Symbian Pain, Everyone's Gain

Samsung today said it would welcome disgruntled Symbian programmers with open arms, joining Google, Skype and others, that hope to lure highly-skilled coders abandoned by Nokia to develop their own operating systems.
"If you are a Symbian developer unhappy about Nokia's recent announcements, and are hence looking for a new platform to showcase your talents, we say 'Hello!' and 'welcome to Bada operating system,'" Samsung said in a newsletter. "If you're new to Bada development, or are moving your app from Symbian, we'd like to welcome you."

Those developers, seen as having valuable skill sets, are being sought after from rival companies hoping to entice them after being left in the cold. Nokia abandoned its Symbian platform in favor of a partnership with Microsoft to build Windows-based devices.

After Samsung's statement, Nokia chief financial officer Timo Ihamuotila said the company would continue to support Symbian "as long as it gives us a profitable margin."

Much of Nokia's current lineup still runs on Symbian, so it can't wash its hands of the platform. But the comments show that it hopes developers don't completely abandon its platform, since it needs at least a year to push out new Windows devices. Without any company fully-backing the platform, Symbian looks like it is in store for a quick death.

Nokia's stock value has also fallen 20 percent since the announcement of the Microsoft partnership, highlighting investor skepticism in the radical plan. Ihamuotila's statement was enough to win back a modest two percent in the hours which followed.

The Finnish phone maker is desperate to make headway in a market dominated by Apple and Google. Despite fielding a number of cutting-edge handsets, its efforts have been crippled by Symbian, which failed to keep pace with developments in the smartphone world.

Symbian began as an open-source smartphone platform, with code contributed by Nokia, Sony Ericsson and others, and was bought by Nokia in 2008. It was intended to be developed by a community, organized under the Symbian Foundation, but never fully took off due to licensing issues. A clean cut would remove the dead weight.

The writing is on the wall, and Symbian developers should probably consider jumping ship. Nokia has already sold off part of Qt, its Symbian support platform. And for better or worse, there's effectively one less smartphone OS in the running now. That means more opportunities for everyone else.