An Industry and Technology Revolution is on the Horizon

By Jason Whitmire

Limo, and in a slightly different way Android, have killed the standards-based approach to open source development in mobile. In the Linux world, creating an esoteric, theoretical application standard not based on market-driven code requires too much speculative investment without any clear mitigation of ROI risk for anyone to take up anymore. Indeed, the days of a bunch of representative techies flying to exotic locales to dream up the theoretical perfect system are over. It’s just too expensive to completely retool an entire stack without a known intrinsic return.

Because of the concentration in the mobile market (83% of handsets manufactured by five companies), when market leaders have invested in a stack, it is a standard whether certified by an arcane standards body or not.  The  Open Handset Alliance has created a de facto market standard not because a group of market leaders have adopted the standard, but because of Google’s overall singular market weight. The effect is the same (Trolltech and OpenMoko did the same thing that OHA did, and took it one step further by actually building a phone, but no one came running to embrace their reference designs because they lacked the market weight that Google has).

This is not to be confused with the need for technical standards that dictate interoperability, like GSM/WCDMA, TCP/IP, and WiFi (These were all the standards that LiPS cited as analogous reasons why there needs to be a theoretical application standard for mobile).  These standards determine how unlike devices interoperate, which will always be needed.  But within a device, the need for a theoretical standard is no longer valid. Developers will flock to what the market broadly supports, whether its because most of the Big Five support it or because of a sea-change in mobile computing brought about by an adjacent industry.

At the same time that LiMo and Android are setting a pragmatic, non-standards stage for significant consolidation in middleware/apps frameworks, a second major reason for mobile Linux fragmentation is arguably the lack of one common Linux distribution to work from (unlike the singular Symbian OS or Microsoft Mobile, or low level RTOSs such as OSE or Nucleus). Indeed, some commercial Linux vendors have traditionally leveraged only the kernel in a product offering, yet these vendors were too small to handle complex, global mobile phone projects for the big players. As a result, Tier 1 OEMs and semiconductor companies had to build costly Roll Your Own in-house OS development groups to handle Linux — a decidedly non-core silicon or OEM  competency — thereby proliferating the number of uncommon Linux distributions and raising costs associated with upgrading and maintaining them

Today this landscape has started to fundamentally change. Larger software players now bring significantly greater value propositions and delivery capabilities to mobile Linux, while there is a growing perception that a common public Linux distribution accessible to all players in the value chain is a critical least-common-denominator running across multiple Linux middleware choices. Indeed, while earlier commercial efforts focused on providing know-how to the kernel, the remaining 95% of what is required to build a Linux device (a common Linux integration environment, a single cockpit tools suite, deep mobile Linux engineering skills in hardware and middleware integration and testing, broad global commercial support, warranties and maintenance, et al.) was missing.

As a result, 2008 signals the start of fundamental changes to the mobile software market as the industry begins the next generation of Linux platform deployments.

Jason Whitmire has more than 14 years of executive marketing and management experience in semiconductor and system software. He currently serves as General Manager of Wind River’s Mobile Solutions business. Previously he was a managing director of FSMLabs, where he headed the worldwide wireless and EMEA businesses, and he was head of business development for wireless software at Infineon Technologies for four years. Additionally, Jason has held senior product management, marketing and business development positions at two European mobile network operators. Jason got his start in the wireless arena in 1993 while representing the US government in international spectrum and privatization negotiations.