Why the Symbian Foundation was an epic fail

You may have seen that the Symbian Foundation is changing its focus and moving away from being a non-profit organization to being a licensing body.

This may seem like a minor organizational change but this is actually one of the larger mobile failures we've seen in a long time and it doesn't bode well for Nokia's future platform strategy.

If you don't recall, Nokia spent about $400 million to acquire Symbian in 2008 and it planned to turn over all the assets to the newly-formed Symbian Foundation in order to create an open source smartphone platform.

Remember, this was before Google's Android was on the market and Nokia believed that its weight, along with the market success of Symbian, would be enough to create a dominant new platform.

Things were looking good at the start, too. The foundation adopted some hip and cute branding, heavy hitters like Samsung and AT&T jumped on board, and foundation CEO Lee Williams would routinely talk trash about competitors and say he wanted to make Apple cry.

But the foundation never seemed to gain traction for many reasons. The first problem is actually quite admirable, as doing a truly open source operating system is messy and takes a long time.

While Nokia was the guiding force behind the first version of the open source Symbian, I do think that it tried to give other members a larger say in the future of the OS.

Contrast that with something like Android, which is also open source – We all know Google is accounting for the bulk of the development of the platform and the source code is then released once the search giant is finished with Android versions.

Google had the benefit of working from a modern OS that was built from the ground up with full touchscreen support and a cloud-centric vision in mind.

Symbian is still quite a highly-capable platform but it was designed for a phone, not necessarily a smartphone or superphone. The Symbian Foundation was trying to remodel a house that had a bad foundation.

We didn't hear much from the foundation besides Symbian^3 and Symbian ^4 and both still seemed light years behind competitors like Android, iOS, Windows Phone 7 and even webOS.

Then, the dominoes started to fall in a row: Samsung ditched it in favor of Android and Windows Phone 7, Sony Ericsson withdrew its support, Williams resigned seemingly out of nowhere and then Nokia said it would take over the development of Symbian, leaving the foundation as a mere licensing body.

So, the foundation cost at least $400 million and in two years created an updated Symbian that is behind the times. That's a failure in my books, a failure of epic proportion.

To be fair, Sharp and Fujitsu just announced support for Symbian but neither of these companies is relevant or large enough in the mobile space to really move the needle. In my mind, Symbian can still only count on Nokia, which is actually a worse position for the platform than before the Symbian Foundation was even formed.

I've said multiple times before that Nokia needs to transition away from Symbian as soon as possible because the platform just doesn't have the legs to compete in the modern era of superphones.

I don't ever think Nokia should adopt Android or Windows Phone 7 because it should control its own software future and that's why MeeGo could be its knight in shining armor.