focus on?

What in the world is going on?

I don’t know. Nobody from Nokia has explained it to me, so I have to read between the lines. Nokia says in the press release: “Nokia aims to support market leading and content rich internet application environments and to embrace and encourage open innovation. By working with Microsoft, we are creating terrific opportunities and additional choices for the development community.” Okay, so I guess what they’re saying is that they want to support every platform and development option out there. Presumably the benefit to them is that they can claim their phones support more software than anyone else.

I doubt that’s the only motivation, though. By supporting numerous platforms, Nokia reduces the possibility that any one of them can dominate the market and push around Nokia. It also lets Nokia play the sides off against one another. I’m sure the threat of embracing Air made Microsoft give Nokia a very good deal on Silverlight, and no doubt Nokia will now use its Microsoft relationship to get business concessions from Adobe (assuming that Nokia still plans to work with Adobe at all; that’s not entirely clear).

Anyway, I can sort of see how this all works for Nokia strategically, although it feels like Nokia is trying too hard to be clever. I’m not as clear on the benefits of all this for mobile developers and users. As was covered in last week’s post on mobile apps (link), many developers view the proliferation of platforms as a problem, not a benefit. Microsoft itself said in the Nokia press release:

“We want to make sure developers and designers don’t have to constantly recreate the wheel and build different versions of applications and services for multiple operating systems, browsers and platforms.”

That’s a pretty danged funny quote coming from a company that now offers at least four mobile platforms (two versions of Windows Mobile, Silverlight, Tablet PC, and does .Net CF count as a fifth?), in a press release from a company that apparently wants to support every platform available. If you really think platform confusion is a problem, guys, look in a mirror.

For users, the benefit of all this deal-making is unclear. We’re stumbling into a world where you’ll need to know details of which platforms are loaded on a particular phone in order to know which apps it can run. I can’t think of a better way to discourage use of mobile applications.

Nokia bought Trolltech for about $150 million, and there’s all sorts of speculation online about what it means. Before I get to that, let me quickly summarize what Trolltech does:

Trolltech is a Norwegian company that makes development tools and Linux software. Its best-known products are Qt (a software layer and development tools for writing applications that run across multiple operating systems, including Windows, Mac, and Linux), Qtopia (a user interface and applications layer for Linux), and Qtopia Phone Edition (a Linux software environment for mobile phones).

In the mobile world, Qtopia Phone Edition has been the company’s best-known product, although it hasn’t exactly been a commercial success. Motorola uses a version of Qt in its Linux mobile phones, but not all of Qtopia. The Sony Mylo mobile device uses Qtopia, as did the Sharp Zaurus PDAs. But Trolltech had so much trouble getting a mainstream phone licensee for Qtopia that it created its own hardware prototype, the Greenphone. (Out of fairness, I should add that Trolltech has a lot of other tiny licensees you’ve never heard of; you can see the full list here.)

The obvious assumption would be that Nokia bought Trolltech for its phone technology, but that’s not what Nokia says. The company’s press release says Trolltech will help advance its “cross-platform software strategy for mobile devices and desktop applications, and…Internet services business. With Trolltech, Nokia and third party developers will be able to develop applications that work in the Internet, across Nokia’s device portfolio and on PCs.”

All About Symbian reinforced that message, reproducing a slide from the Nokia press briefing that showed Qt layered on top of Nokia Series 40, S60, and a variety of desktop PC operating systems (link). The Guardian quoted a Nokia spokesperson as saying the emphasis of the deal is development tools: “This is about Trolltech’s fantastic tools. You can much faster develop programmes which can work on multiple platforms.” (link).

Vnunet quoted an analyst saying that Nokia will use Qtopia to help deploy its Ovi Internet services cross-platform (link). I don’t really see the Internet connection; Qtopia has not been a contender in the net applications world the way that Flash and Silverlight are. But maybe Nokia wants to build it into a contender.

Other analysts suggested other motivations for the purchase. Some of the commentary on Slashdot suggested that Nokia is investing in Linux to counter Google Android (link). ArsTechnica suggested that Nokia might be planning to replace S60 with Qt (link), while others suggested that Nokia plans to use Linux instead of Symbian. Richard Windsor of Nomura pointed out in an e-mail analysis that the purchase of Qt rips the guts out of Motorola’s Linux plans, although he guesses that’s more of a happy side effect for Nokia than the primary motivation.

But an unsigned article on ZDNet UK had the most sweeping interpretation, basically saying that this spells certain death for all proprietary operating systems (link):

Nokia’s bet is that the sheer size of the Qt 4-based market will be a decisive inducement for everyone else, handset makers, operators, and pure applications players alike, and that the explosion in compatibility will amplify the market for everyone much as happened on the desktop when MS-DOS anointed the PC architecture. But unlike then, Qt 4 will break forever the idea that one part of the market can seal itself off as a profitable mini-universe, an idea as archaic in the 21st century as the feudalism it so closely resembles.

As we say here in California, I want some of what he’s been smoking.

What does it really mean?

We’re all assuming that Nokia actually has a coherent master plan here. Although $150m is a lot of money to me personally, it’s mouse nuts to Nokia. Maybe Nokia bought Trolltech just as an experiment, or to keep it from falling into some other company’s hands. The fact that Nokia’s going to continue to develop its Maemo version of Linux, which is not based on the Trolltech technology, suggests a certain amount of incoherence.

If you want to be really Machiavellian, you could speculate that this purchase is the Nokia mobile phone organization’s answer to Maemo — “you tablet guys keep your version of Linux, now we have our own.”

But let’s assume there really is a plan, and it’s aimed at competitors. About six months ago, I wrote about Nokia’s ambitions to be a computer company (link). Now we see them dealing themselves into the operating system competition as well. No matter what you think Nokia’s motives are, the fact is that it’s now the owner of a respectable cross-platform software layer that runs on PCs and mobile devices. Nokia is now a software layer company, in very direct competition with other layer companies like Microsoft and Adobe and Sun. The deal also makes Nokia a much more important player in the open source community. And it puts Nokia in more direct opposition to the companies with their own operating systems — Apple and Google and (once again) Microsoft.

That’s a huge potential change. I say “potential” because Nokia has a lot more to do if it really wants to compete. The Trolltech team will need more investment (they have been losing money) and Nokia has a lot of work to do in developer evangelism and support to make the challenge real. But the potential is there.

I think that as the implications of the deal become clear, Nokia may have trouble continuing to partner with some of its new competitors. For example, it has spent a lot of time positioning itself as a partner to Adobe Air, but it’s hard to see the evolved Qt as anything other than a competitor. Same thing for Google.

As for how this fits with all of Nokia’s other products, I’m having a lot of trouble understanding how Qt will cohabit with S60 and Series 40. What exactly are developers supposed to develop for, and which user interface will the phones feature? If Nokia tries to keep all of them going, its phone software is going to look like a petit four, with layers stacked on layers stacked on layers. That makes for a nice pastry, but in a mobile phone it’s a recipe for bad performance and short battery life. It’s also a certain way to confuse developers.

So a lot depends on Nokia’s next steps. Does Qt replace Series 40 and S60? I don’t know which group within Nokia made the Trolltech deal, but I wonder if the biggest competitive battle might end up being the one inside the company, between its competing software standards.