Mobile Linux fragmentation

InfoWorld has an article this morning about the fragmentation of efforts among all the various groups who want to standardize Linux for mobile phones. This was an area that I was actively researching in August before teaching responsibilities forced me to put it on the back burner.

Reporter Nancy Gohring tried to understand why there are so many different overlapping efforts, and came up with a lot of good quotes that suggest that such fragmentation is systemic and persistent. This reminds me very much of the Unix wars, in which various participants admitted that they were arguing over turf and control more than the petty technical details — and admitted that they ended the wars too late, after Windows had already taken over the low end workstation market.

About the only thing missing from the story is the suggestion that division is actually desired because each operator and phone maker wants something that’s different. Given such differences don’t create differentiation, why do they persist? Perhaps the hope is that they create switching costs and thus reduce commoditization.

Technorati Tags: embedded Linux, Linux, mobile phones, standardization

Nokia spurs mobile network bypass

Nokia is releasing a handset that can handover a live cell phone call from a cellular network to a Wi-Fi network.

The Nokia 6301 supports a standard called “Universal Mobile Access,” which is endorsed by the main W-CDMA (UMTS, 3GSM) standards body, 3GPP. (See the UMA white paper by Kineto Wireless).

We know that carriers are fighting mobile VoIP including Cingular’s decision to remove Wi-Fi from the Nokia E61 and call it the E62. Of course, given Cingular’s (AT&T’s) deal with Apple, the iPhone won’t support this for years if not decades.

Technorati Tags: business models, mobile phones, Nokia, VoIP, Wi-Fi

NBC’s Brave New World

After deliberately picking a fight with Apple and getting its content booted from the iTunes Store, NBC has now shown its other card. It’s not really Amazon’s download service, but free ad-supported downloads.

The trial (with some shows) of the new service has already been ridiculed by at least one commentator:

The new service sounds, quite frankly, hilariously bad. Here’s some of the highlights:

• commercials that can’t be skipped
• files that lock after seven days
• no transfer to other devices
• Windows only
Man, we can’t wait to try that out.

Perhaps more interesting to me, it requires going to the NBC Direct website, and (in all likelihood) a dedicated player application.

So NBC is hoping to recreate on the Internet its 50+ year old business model from broadcasting: ad-supported content through exclusive control of distribution. It’s even a pre-VCR model with no ad skipping and limited time shifting. However, it’s also a verisioning strategy designed to support a lucrative (and more recent) business model: the subsequent sale of compilation DVDs at the end of each season.

In a final irony, the NBC announcement of its ad-supported business model was first reported on NYTimes.com (as well as the dead tree version), which this week announced the demise of its paid TimesSelect service and its shift to an ad-based model.

Technorati Tags: business models, iTunes, movie industry, NBC, versioning

A looming EU-US trade war?

After reading online yesterday about Microsoft’s big loss at the hands of EU competition authorities, I thought I had the full picture. But an article in the dead tree version of the WSJ added a few points.

First, real lawyers (not just journalists and pundits) believe that EU Competition Commissioner Neeli Kroes is going to use the Microsoft win as a precedent to go after other dominant US firms — Intel, Qualcomm, Rambus and Google. Others worry about the precedent. European lawyers see as this as promoting a policy split between the EU and the U.S., while the US Chamber notes that the move will embolden other countries to move against American firms.

Action by other governments to hurt American companies could spark trade friction, assuming any US politicians care (or want to seize an issue for cheap political points). The Journal quoted Rep. Robert Wexler (D-Fla.) as calling this a “new form of protectionism,” but Wexler’s website makes no mention of this — only his campaign against Rush Limbaugh.

Two other tidbits on the case: with penalties, the €0.5 billion fine has become €2 billion. And while Microsoft appears to be have been stalling, it has already licensed competitors access to its server technology (the heart of the case). The catch is that those licenses have been paid licenses — which obviously wouldn’t help open source developers — but the EU wants that information available for free. Perhaps the EU could rebate two days worth of penalties (€6 million) to cover a fully paid license for the whole world.

Technorati Tags: antitrust, EU

IBM drops the other shoe

After joining OpenOffice.org last week, today IBM dropped the other shoe: it’s shipping a new product “Symphony” based on OpenOffice. As InfoWorld notes, it’s the same name IBM used in the 1980s for its integrated office suite.

IBM’s effort will help promote its long-standing support for the Open Document Format (ODF). To me, it seems a little like an exit strategy (growth strategy? salvage strategy?) for the increasingly irrelevant Lotus division.

The biggest omission is that Symphony lacks e-mail to compete with Microsoft’s Entourage. How hard would it be to find an open source e-mail client to integrate? The Mozilla Thunderbird project is one such example, and late last month the Qualcomm-sponsored Penelope project released a new skin providing Eudora features to Thunderbird users.

Technorati Tags: IBM, ODF