Guest post by David Wood, one of the founder executives of Symbian – and the one who saw it through to the bitter end – has written a book. A very big book.
Smartphones and beyond: Lessons from the remarkable rise and fall of Symbian tells the entire story from Symbian’s conception, to world domination, to its rapid demise, and it must be one of the most candid and revealing books a technology executive has ever written.
The Register’s Andrew Orlowski has published a review.
It’s a great book.
I think when a company fails, the natural instinct is to think that they were responsible for all the good, and anything bad that happened to the company was preventable, if only the right decisions had been made.
I’m not sure that’s true in many cases, especially Symbians. It was an OS for weak processor with minimal resources. That allowed it to dominate that era of phones. When better hardware arrived, the sacrifices they made for battery life and performance had a negative impact on developer time & energy. Google had a huge advantage with a “Java” phone that had an easy api and tool set, with no legacy code or commitments. Even migrating to QT wouldn’t have been enough, regardless of the quality of the port.
I have some experience with that. When you have a product and you work for large companies, each wants to manage your schedule and priorities and working for many at the same time is crazy.
The typical situation (what i assume happened to Symbian) is that large clients end up requesting changes and, while money is not usually the problem for them, negotiating requirements and signing an agreement for them takes time (because you have to make sure to earn a profit or else you can’t continue to operate) your clients usually don’t have due to the very short times to market.
In the end, since they have to pour a lot of money into you anyway, one of your clients will offer a huge chunk and purchase your company so they make sure they get exclusive access to your resources. After they are done, they will close it and fire everyone or just keep those responsible of maintenance.
It’s one of the most common reasons for “failed” company acquisitions. The owners/shareholders win, everyone else loses.
Edited 2015-01-03 01:02 UTC
Symbian died because it became outdated piece of shit and everyone else provided to developers technologies superior to Symbian from the beginning. While I like Symbian’s kernel and descriptor architecture (I spend nearly 6 years on developing Symbian apps), the rest was horrible.
1. There were no (working) debuggers available for this piece of garbage. Nokia’s stupid excuses for SDK sizes to provide debug symbols were hardly acceptable. Android/iOS somehow could provide that. Application testing was a mess. You could not attach Sy(m)bian’s half-assed “debugger”, which crashed either itself or whole phone most of the time, to anything useful. Breakpoints didn’t work 99.9% of the time. Single stepping didn’t work 90% of the time. Nokia’s “solution” with Trace 32 (Lauterbach), which is barely affordable for small companies and requires you to have phone with exposed JTAG, was ridiculous. Developers had to spend lots of time to debug using logger …
2. There were tons of private APIs and another SDK: Binary Access Kit – if you wanted to do something useful or more advanced. You needed special partnership with Symbian/Nokia to get these.
3. There were no true frameworks (like in iOS/Android) which provided coherent, high level functionality across devices. Most of Symbian APIs were half assed bunches of random functions. Many APIs were working inconsistently across OS versions. Hell, even on 2 different devices with the same OS version. On some it worked, on some it crashed applications and on the others it happily rebooted phone.
4. GUI APIs provided mediocre (at most) Low-Level functionality. You wanted something like UITableView ? Screw you ! Write your own or use unstable Symbian’s crap which is PITA to use and many useful functions are left in TODO state (or happily crashed phone/application).
5. After introducing crappy touch UI (with resistive touchscreens which hardly worked), AVKON (Nokia’s garbage UI) was “gifted” with touch “support” – they simply quickly slapped touch support as mouse events, which were already supported in Symbian. You wanted gestures ? Multitouch ? Or even useful touch controls ? SCREW YOU ! Write your own.
6. Because of the above points it was extremely hard to write and test Symbian applications, (all) developers quickly escaped to modern platforms: iOS/Android/JavaScript. I think it took 20-30 more time to write mediocre Symbian applications than to write/test good and working iOS/Android apps.
7. SDK build system was a bad joke. It required ridiculous .mmp files, which had hardly any functionality and took forever to build. Screw you Symbian !
Edited 2015-01-03 01:53 UTC
Tell me, it’s a rant, isn’t it? Are you sure that isn’t a chapter or an annex of the book ?
That’s purely from my experience and has nothing to do with the book.
You forgot to mention that wonderful hack known as Symbian C++. Even MFC was a better experience.
Wow that’s cold man.
Reminds me once more that if you wrap shit in gold foil and slap a fashionable logo on it, people will queue around the block for it…
Just like hobbits and lemmings do…
Many people on this site told me over many years that Symbian could never die. The writing was on the wall even a good decade ago.