I’ve just completed three Gartner symposium conferences and so have spent a lot of time talking to clients in Europe, APAC and the USA about mobile platforms. And one thing I noticed was how seldom people talked about Symbian. Remember Symbian? It’s the dominant smartphone platform by far, well over 40% of smartphones shipped in Q3 used Symbian. Even though it’s being attacked by Android we expect it to remain ahead through 2012. Although Symbian is predominantly a consumer platform Nokia make some excellent enterprise Symbian handsets – E series – which have hardware encryption and offer levels of security second only to Blackberry. So why is no-one asking about it? I’ve had more questions about the potential of Android as a corporate smartphone platform than Symbian even though the latter is far more consistent, secure and mature.
There are clearly some regional issues here, Symbian has almost no presence in North America because Nokia is invisible there, so it’s hardly surprising that Americans don’t talk about it. But APAC and Europe ought to be more interested. So what’s going on?
Android is well up on the hype cycle, it’s still a novelty and so is pretty much marketing itself; despite the fact the operators and handset manufacturers tend to de-emphasise it in favour of their own brands. Android also gets illuminated by a lot of reflected Google glory. Apple spends tons on marketing and advertising, there can’t be a sentient being this side of Alpha Centauri who hasn’t heard of iPhone. Apple also gets a lot of free marketing from its own users half of whom seem to be on a personal crusade to convince the rest of us to buy an iPhone. How long can it be before cult deprogramming specialists offer to kidnap your family members to free them from their Apple dependency? RIM does a fair amount of Blackberry marketing, and has the ultimate celebrity endorsement in Barack Obama.
But who’s marketing Symbian? No-one.
The Symbian foundation doesn’t have the staff or resources for marketing, it relies on handset manufacturers, and pretty much the only one at the moment is Nokia. But Nokia markets Nokia and Ovi, not Symbian. Lee Williams certainly evangelises Symbian, but despite his enthusiasm he’s only one man and there’s a limit to what he can do. In the case of Apple and RIM the device and the platform are the same, marketing one markets the other. But in Nokia’s case this isn’t true as Nokia has at least 4 platforms (depending on how you define them). So although Nokia is the world’s 5thmost valuable brand that has no impact on Symbian. Worse, Nokia has badly mishandled the N900 positioning message because it’s been reported in the press that Maemo is going to replace Symbian; which isn’t really the case but has probably damaged Symbian.
So from the perspective of corporate strategists who are making platform choices as opposed to manufacturer choices there’s no-one out there evangelising Symbian. So they’re forgetting that it exists. Maybe the corporate market doesn’t matter that much because it’s small, but if consumer developers start to forget about the existence of Symbian that imperils the whole Ovi strategy.
23 responses so far ↓
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3 Paul B // Nov 29, 2009 at 11:50 am
Marketing is only fluff if it is not backed by product definition, engineering, and product creation. Although there are millions of available phones with the legacy Symbian Limited platforms, there are zero available and announced phones with the future Symbian Foundation platform.
4 Nick Jones // Nov 30, 2009 at 4:09 am
I agree, but marketing sets perceptions. If no-one does any platform marketing for Symbian (both the current and the new open source version) the perception will be that Symbian isn’t significant, which in turn will affect application developer’s platform choices. IMHO platform selection is a surprisingly emotional decision, developers choose iPhone more because of the buzz than a rational calculation based on the market size because the number of iPhones in the world is actually very small. No buzz = no developers = no apps = failure.
5 Graham French // Nov 30, 2009 at 6:23 am
I agree with Paul B: the world needs to see and get excited by a cool new handset with the new Symbian Foundation platform. The handset manufacturer will market the hell out of the device and Symbian gets carried along with it. Consumers, I wager, do not care what OS is on the device.
However, I’m not sure Symbian is being strangled by Marketing alone.
Nokia did a poor poor job on the 5800 and N97 with S60 5th edition and it now looks like Sony Ericsson, have had the same issues with the Satio with bugs and consumers handing back their devices. This does not reflect well on Symbian and no amount of marketing can solve that.
Developers will develop on the platform with the broadest appeal and reach weighed up against cost of development. And at present Symbian is regrettably one of the more developer unfriendly platforms to develop against with horrendous fragmentation, complexity, and a stale yet complex UI and UX that has not moved on in the last 6-7 years. But it has the biggest reach by far.
Symbian and its members have to quickly demonstrate to developers with more than slideware that it has a viable, up to date platform that gives a slick, reliable User Experience coupled with a lower cost development, with a *few* new innovations. They may not be able to beat Apple, but at least learn from them. IMHO, they can however, compete and perhaps dominate everyone else in the platform space if they get the product right!
6 Nick Jones // Nov 30, 2009 at 6:38 am
Graham, I absolutely agree that Symbian has a lot more problems than marketing alone. Technologically although the platform core seems OK it’s lagging in tools and has a very weak UI as you mention. But to some extent good marketing can help weak technology, as Microsoft has demonstrated on many occasions. Symbian has both technology and marketing problems which is a bad place to be.
7 Gartner on Symbian « Symbian Blog // Nov 30, 2009 at 7:21 am
[...] on Symbian Nick Jones over on Gartner late last week weighed in with some thoughts on Symbian. Our thanks to Nick for bringing this up I’ve just completed three Gartner symposium conferences [...]
8 Haydn // Nov 30, 2009 at 7:34 am
Obviously a new handset on a future platform would be great but Symbian could be doing a ton more marketing simply by being more present online. It is one of my disappointments that we are not as active online as we could be. And I think there are strategic moves we could make with the brand. Apple typically steps into markets where it can position itself as the change agent, up against a large entrenched incumbent. The creation of Symbian Foundation is evidence that no such incumbent exists and that Apple are tilting at windmills. If there is an incumbent in this business right now it is Google. Google and Apple are the natural adversaries (if you can disentangle their board interests). What Symbian should represent is the kind of fresh air the industry needs.
9 Mark W // Nov 30, 2009 at 7:50 am
We’re talking about marketing to developers here right?
Developers like to work on new and cool stuff. They also like to work on things they think will improve their CVs. Nokia have made a clear decision to remove emphasis from the underlying OS and market the benefits of cross-platform development with Qt. As such you can consider that Qt IS the platform, not Symbian or Maemo, for them. Symbian & Maemo are platforms for device creation and Qt is the platform for developers.
Qt has a very large and loyal developer community, but since the libraries aren’t yet shipping in any great devices it’s not surprising that it isn’t getting a lot of attention in mobile developer circles yet.
Marketing Symbian’s current native development environment (which is planned to be removed from the platform next year) would be pointless and counter-productive. So what to market instead? Qt – not ready yet. Web Runtime – Didn’t do Apple any good, developers were screaming for a native SDK and that’s what most of the apps are being created with. Flash Lite, when full Flash 10 is coming next year – maybe but again not quite ready yet. Java ME – yeah, just put that one in for a joke
So, for now I think we have to accept that only those doing their sums and seeing a serious business case for Symbian native development based on market share will make the effort (which they generally are doing). The chances of a completely unsustainable speculative app development community like Apple’s spontaneously forming around a legacy platform before its development environment is overhauled to be competitive are non-existent – even with millions of dollars poured into a marketing campaign.
Fortunately the smartphone platform contest is a marathon and not a sprint.
10 Nick Jones // Nov 30, 2009 at 8:27 am
Mark, I think Symbian needs marketing for both developers and users. As you very rightly point out Symbian will struggle with developer marketing until Symbian Qt is sorted out. And even when that happens, Qt marketing for developers will partly benefit non-Symbian platforms such as Maemo and even WinMo. However I think marketing needs to address users as well. Ideally buyers should make a choice of Symbian as a platform alternative to (for example) Android, based on the range of handsets and applications.
I’m a tad more pessimistic than you about the marathon vs sprint analogy. Most mobile developers are very small companies and individuals who can’t afford to support lots of platforms, so they will be forced to make choices. And once they make a choice they’ll be slow to change, so the choices people make now could last a long time.
11 Mark W // Nov 30, 2009 at 10:16 am
Nick, my problem with marketing Symbian to end users is that it’s very unlikely that there will ever be a single unified “Symbian” user experience. OEMs using the platform will continue to differentiate on the UI and provide their own application stores etc. So when the platform is not the product, what are you trying to market to them? As I see it (and I think many of my colleagues agree with me) the only kind of consumer marketing that makes sense for Symbian is co-branding like “Intel Inside” or “Dolby Digital”. Even here there a problems with ensuring the quality of OEM products to avoid damaging the brand for everyone, and such a strategy is likely to benefit the smaller less known OEMs adopting the platform more than the existing larger ones. With little obvious incentive for the current OEMs to adopt this and very little bargaining power on Symbian’s side (the platform is already free after all), I find this extremely unlikely to happen.
99% of users don’t buy a phone because of the platform it runs and I strongly believe that will continue for several years. Consumers don’t choose platforms, they choose phones. Enterprise IT departments choose platforms, although the trend is even moving strongly away from that and towards personal choice.
Completely agree that Qt is coming rather late to the mobile party and there isn’t much Symbian can do about that. Just have to hope it’s not too late – I beleive it isn’t, but time will tell.
12 Nick Jones // Nov 30, 2009 at 10:32 am
But people are starting to choose phones on the basis of the application portfolio (recent Apple ads are advertising apps as much as Apples). And if apps are the determining factor then the platform matters. It’s easy for Apple and RIM because the phone IS the platform, but in the case of Android or Symbian the manufacturer and the platform are separate issues. So I think some level of platform marketing will be required, especially as app stores are turning into a bit of a numbers game, i.e. “my platform has more apps than your platform”. Maybe a “Symbian inside” logo is the way to go.
13 Mark W // Nov 30, 2009 at 12:12 pm
I could be wrong, but I see giant application stores with competition to have “the most apps” as the latest industry fad that will pass like all the others. Some poor developers have been duped into wasting their spare time creating junk that no-one uses for the iPhone app store, with the vague promise of great riches out there for the taking. There’s strong evidence that of the 100,000 apps for iPhone, only 2000 of them are in active use by more than a fraction of 1% of users. As I suggested above, this is unsustainable, the vast majority of developers aren’t making money like this and won’t continue to invest their time and resources in it.
I believe there’s a good market for mobile applications, I just don’t beleive this is what it’s going to look like in its final form. The most valuable applications are likely to be available on every major platform and this will cease to be a significant differentiator.
14 Haydn // Nov 30, 2009 at 2:46 pm
Mark – we’ve moved into an economy where lots of labour gets given for free (read no cash), whether that’s thru open source or thru apps that go nowhere. Saying that the big apps market has no future or that people are duped is like saying developers in open source are being taken for a ride – it’s just not true . It’s a different economy.
And I’m not sure how many people agree that we should not market to end users – we are looking actively at end user communities and puzzling over how to connect with them. It is a policy to market to end users.
The problem with a Symbian inside logo (apart from what manufacturers might think it takes away from their branding) is that it actually needs very powerful branding prior and during its life “inside”. To make sense a “Symbian insdie” logo has to represent something – something powerful, interesting, intriguing, fascinating or cool….
15 kutta // Dec 1, 2009 at 3:41 am
Symbian had its chance. They blew it. Lets face it. They had a chance to make N97 an iconic device. Look what happened. In return they tarnished Nokia’s brand image too.
16 Nick Jones // Dec 1, 2009 at 3:52 am
Kutta, I think you’re being a bit harsh to the Symbian Foundation there. The N97 is a 100% Nokia device, nothing to do with the Symbian foundation so I don’t think you can blame them for it. I agree it’s not exactly iconic, although I think the N97 mini is a better device than the original N97.
17 kutta // Dec 1, 2009 at 5:11 am
Nick, actually the issue is lot more complex than the black & white argument here. Time and again Symbian devices exposed its limitations.
Symbian has hell lot of troubles to overcome before they can come out confidently to market it.
18 Mark W // Dec 1, 2009 at 5:51 am
Haydn, open source is nothing like developing a commercial app and then finding that no-one wants to buy it. Most of the stuff on the app-store has been built with the expectation of a financial return. It’s a very fundamental difference because people “work for free” for a variety of reasons, but they always expect to get SOMETHING out of it. If they don’t get back what they were expecting they’ll stop doing it. The whole online world is still trying to sort this out, but “the economy of free” is not sustainable for all digital content. We can’t all just advertise to one another either – at the end of the day, some cash has to change hands for the economy to work.
Re: consumer marketing – I know it’s a policy to do so and I should make it clear that it’s my opinion that it’s a bad idea, not that of my employer.
Yes, it’s chicken and egg. There’s no reason for OEMs to co-brand with “Symbian Inside” unless the brand has value of its own and the brand will struggle to gain any value without the recognition provided by co-branding. So one perfectly logical response is to try to build brand value online first. To do that coherently we need to have a clear and communicable vision of what Symbian represents that consumers will want to associate with. I didn’t get any of that from your previous post on this thread. The details of how Symbian is more open than say Android, LiMo or Maemo are really important for the industry but beyond the interest and attention span of the average consumer. Indeed there’s a long history of consumers not really caring about openness much at all if there’s a better product on offer that’s closed. This is probably a conversation to take offline though.
19 EEG // Dec 1, 2009 at 6:29 am
I agree with kutta. It’s not that Symbian doesn’t have good hardware, look at the n97, 5800, omnia HD, 5530, satio and the upcoming Nokia x6. They all have feature lists that will put the Iphone and any android phone to shame, but what really lets them down is the software.
If the manufacturers are doing whatever the hell they want, then what is the point of symbian? It is like a lion without any teeth.
In my opinion the average person doesn’t really care about the OS as much as the ability to easily access lots of good quality apps. This is what android and apple provide. If it wasn’t for the apps the iphone would just be a bit of eyecandy and nothing more.
The symbian UI was good about 5 years ago but now it is ancient compared to android and the iphone. It was designed for the stylus era and all symbian have done is dusted it off a little and put it into the modern phones out now. Development in the UI has been stagnant for a long time.
I’ve always felt that symbian has been designed for the manufacturers and not the end users. What andoid and the iphone have done is generate excitement and enthusiasm not only at the end user level but also at the developer level, that is something that symbian has not managed to do in its entire lifetime.
At the end of the day what is there to market? The UI? Or maybe it’s the lack of/inaccessible apps?
20 Mark W // Dec 1, 2009 at 8:12 am
The current Symbian UI is the one developed by Nokia as S60 and is being replaced by a new completely new one built on Qt, which is a really fantastic framework for developers to build apps with.
The current strengths of Symbian compared to other platforms, apart from a much richer feature set, are less obviously attributable to the software and harder to market to consumers as such. For example, your battery being flat at the end of every single day (and in some cases needing to turn features off in order to conserve battery) is something that consumers tend to attribute to the hardware, and yet on average Symbian devices have much better battery life – there’s a good reason for it – it’s the combination of hardware and software that’s important. Another example is device cost – it would seem to be a feature of the hardware, but the fact that the platform is capable of running on lower cost hardware is what enables it.
Also, while some of the current Nokia devices are rather underpowered on the hardware front compared to their peers, the fact that they have much better specs for other features is largely attributable to the fact that the platform provides support for those features where others don’t yet.
You’re right about the UI – it needs the overhaul it’s getting. If it’s done well then the platform will be extremely competitive again and there should be something really worth marketing.
21 Nick Jones // Dec 1, 2009 at 8:33 am
Mark, I am less worried about the ability of Nokia & the Foundation to fix the technology, or more especially the UI which is the weakest part of Symbian by far. Let’s imagine Symbian acquired a great UI tomorrow which was competitive with iPhone. Would that fix all its problems? I suspect not, because the platform and devices would still have non-functional weaknesses.
As I’ve mentioned before in this blog I’m a fan of the Don Norman model of product success; he says great products hit you at 3 levels: visceral (the “wow that’s cool” moment), functional, and reflective (supports your goals and values). Apple are experts at balacing these three.
For Symbian to be a success it will need devices with instant “wow” factor and also will have to satisfy deeper personal needs. E.g. you’d want your friends to be jealous / impressed when they saw you using a Symbian device. You’d want your kids to beg for Symbian devices because it’s cool to own one. And I think that’s a job for marketing.
22 Mark W // Dec 1, 2009 at 10:08 am
Thanks for the dialog Nick, it’s very interesting. I agree about Apple’s marketing ability and they have placed themselves exceptionally well as a premium brand that people aspire to own. However, I see this as an expensive area where the OEMs using the Symbian platform have the opportunity to differentiate from one another. Nokia actually has that kind of premium status in lots of countries but not at all in the US. They plan to use Symbian to reach way down to the bottom of mid-range devices. Those things are not aspirational, they’re mostly functional and practical. I don’t see how an open source software platform can possibly maintain that kind of aspirational position when Nokia positions it as the “mass market” platform and intends to use Maemo for its highest of the high end devices. Then a Chinese OEM like ZTE might reasonably make an ultra-cheap Symbian device for the low end. At the same time, Sony Ericsson might choose to use Symbian in their ultra high end devices with multi-core processors, high definition screens and top of the range cameras.
The point is that Symbian is an extremely scalable platform and I think it would be a mistake to confuse platform market positioning with product positioning.
As Geoffrey Moore advised Symbian at our recent SEE event, that kind of end-user market positioning is best suited to the OEMs – the customer relationship is down to their own product marketing strategy and most of them like to own that relationship.
The role of Symbian as a platform provider versus the OEMs as device creators and how they should present themselves to the market is a very worthwhile discussion that should probably be part of Symbian’s public dialogue in line with its open management philosophy.
23 davidbaer // Dec 26, 2009 at 11:08 am
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