Nigel Clifford is CEO of mobile OS maker Symbian, the market leader in the smart phone operating system space. The 49-year-old CEO, a Cambridge University graduate who also has an MBA from Strathclyde University, joined Symbian from another telecoms software business - Tertio Telecoms - and has also worked at Cable and Wireless, heading up its UK operations, and at BT where he held a variety of management roles.
Earlier this year - and some three years after Clifford joined Symbian as chief exec - the company announced it would be going open source, shifting from a proprietary business model to one that offers access to its millions of lines of code to developers everywhere via the Symbian Foundation. Or as Clifford puts it: "At the heart of [this decision] is a belief that the power of many is better than the power of the few and that by making ourselves open we then have the opportunity to use millions of brains who perhaps previously were held a little bit distant from us."
silicon.com caught up with Clifford recently in his loft-style office at the company's Southwark HQ in London to discuss the finer points of going open source; the challenges posed by mobile newbies like Apple and Google; how to build 'usability' into an OS; and how a humble mobile app helped him best his two teenage boys in a triathlon.
Rising competition
Symbian's history is a long one, for the tech industry. The company was established a decade ago by Ericsson, Motorola, Nokia and Psion, and by 2006 there were 100 million Symbian phones in the market - a figure that has more than doubled two years later as the smart phone market continues to grow year-on-year.
Today the company remains undisputed market leader in the smart phone space, largely owing to the strength of Nokia - the world's number one handset vendor - which uses the Symbian OS. But Symbian knows the mobile game is changing - as the CEO writes on the company website: "Our market today is very different from the one we've been operating in successfully in the past 10 years. We're clear that powerful competitors are vying for this space."
And while these "powerful competitors" are not name-checked on Symbian's site, they are very familiar brand names indeed - Apple, BlackBerry, Google, Microsoft - all encroaching on its territory.
According to analyst house Gartner, Symbian claimed well over half (57.1 per cent) of the smart phone OS market in Q2 2008, followed a distant second by BlackBerry-maker RIM (17.4 per cent), after which comes Microsoft's Windows Mobile OS with 12 per cent. However the stats also show Symbian's lead is shrinking. Back in Q2 2007 Gartner gave Symbian 65.6 per cent market share - which means the company has seen a not inconsiderable 8.5 percentage point drop in market share in a year. And rival platforms continue to cut bigger slices of the pie - most notably BlackBerry-maker RIM that has seen an 8.5 percentage point increase over the same period.
Beyond the mobile
Freed by the Foundation, the CEO sees no reason why Symbian software might not end up being applied to non-mobile hardware, such as a set-top box, say, or an e-book reader, camera or navigation device.
"That's one of the really exciting things - now there isn't a point of control or a point of 'we will only allow Symbian to be used here'," he says. "We are saying it can be used anywhere that is decent, legal and truthful. It should be available for that experimentation, so you could have someone who's looking at putting together components for a unique product offering or service offering and we just become one of those components.
"You could see developers saying, 'Well I know this [Symbian software] works with cameras because they're on phones so why don't I take this and then I'm going to come up with a whole new camera concept using this mobile OS' or 'I know it works with navigation - because a third of our products had navigation on last year - so I can be confident and take this fragment and go and play with this in a navigation context.' So it's interesting that the output now becomes two ways."
Road to open source
Symbian's road to an open source future began in October/November last year, according to Clifford, after the company's annual strategy round. "There were probably half a dozen of us in the strategy team and the leadership team who were beginning to think a lot about what's the future of competition in this marketplace, what do we need to do to be able to compete effectively, how do we take this to the next stage, how do we engage more actively with more developers across the world, how do we free up that 200 million devices for experimentation - all of that," he says.
"And coincidentally we bumped into other people coming from other companies who were thinking about these same kinds of things. And through a series of conversations that got developed and developed and then ultimately in June we got to the point where the 10 board members were in agreement and we could make the announcement on the 24th. So it wasn't the planning of five years but it wasn't the planning of five days either. It was kind of neatly in between."
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