At the start of any new technology, the money is always made in selling shovels, the tools that are needed to get people involved. Time passes and the technology matures and while people still want shovels, it's not at the top of their list. What is at the top of the list now is the eye candy, the sexiness, and the graphics that slide around the screen nicely. It's why app stores and third party developers are important in the modern ecosystem.
You'd be hard pressed to argue that Apple is not sexy in the modern smartphone world. And, while the Symbian Foundation is making noises about updating the user interface to something more slick in the next version (quick, make a reference to the story of the Ugly Duckling), their strategy up until now has been to create the best tool in the world at the Operating System level, leaving it up to the licencees to implement the UI. Time has of course left us with S60 as the dominant UI, but while it was sufficient a couple of years ago, now it looks more like a shovel than a beautiful garden.
What can the Symbian Foundation do? Well they're showing promise that something sexy is coming along by flashing a bit of leg with their UI Concept video. On top of that there are more hints every day that there are amazing things in the roadmap, but much of these are tools in the SDK's and tool-chains for the developers to create good third party applications. Will the Symbian Foundation make it easy enough for developers to make sexy applications?
The problem could be that these tools and the existing platforms aren't sexy enough to attract new developers. Having a few poster child applications is a good start, but the Symbian Foundation not only needs to make the tools, but prove that these tools can be used (by others) to create the eye-catching applications. They're going to have to bootstrap a new app economy, with lots of razzamattazz and showbizness. And I'm wondering if they have that in them.
Ewan Spence