What triggered the disruption
The
announcement surprised almost everyone in the mobile industry. It was
hard to predict, but is not too hard to rationalize. It may be argued
that there are two reasons for Nokia's acquisition and open source
roadmap:
- Firstly,
as a royalty-free, open source licensed OS, Android was too hard to
resist for any OEM. Nokia's acquisition of Symbian is essentially the
answer to Android, resonating the same core principles, which are
- royalty-free
- open source licensing for pooling costs of maintaining a commoditizing OS
- majority ownership by a single player
- Secondly, Motorola was bleeding heavily in a financial sense, and so it would have been keen to sell out its UIQ shares, which Sony Ericsson could not assume the burden of, as UIQ was a long way from being profitable. With UIQ out, S60 was the only Symbian-based alternative for Sony Ericsson, and a strategic choice in keeping Google from becoming the "Android-inside" of the mobile industry.
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