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3Com & Psion to Join Forces for Wireless Internet
A reader wrote to us with the news that Psion and 3Com have agreed to join forces against WinCE. Software will be portable to either platform - Psion's or PalmOS and they will continue to work more closely together. Psion has support already from the biggest cell phone people - Nokia included, a great starting position.
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Then, Microsoft is beginning to pick up on the embedded & hand-held markets, again. And they have some serious resources they can throw at things. If they break into the market, then it won't matter how good the alternatives are, they'll fail.
On the flip-side, if 3Com and Psion can pull this off, and deliver a coup de grace to Windows SE, that might deliver some HUGE shock-waves to the market, way beyond merely who controls that one sector. For Microsoft to admit defeat, even in an area they've never done well in, their image will be seriously damaged in -every- market. Once someone has been beaten, they lose the aura of invincibility, not just with that opponent, but with everyone. There would be a real danger of competitors in other markets taking the battle to Microsoft, rather than allowing themselves to be controlled and dominated.
Depending on how this turns out, it could be the end of 3Com & Psion, or the end of Microsoft domination in computing in general. In business, image is EVERYTHING. Who wins, wins big. Who looses, looses it all.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I joined Nokia at the time they invested in Symbian, together with Ericsson and Motorola. (Note: Nokia, Motorola and Ericsson are the three biggest players in mobile phone market, and otherwise there is bloody competition between them.) I was/am a fan of Palm and so was a bit disappointed, believing Nokia would have been better off to invest in the Palm OS. OTOH, Nokia, Ericsson and Motorola (and now Matsushita and Philips and who else..) know well where they put their money. They certainly wouldn't cooperate on a project if they weren't sure it's going to be turbogood, and strategially important.
Also, please note how Nokia has really *huge* know-how of embedded and special purpose OSs. I don't mean only the GSM (and nordic) phones, but also the multiprocessor/modular DX-200 switching platform.
So in the end Nokia decided to use Epoc *and* Palm OS. Why not? They are both great embedded OSs, efficient and well designed, and as such it's easily possible to find synergies.
I would also like to add that Nokia as a corporation doesn't like Microsoft. MS did some bad and ugly things to push their non-standards against WAP and have, quite simply put, annoyed a lot of people here. MS proved again to be full of sh*t, in every respect. That's (probably) one of the reasons Nokia chose Linux for it's multimedia set-top/wireless Internet access device.
And, just as another example, Linux and *BSD are meeting with less and less resistence in the corporation, you can see these boxes everywhere now! A good place to work for a nerd (which I am not (fingers crossed)).
Sigged!
I think the main point here is not about dominating the PDA field, it is about which operating system gets chosen for the mobile multimedia terminals. Face it, mobile wide-band technologies are here in 2-3 years. First there will be GPRS (GSM Packet Radio Service), which provides connectionless data transmission through GSM networks with a reasonable bandwidth. A couple of year from that, 3rd gen. mobile networks will be emerging, and they will provide 256 Kb/s - 2 Mb/s of bandwidth. Think about it, that will make continuous real-time multimedia streaming feasible. Streaming Mp3 or even MPEG4 to your mobile terminal! Now when you think that in the most advanced countries (Finland, that is), already 85% of the active population have cellular phones, and current mobile phones will be gradually upgraded to mobile multimedia terminals, dominance on that market begins to look pretty important. The PDA, or even the desktop market, seems almost insignificant in comparison. Since ALL of the major mobile players are with Symbian, and none (AFAIK) with Microsoft, it -- at the moment, at least -- seems like MS is missing their launch window to the major market of the future! Interesting, isn't it?