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To: quartersawyer who wrote (31277)	5/29/1999 9:58:00 AM
From: Jon Koplik	Respond to of 152472

Article about Symbian / Psion vs. Microsoft (from The Economist). (From the 5/29/99 - 6/4/99 issue). Symbian's friends IT IS too early to say whether Microsoft will succeed in establishing Windows as the de facto standard operating system for digital television set-top boxes. The equity stakes it is expensively accumulating in American and British cable companies should at least give it a head start over its rivals. But things are not going quite according to the “Windows Everywhere” plan in the market for wireless data appliances—next generation web-surfing mobile phones and palm-top computers. This week, Bill Gates's strategy took another knock. Matsushita Communication, the world's fourth-biggest mobile-phone maker, announced that it was taking a 9% shareholding in Symbian, an 11-month-old software joint venture fostered by Psion, a small but pioneering British company that makes handheld computers. Based in slightly shabby central London offices, Symbian has fewer than 300 employees and, by its own admission, is several years away from making a profit. Why should that concern the mighty Microsoft? The reason is the identity of Symbian's other shareholders—they are Nokia, Motorola and Ericsson, the three giants of the mobile-telephone industry. With Matsushita on board, Symbian's parents now account for some 85% of the world's 175m-odd mobile phones. Because of its mighty parents, Symbian is a potential powerhouse that threatens to lock Microsoft out of a market that could reach 150m devices by 2005 and may be even more important for the development of the Internet than set-top boxes. Symbian was set up in the hope of creating a common software platform built around Psion's EPOC operating system for what it calls “wireless information devices”. What drew the mobile-phone firms to Symbian was the quality of the EPOC technology and their conviction, born of Europe's experience with digital GSM, that an open standard was critical if the new market was to take off. The establishment of an open standard gives customers confidence and allows manufacturers to compete, innovate and differentiate their products with less risk. As for EPOC, because it has been specially designed for mobile devices (unlike Microsoft's competing Windows CE), it makes better use of their more limited batteries and memory. Since speech, which will increasingly drive these devices, uses up a lot of power and memory, that is a crucial advantage. But what motivates Symbian's parents more than anything is that, as computing and wireless telephony converge, they do not wish to end up like PC makers—low-margin assemblers that are little more than a distribution channel for Microsoft's intellectual property. As the mobile-phone firms see it, Symbian should ensure that they stay in control of their future. And the licence fees that will go to Symbian, rather than Microsoft, are a nice way of keeping all that money in the family. (END)