Peter-Paul Koch on Nokia

Peter-Paul Koch:

Why on earth wouldn’t Nokia be able to maintain two operating systems?

Apple does it: Mac OS and iOS. Google does it: Android and ChromeOS. Microsoft does it, 7, Vista, XP, and maybe even older versions. And Windows Phone 7, of course. And I’m sure HP has a few OS skeletons in the contractual closet.

This is at least partly in response to my argument that “Nokia needs to settle on one software platform for mobile devices, very soon.” I shouldn’t have written “mobile devices”; I should have written “smartphones”.

Is Symbian fine for low-end “feature” phones? Sure. I’d say it’s sort of equivalent to the Pixo OS that Apple uses in iPods. The point is that Apple has no confusion about which of its OSes to use in which products. Is it a PC? Mac OS X. Touchscreen mobile computer? iOS. Media player handheld? Pixo. I’m saying a big part of Nokia’s problem is that they have no single answer regarding what their OS is for smartphones.

Koch goes on to argue that Nokia has made this decision, and it’s MeeGo — their problem is simply that they’re too slow to execute it.

(Also: the Android-or-Chrome OS question may well prove to be a problem for Google. Which is their OS to compete against the iPad? From what I hear, the Android team says Android, and the Chrome team says Chrome.)

★ Friday, 17 September 2010