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Posted 17/03/99 7:51am by Tero Kuittinen
Symbian to KO Microsoft at CeBIT?
What Bill Gates and St. Paul have in common is an annoying one-note evangelical
zeal. In defence of the latter it has to be said that at least he was involved in creating a
major religion and only had one conversion. Mr. Gates keeps getting new
pseudo-religious epiphanies with alarming regularity - and they tend to be glaringly
obvious.
Microsoft missed the Internet boat in the early 90s, but was able to undo some of the
damage caused by spending a truckload of money. Even so, Microsoft's success in
the crucial e-commerce and portal businesses has been lukewarm at best. The
company won the browser war - only to find out that the real action was somewhere
else than in controlling the browser software.
The latest Microsoft awakening concerns the mobile telecommunications field. The
realisation of the enormous market potential of mobile telecom arrives just as late as
the Internet insight. But this time, Microsoft is not facing a motley crew of small,
relatively inexperienced start-ups like Netscape. It's going against opponents that are
both well-funded and determined to form a united front. Apparently it was only in 1998
that Microsoft started seriously to metastasize into mobile telecommunication, which
gave the established telecom companies plenty of time to form a coherent battle plan.
One key collaboration is the Symbian initiative to produce a universal new operating
system for smartphones, others include Bluetooth and WAP. All of these projects have
been under development in various incarnations for several years, even if the formal
announcements of them have come much later. Bluetooth, for example, combined
several in-house development projects aimed at creating a wireless interface
technology connecting mobile phones with other IT devices like PC's, laptops, faxes
and printers. The initiative is now being backed by pretty much everybody except
Microsoft - from Toshiba to Intel.
Cheap & fast
By uniting behind common technological standards the various companies aim to
pre-empt the attempt to introduce Windows in different forms into wireless technology
universe. So far, the approach seems to be working. Symbian was able to bond the
usually combative Motorola, Ericsson and Nokia. This unison created a critical mass
that is now in the process of sucking Alcatel, Siemens and Sony into backing the
concept. If this really happens, the battle for the control of the Internet phone operating
system is over before it begins. Ericsson's launch of the MC 218 is signaling that
EPOC devices are being introduced ahead of schedule - just a few weeks ago it was
still assumed that EPOC products would debut "within a year". Now Ericsson is set to
start selling its first offering this summer and Nokia and Motorola are widely expected
to unveil EPOC phones by next fall.
What gnaws Microsoft's guts perhaps the most is the low licensing fee approach used
by the Symbian and Bluetooth initiatives. Bluetooth will actually cost nothing to
companies implementing it - EPOC is widely assumed to cost companies just 20-30
per cent of what Microsoft wants to ask for a modified Windows OS for handheld
devices. This puts Microsoft into a very difficult position. It can't compete with price, so
it has to argue that cross-platform interoperability between PC Windows and
handheld device Windows is so valuable to consumers that it's worth the price
premium. But even though Windows is Microsoft's greatest asset, in this case it may
turn out to be a liability. It doesn't matter that the PC operating system is suffering from
elephantitis - Intel keeps cranking out faster chips and memory space keeps
expanding at an equally break-neck speed. However, in the handheld device field,
nothing matters as much as compactness and frugality.
These are alien concepts to Microsoft, which has never paid much attention to the
"less is more" bromide. 1999 - the decisive year? Nobody knows when the first
Microsoft OS-equipped Internet phones might actually arrive to the market. But this
time the "vaporware" threat carries little weight. The manufacturers are not paralysed
by the possibility of a late Microsoft entry to the market, because the top three mobile
phone makers in the world are already committing considerable resources to EPOC.
The possibility of a Microsoft attack is not slowing down development of smartphones
- on the contrary.
Ericsson, Nokia and Motorola have been galvanized into action and intend to flood the
mobile phone market with several competing EPOC and WAP devices, designed to
create a uniform way to access internet via phones. So the ongoing roll-out of EPOC
products is leaving Microsoft to try to push a Windows-based OS that comes late to
the market, suffers from being relatively inefficient and unsuitable to voice applications
according to most observers - and carries a stiff price premium.
Moreover, the only phone manufacturer currently cooperating closely with Microsoft,
Qualcomm, is bringing a new smartphone to market this spring or summer. And it
uses Palm Pilot OS, allying Qualcomm with Microsoft's worst enemy on the PDA front.
Qualcomm may shift to using some Windows variant in its future applications, but for
the near future, the damage is already done. The scrappy Palm Pilot is still dominating
the US and European PDA markets, leaving Windows-based PDAs scrambling to
close the market share gap. This division in the PDA market is crucially weakening
Microsoft's attempts to convince any major mobile phone manufacturer to join its
bandwagon. If Microsoft can't even succeed in the PDA market, which is much closer
to the PC market, what exactly is the rationale for adopting Windows Lite for mobile
handsets? CeBIT 1999 may be a crucial turning point. It will be interesting to see what
Microsoft can offer to the sceptical mobile industry audience. Any Symbian
announcement by Sony, NEC or Matsushita would spell big trouble for Microsoft -
these Asian companies with close ties to Microsoft are the last line of defence against
Symbian.
If they join the Motorola-Europe axis the game is over. Microsoft's previous
collaboration announcements have been either nebulous (what's the actual, specific
content of that British Telecom agreement, anyway?) or somewhat unconvincing
(Qualcomm will become Microsoft's close ally... while launching a Palm Pilot
smartphone). They need to show some real substance - new products and their launch
dates, new corporate alliances that actually aim at some tangible results. The
Symbian alliance will most likely try to overwhelm the fence-sitters by an onslaught of
new products. By the end of next week we may have a much clearer picture of
Microsoft's role in the field of mobile telecommunications. ®
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