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Nokia Paying $10M For Symbian Software Devs
colordev writes "Yesterday Nokia and AT&T announced a mobile software coding contest worth $10 million in prize money. The move is intended to help Symbian compete with Android and iOS. The day before this announcement, Sony Ericsson said it would not be making any new Symbian devices and is instead focusing on Android. That left Nokia pretty much alone with Symbian, and now it wants to find new coding 'friends' to keep the platform alive. Natural selection seems to be slowly eroding Symbian's future. Is this contest too late?"
The Grand Prize is only $100,000. Most of the "winners" just get some upcoming Nokia device. "Winning" means that the app receives "$1 million" in marketing promotion: "a Nokia press release, premium placement on Ovi Store, placement in Nokia digital and social media efforts, and direct consumer messaging via email and/or SMS." In other words, winning means Nokia spams for your app.
Nokia takes a 30% cut on sales through their "Ovi Store", so they're promoting themselves.
Nokia's total outlay on this "contest" is probably under $1 million.
Yes, Symbian "only" has 44% of the worldwide market share of smartphones. http://www.asymco.com/2010/08/02/android-global-share-rises-to-16-of-smartphones-in-q1/
They used to have a lot more. 44% is way, way down from a couple years ago.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
Yes, yes and yes.
You've been able to get add-on software for symbian phones since... well I had one in about 2005/6. Now they have the Ovi store. And yes, a lot of Nokia's Symbian phones are very similar to the competition. Not that that's always a good thing.
Me, I wish they'd drop Symbian in favour of Meego, but it doesn't look like that's happening any time soon. They are adopting Qt for both, which should allow for some portability.
1. Ditch the goal of moving Symbian to anything beyond dumb phones with cameras
Many people outside of US still use it and want some compatibility with their old phones.
2. Change the name of Meego to ANYTHING ELSE
MeeGo is just the name of the SDK / developer platform. Most consumers will not see that name when they purchase the phone.
3. Release Meego completely OSS and don't hamper people wanting to go in and tinker
You can now.
4. Start rolling out both (Official stock) Android and Meego on devices and allow for the devices to switch back and forth between the two
You can run MeeGo on N900. I think you can install Android on it too. MeeGo is not ready for any other device yet; not because Nokia doesn't want you to port it, simply because MeeGo doesn't have to features yet to handle any other kind of phone. Nokia doesn't think MeeGo is ready for primetime yet so you will not see it on any other phone for some time.
5. Release a marketing campaign to choose 'the next look of Nokia'
Wait until Q2 2011. I am not allowed to say anything else.
6. Analyze which OS is getting better market traction and phase out the loser
Nokia already said that they are moving to Linux/MeeGo. Qt is the "bridge" to move developers from one to another (just like how Carbon was used to move from MacOS classic to MacOS X). Talking to the people at Nokia, they already consider Symbian to be "legacy" and are already moving to MeeGo.
7.Profit More!
I hope Nokia will.