Symbian Foundation

History

November, 2010

The Symbian Foundation organization created in 2008 by Nokia company announced that it refuses the basic function - development of the mobile platform. According to the official statement, the organization will continue to deal with issues of licensing of the software and other intellectual property, including the Symbian trademark. As for further development of Symbian, Nokia will be engaged in it. Members of Symbian Foundation made the decision on reduction of volumes of the resources selected for functioning of the organization, including number of the people working in it. It is planned that by April, 2011 in the management of Symbian Foundation there will be a group of the directors who do not have executive functions which will monitor licensing transactions. After the announcement of Symbian Foundation the official statement was issued by Nokia. The company said that are not going to give up development of the platform and will continue to invest means in its development. "Future Symbian does not depend on Symbian Foundation existence, - the senior vice president of Nokia for smartphones Jo Harlow said. - This platform is a basis of hundreds of millions of smartphones - including our own, - and we expect further strengthening of the ecosystem surrounding it". Analysts predict that by 2014 the world share of the Android operating system will be equal to Symbian share. However it can happen to the current growth rates of Android much quicker. According to Canalys, in the 3rd quarter 2010 of Android showed the highest growth rates among other platforms: deliveries of devices grew more than by 14 times (by 1309%) in comparison year-on-year - from 1.4 million to more than 20 million devices.

October, 2010

The chief executive of Symbian Foundation Lee Williams left the organization for the personal reasons. Its place was taken by Tim Holbrow, the chief financial executive. Before position assignment of the head of Symbian Foundation Williams headed S60 group which is a part of division of Devices Nokia. Here he bore responsibility for development of Nokia in the direction of key strategy, including development of S60 and annexes to this platform. Before accession to Nokia Williams worked in the Be company known for the BeOS operating system. After Be was purchased by Palm, it was a part of parent company in which undertook obligations for product development. For operating time of Williams in Palm the Palm OS 4 and 5 operating systems were released. Williams also worked in the Symbol Technologies company which is engaged in production of scanners of barcodes, RFID systems and mobile computers. It was purchased by Motorola in 2006 for $3.9 billion.^[1]

In 2008 Nokia redeemed a missing share in Symbian, having founded Symbian Foundation non-profit organization with the purpose to make the proprietary platform open. The first product of this project, Symbian^3, appeared in the market quite recently, together with the output of the device N8 Nokia.

Refused participation in development of the Symbian platform Samsung and Sony Ericsson. According to ZDNet, now it is supported by only three companies - Nokia, Fujitsu and Sharp. For many years Symbian was the dominating platform in the market of smartphones, it is it and now, however every year its positions weaken. According to the forecast of Gartner, by 2014 the share of Symbian will be reduced to 30.2% and read will be equal to Android share. For comparison, in 2009 this platform occupied 46.9% of the world market. According to the forecast of IDC, the share of the Nokia operating system by 2014 will be reduced to 32.9%.

Let's remind also that lately it became known of departure of the chief executive officer of Nokia Olli Pekka-Kallasvuo, the head of division of release of smartphones Anssi Vanjoki and the leader of developer MeeGo in Nokia Ari Jaaksi.

Analysts criticize Nokia long ago for inability to release at least one smartphone capable to compete on equal terms to the Apple iPhone or top smartphones based on Android. It is rumored that the company can pass to use of Windows Phone 7.

July, 2009

Symbian Foundation released the first software package open source. Software packet for security (Security Package) which is released under EPL became available to users of Symbian. This first software for a system which is not under Symbian Foundation License (SFL)". Thanks to EPL software will be able to be exported out of borders of Great Britain whereas earlier it was impossible because of the existing rules. For the free software in rules there is an exception therefore transition from SFL to EPL began the most certain way to make available to all cryptographic functions of a system.

Notes