Excellent analysis Andreas. A few names there from feature phone world that I'd forgotten about.

Being now active in the OTT/SmartTV space, it always amazes me how noting is ever new. The TV industry is going through exactly the same process again. Which platform will we demand of our TV's in years?

I couldn't help wondering how you'd classify RIM and BlackBerry OS 1-7, OS 10. It's clear we certainly don't need a new mobile OS, but are their pockets deep enough? Does anybody care?

A long view. Which points out that even today's giants will one day be dead dots on your chart. Is Android fragmentation a path to the disappearance of Android as a 'main trunk' or a path to its dominance?

Um, one correction. webOS is not dead, but it is going open source. HP just announced the roadmap for 2012 last week and due to the "fire sale" last August, has a decent installed base for tablet. Besides, the entire premise of webOS is using web standards to build apps, which is perfectly in line with "the web". Also, you have its "birth" in 1999? Are you confusing with something else?

Hmm I would not attribute iOS success to Apple's focus on developers. Their focus on solving real end user problems is (in my opionion) more important for their success. The promise of the iPhone was more "internet in your pocket" to begin with. Apps came later and are now, as you describe, very important.

'Dead Platform Graveyard' is redundant. It's Dead Platforms or a Platform Graveyard.

The mobile web is a platform by your definition even though it is not owned by anybody. It has:
- low adoption barriers
- big network effects
- zero cost of ownership
- biggest ecosystem
- (but) conflicting revenue model

Great piece Andreas,

I would add a big driver for why OEM-focused platforms have died: industry consolidation

Flash-back to circa 2004 when the likes of Sendo, Siemens … and many others were still around. Each shared a small piece of the overall feature phone market pie. In that context, the variable costs of licensing a platform on a royalty-based basis from a 3rd-party were more favorable than the fixed costs of building your own platform in-house (except for Nokia with S40 at the time).

Fast forward to today, all small phone OEMs have disappeared leaving only a couple juggernauts: Nokia, Samsung (and to a lesser extent LG) with a large share of the pie each (+ a myriad of Asian OEMs relying on Mediatek). In this context, the fixed cost of having an internal platform R&D makes more sense from a financial point of view.

Andreas,

Great insights. I think that revenue model is moving from royalty to patents – these OS's are definitely not free.
* Google may give Android for free, but then Microsoft comes and scoops up their share.
* iOS costs are simply wrapped in the device's cost, as it is an inhouse platform.
* Windows Phone is probably going to be based on royalty costs, and I assume these won't be that much different than the patent fees they take from Android phone vendors.

Hi folks,
I don't agree to the analysis, because the influence of cost on the device makers seem underestimated to me. The real story is that smartphones have been invented to support the major business in the Internet, which is advertising. So the cost for Android is no longer paid through royalties but through "ads by Google". So technology to get better profiles of the users (e.g. by gathering GPS data) and to have better (adblock free) APIs to submit ads to the user are the key success factors for a smartphone OS. So we all pay the cost for Android in the supermarket or our favorate pizzeria. It is no longer paid by HTC or Samsung.

hey, how come Maemo is not mentioned (either as living or dead!) ? N9(Harmattan) was actually QT on top of Maemo and not at all Meego. That is why Elop pronounced meego as dead. Nokia has never released a single proper meego phone. It has all been only maemo phones

What amazes me about Nokia is that they clung on to Symbian which was not really an easy platform for developers to work with and even more difficult to monetize. History has repeated itself just like the battle between Microsoft Windows 3.0 and Geoworks. Geoworks worked on 80286, took only 1K of memory and was integrated with AOL to make it one click to get to the Internet. But Geoworks went the way of the dodo because it did not support an external development community, Microsoft did. Apple has made it easier, but Google has beat Apple at its own game which is why the adoption rate has been much faster for Android, but the difference is that Apple has a closed eco-system and a very loyal fan base. Android, not so much and Microsoft burnt their developer base with Mobile 5 & 6 so bad, that most have not returned or recovered.

Agreed

I agree Andreas. By not announcing new webOS devices and simply open sourcing the platform, Meg Whitman, like Pontius Pilate, "washed her hands" from the webOS debacle. It's a way of killing the platform without directly taking credit for the decision to kill it.

No Qtopia?

I think it would be more useful (perhaps in a future post) to distill the meaning of "Software DNA." It is too broad a term and hides the key differences. Nokia were supporting developers for years before iPhone. Nokia had lots of software DNA, as did companies like Motorola. I would say that design competence is a key differentiator and factor here, as is focus. Apple had only ONE device. It didn't support developers from the get-go – we were given the Job's "Browser apps" vision. Many would say that the iOS APIs were clearly an afterthought. Above all else, they focussed on design and user experience. They were vehemently focussed on the end-user, not carriers, as customers.

Well.. mobile web is a technology (HTML, JavaScript, CSS) and a set of browsers, but no distribution (major app store), monetisation (beyond ads) or retailing (storefront) element.

Hi Tsahi – I think that patents in the anti-Android camp are not used in lieu of royalty. They are used as a way to either stop shipment of Android handsets (Apple) or to lower the OEM switching cost to Windows Phone 7 (Microsoft). Otherwise, today in mobile asin desktop, software platforms are complements that are used to drive the core business of the platform owner – ads (Google) or consumer electronics (Apple).

Agreed – the business model for Android is to drive Android's core business which is driving eyeballs to Google properties.

Good point. We 'll add Maemo as "zombie" in the next revision.

Very good point. Qtopia was the apps suite that died soon after the Nokia Trolltech acquisition. We 'll add in the next revision of the chart.

Hi Paul – DNA is made up of resources, processes and values (as per Christensen's RPV framework). Nokia was supporting developers since the early Symbian days but was lacking processes and values that were closer to a software company. Motorola was much the same, with emphasis being on pre-load processes (typical of an OEM), not post-launch processes (typical of a software company).

Good article, except that it's not true that "network effects in mobile platforms were not properly understood until the launch of the Apple App Store". It was just that the importance of keeping development experience optimal was not understood enough before Apple.

Wonder if RIM (BlackBerry OS and QNX) should be on the "Software DNA" chart? Still alive and kicking with some market share. Also wonder how come iOS and Windows Phone bubbles are same size, when chart legend says "bubble size = relative vendor revenues for last 4 quarters"? Guess the keyword is "relative" and how to interpret that

What will be interesting to watch will be how OEMs look to leverage the Android ecosystem outside the control of Google. RIM is doing it and I think there will be others that will implement the Delvik Virtual Machines outside the entire Android stack. This strategy will allow OEMs the ability to control the experience on their devices wile running Android apps.

As this is a subject which is somewhat dear to my hear I would like to offer a small correction on the subject of "Nokia GEOS" (which originally got me from PCs into mobile development):

While it is true that Nokia launched the Nokia 9000 Communicator in 1996 using the GEOS operating system, the platform actually had a Desktop heritage, being a variant of the PC/GEOS operating system developed by a company called Geoworks.

More details here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEOS_%2816-bit_opera…

In a sense, the fate of PC/Geos is in itself an interesting case study, because it was an operating system that started out with an amazing ability to perform well on low-resourced (1MB, 16-bit, Intel 8086-class) devices of the early 90's, using an idiosyncratic C dialect closer to Objective-C than to C++, but then failed to "grow up" to other platforms when ARM CPUs and protected mode x86 architectures started to rise at the end of the decade.

At the same time, it is remarkable how Nokia failed to recognize the extremely flexible user interface technology in GEOS with the ability of a "descriptive" user interface to adapt to a wide range of screen sizes, themes and even input modalities. Instead, the Communicator used a tailor-made software layer on top of the original platform that locked down much of that flexibility, in a way that remarkably mirrors how the Avkon layer in Geos took away much of the original design in the Eik class hierarchy.

So in a sense I am now watching the end of the Symbian saga as "2000 redux", when Nokia already once swapped Smartphone operating systems rather abruptly. On the other hand, with he attempts of Intel to get back into mobile devices with its Atoms, the pendulum now seems to swing back towards x86, and Objective-C is rivaling C++ for mobile development.

Enough nostalgia for today.

You seem to have forgotten JME the largest installed base of mobile devices in the world
Jon Bostrom -father of mobile Java

You coud write somewhere a shorter url obtained from bit.ly so I could write it into my Bookeen reader web browser.

Small correction: I meant "how the Avkon layer in EPOC took away" – otherwise the comparison to the Foam "wrapper" on GEOS makes no sense.

One more detail – GEOS on Nokia phones was in fact an open operating system in the sense that an SDK existed from the very start, though at quite a high price at first, and only gradually being reduced to being effectively "free". The only thing that still needed to be purchased was the mandatory Borland C++ compiler, which ended up being really hard to get near the end of the Nokia 9110 lifecycle.

The main thing that Apple got right IMHO was not the network affect but the fact each phone HAD to have a data plan with the phone. Nokia really dropped the ball on this one.

With a data plan came the connection to the app store and the internet and this made a market where there was none before.

I see it highly unlikely that Microsoft will survive in the smartphone market due to the lack of a unique selling point, at a minimum they should be targeting Enterprises very heavily as this is largely an untapped market. Even worse, Webkit is the defacto browser on mobiles and this omission will leave Microsoft as a niche player in the smartphone world where the web apps work on all major os's (Android, iOS, BB, Bada) but not/limited on WP

You seem to have left out the Newton OS from Apple

Sorry I forgot to add that I believe Apple also were start-up owners of Symbian

Nice composition Andreas, according to me even the Blackberry may join this, if it continues with same strategy. In recent survey, most of the Blackberry developer has shifted to Android platform, as there is no requirement for blackberry app development.

About Symbian with recent release of Anna and belle, there is still hope for survival.

Sorry for the late reply. I would say almost zero. Think of the SmartTV space as feature phone world five or so years ago but with 10x less volume. Everyone has their own SDK (more than one in some cases) for their platform which means there must be 12+ different development environments out there.

Nokia had given up on developers a year or so before the first iPhone, after years and years of trying to make apps a succes. And the consensus at that time was that there was no money in native apps. What Apple did different was to go all the way to make things perfect. Just compare Nokia Software Market to the App Store.