Chair: Next up, we have Bruce Carney, from the Symbian Foundation, welcome.
Bruce: It's interesting following Skype. I'm going to talk about what telecoms and computing should know about each other and how it can learn from the best of both worlds.
Intuitively, everyone in this room realizes that the computer and the telecoms industry are converging. My next example, not deliberately scripted to follow on from Skype; last Sunday, at my son's birthday, my seventy-eight year old parents could actually sing "Happy Birthday" to him, watching him blow out the candles on his cake, using Skype with a webcam-enabled network over Wi-Fi.
That is certainly convergence, but it did take me half an hour to set up. I had to use VNC to access my father's computer, I had problems with the network, but for us early adopters, we could equally use technologies like Qik, which streams video from a mobile phone. We could even use a video call over a 3G network.
For all of us, who are interchangeably Twittering, using voice calls, emailing between our computers and smart phones, and to many of us we think, in actual fact, convergence is here. To the consumers of the world, they're not quite at the level of convergence.
We have this classic paradox of the unstoppable force of the computer industry meeting the immovable obstacle of the telecom's industry. This is what I want to talk about, today, how the Symbian Foundation will seek to solve this paradox.
Intuitively, when we think about the two industries, we see the telecoms industry as full of prehistoric traditions, limited bandwidth on PSTN calls, as we heard previously; they're controlled by massive multinational corporations. They have implicitly high barriers to entry. They are slow moving and they're equally slow to adapt to change.
Intuitively, we see the computer industry as being more open and innovative. It's the industry where a garage coder can wrap a business model around a good idea, turn it into a multinational company, and add tremendous value. In fact, at the computer industry, the ability to scale and reach markets is only limited by ideas and eyeballs.
Counter-intuitively, the computer world doesn't really meet the needs of the consumers. If anything, consumers are being forced to adapt to understand their computer systems. They spend half their lives trying to understand the idiosyncrasies, trying to keep the system alive. Anyone who acts as a family IT support person would know this. Certainly, my family treats me as the proxy for the entire IT industry, as to why everything isn't working.
Whereas the telecom's industry is exceptionally good at reaching far and wide, it's exceptionally good at addressing the mass market consumer, making things simple, and the mass market consumer industry is really big, it's diverse, it's global, and we can take a mobile phone and go to virtually any country in the world. We can get data access. We can send SMS. We can make calls to almost any other network in the world. It's amazing complexity simplified to the point that all you have to worry about is recharging the battery on your phone and paying your monthly phone bill.
The thesis I want to present is that convergence is best understood as something where there is a lot to learn from both sides. Each is actually well adapted to the environment, it's own environment, but we're entering into a new environment where the DNA from each industry is essential to drive growth.
When we look into the good, the bad, the ugly of these industries, the origin of the species and the behaviors that come from the way things are working - in telecoms, trust is essential. Probably the biggest thing when I talk to people in the computer industry, that they don't realize, is everything that happens in telecoms is a financial transaction. A call, and SMS, even a packet of data is a financial transaction.
The thinking is naturally towards security and scalability. Safety and walled gardens make sense in a telecoms environment because they protect the consumers [audience nearly falls off their chairs]. Foreign devices and anything from outside the network need to be tested. They need to be certified. Every network in every country in the world has its own eccentricities to give five 9's reliability; you have to test everything leading to fragmentation, leading to extremely long lead times to get devices onto networks.
Also, backward and forward compatibility of standards is essential. You are coming from an environment where the phone you bought in 1950 can still be plugged into your wall socket and will work.
To the computer people, that's maybe the bad; to the consumer, it's mostly good. Interestingly, in the mobile telecoms industry, we're actually seeing an amazing amount of innovation in the last decade; hardware innovation, adding more CPUs, cramming radios, audio parts, antennas in a device as small as that with a tiny battery, one single CPU, and color screens. There are orders of magnitude in improvements of power usage, to the point that this C71 has ten hours talk time, seventeen hours standby time. It's amazing hardware and software innovation.
Crucially, the mobile phone has become the real personal computer. The mobile industry has learned to segment, to differentiate, to hit different price points, to scale to different regions, to create differences, to the point where most people have a mobile within about three feet of them, for twenty-four hours a day.
When we move over into the computer industry, most of us agree that the computer industry has mostly been driven at the behest of enterprise and developers. This has given it a lot of advantages. There is a multitude of programming environments. In regard to productivity, there are virtually infinite computational resources. Power is always connected. That means that developers can spend more time worrying about developing functionality than things that occur in the telecoms network. New systems are developed quickly and they're deployed even more quickly.
I must update Skype probably every two months, with their Betas coming out. This leads to interfaces being well published, well documented, to keep the speed of change. Standards are actually standard in the computer industry. They either become standard or there is a battle to become a de facto standard and everyone falls in line. Openness fuels innovation.
The unfortunate thing about the computer industry - for people like me it's fine, but for our consumers, for the mass market consumers who aren't into computer technology, they're being used as Beta testers. They're being exposed to viruses, spyware, phishing, fraud, spam, and denial of service attempts [so they need a telecom operator to step in and bill them more to protect them hee hee]. The software distribution has actually become quite complex for them, to the point where I can't think if the last time I knew someone who bought an application for their computer. They're moving to services.
Most consumers actually aren't even installing apps on their computer [amazing revelation hee hee]. Not to force the point, but since 2002, the innovation is happening in mobile telecoms [but by whom? Operators, no]. The computing industry is moving to mobile telecoms.
With Symbian and the Symbian Foundation, Symbian was founded in 1998. Its founding shareholders had great vision to create an open mobile operating system. The term "open" is becoming clichéd and I'm sure virtually every speaker speaking at this conference probably throws it in there.
One thing that is absolutely certain; Symbian is battle-hardened. The real value of Symbian is that it sat at the middle of the tectonic plates of OEMs, carriers, and developers to create an ecosystem to provide an open mobile operating system, to get apps onto that, to allow any developer in any developer environment to use their operating system.
In a move that's best describe as "if you love something, set it free," [ahem, more like Apple forced this] on the tenth anniversary of the foundation of Symbian, the shareholders announced an industry changing announcement to open source our Symbian OS and the associated user interfaces. That's S60 UIQ and Moapp, which is used in Japan, which has only shipped thirty million devices in Japan, for DoCoMo.
A billion dollar asset was put into the public domain. This industry-making decision by Symbian shareholders, to create the Symbian Foundation, provides the computer and the telecom industry an environment to leverage each others' strengths in a level playing field, within the Symbian Foundation.
Here, you have a low power, efficient, robust, scalable, secure operating system already shipped to more than two hundred fifty million devices on two hundred fifty carriers, all around the world, with ISVs developing for more than a hundred countries; set free, to drive growth. In short, to accelerate innovation.
Taking all the advantages that we've learned from the mobile telecoms industry, but now allowing a member community full access to the source code, full access to influence the platform, full access to competitively differentiate and segment based on that platform.
With the added advantage of quality, packaging, testing, the maintenance of long-term roadmaps into twelve to eighteen months into the future so you know what's going to happen; a commitment to include more web-related run time environments, but already with support for Java, SilverLite, Flash Lite, Python, opensource commercial environment's basic.
The road to get there with this reshaped vision is actually non-trivial. It takes quite a process to take a company to a completely new business model and open source this asset. To start with, nothing changes. As part of this continuity, S60, 5th Edition on Symbian OS becomes the basis of the Symbian Foundation releases. This is their version of S60 Symbian OS that is coming out in the N97 device. It forms the basis. There is still backward and forward compatibility to S60, 3rd Edition.
The yellow arrow in this slide depicts a continual release of code, where blogs [?] are intended to be released every six months. These releases, to continue with the momentum, are themed around some areas we intend to include, functionality that's already scoped in. As we move out to the release that's planned for end of first-half of 2010, it's completely open. That release will be defined by the member community.
The call to action of my presentation is to come along and join us. Membership is open. Symbian Foundation is due for launch operationally in the first half of this year, later in this half. We'll also be at CTIA, where you can come and talk to me more about it. Thank you.
