Saturday, Aug 30, 2008
The software king has big plans for making the world of mobile phones safe for Windows. Can phone makers, and a little Norwegian company called Opera, stop the onslaught?
Nov 21, 2002 | When Jon von Tetzchner travels from his home in Norway to the United States, he often carries with him a small black bag stuffed with about a half dozen cellular phones. The phones are of various models, sizes and colors, and they're all brand-new and as stylish as they come -- sleek, tiny brushed-steel and translucent-plastic devices that are probably at the center of many cell-addled Euro teens' most lurid tech fantasies.
Von Tetzchner -- the CEO and co-founder of Opera software, which makes a commercial Web browser with a reputation among chic geeks of being one of the best alternatives to Microsoft's Internet Explorer -- doesn't bring the phones with him just to burnish his image. The gadgets serve a business purpose. Opera has just released a new Web browser for tiny devices, and von Tetzchner needs all those phones to prove that his software will work on just about anything. Microsoft's browser will work only on phones powered by Microsoft's cellphone operating system -- and von Tetzchner considers that a significant limitation for Microsoft as well as a significant opportunity for Opera.
But when von Tetzchner demonstrates his browser on each of his favorite phones, as he did for me in San Francisco this fall, it's not hard to see that he also loves the devices because they make him look good. Von Tetzchner, who is 35 and has an air of carefully cultivated dishevelment, with mussed-up short hair and a three-day stubble goatee, doesn't think of a cellphone as merely a machine to house his code. He revels in the differences between the phones, in the interfaces, the lines, the screen sizes. That's why when he shows off his software, he brings five or six phones instead of just one. He knows that to someone buying a cellphone, design and brand matter quite a bit -- maybe more than price and feature set. A phone, like a pair of shoes or a car, and unlike a PC or a coffeemaker, is a personal device, a fashion accessory that says something about its owner.
In 1998 Nokia, the world's largest phone maker, released its phenomenally successful 5100 series, which featured interchangeable faceplates. Since then phone makers have recognized that one way to sell a lot of cellphones is to appeal to consumers' aesthetic sensibilities. But von Tetzchner believes that the personalization in phones should extend beyond the hardware and into the software. Why should the Web browser on Eminem's cellphone look like the browser on P. Diddy's? And shouldn't the operating system in either of their phones be different from the OS in, say, Gene Simmons' phone?
That's where von Tetzchner sees an opportunity to beat Microsoft in the cellphone business. This fall, Microsoft released its first "Windows powered" phone, the SPV, which is being sold by the British phone carrier Orange. The phone has a color screen, Windows XP's bubbly look and feel, and a powerful processor to allow for multimedia applications like Web and e-mail browsing, instant messaging with pictures, and some PDA-type calendar and address features. The SPV is meant to compete with similar "smart phones" being released by all major cellphone makers; the wireless industry expects these high-end devices to become a big part of the market during the next few years.
Because these new phones will also run applications from third-party vendors, much as your desktop computer does today, smart phones may usher in a whole new software industry devoted to building programs for tiny devices. But the question of who will make the big money in this business hangs on who wins the emerging fight over the market for the operating systems for the new phones. In a press release announcing Microsoft's phone, Steve Ballmer, Microsoft's CEO, suggested that Windows might have the upper hand because cellphone users would take to its "familiar and powerful software experience."
But von Tetzchner and Microsoft's competitors in the wireless industry believe exactly the opposite. Cellphone users don't want a familiar software experience. They want a unique, personalized experience. Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Motorola, Matsushita and Siemens -- which together account for more than 60 percent of all phone sales in the world -- are all large stakeholders in Symbian, a company in the U.K. that builds operating-system software for smart phones. Symbian licenses its software to phone makers for use in smart phones, but it doesn't require those firms to use the code in any set way. The companies get access to Symbian's source code, and they're allowed to tweak any bit of it they like, in order to make smart phones that are compatible across vendors yet offer a look and feel unique to a single device. And, to underline the rivalry between von Tetzchner and Microsoft, Opera is the default browser for Symbian.
There's now some indication that Symbian's model may be winning early battles in the marketplace. A number of the largest phone makers have already released Symbian-based smart phones, and Nokia says it will sell as many as 10 million of them by year's end. But Symbian's biggest victory came early in November, when Sendo, a British handset maker that was one of the first companies to sign on with Microsoft, abruptly announced that it would no longer build a Microsoft phone. Instead, Sendo said it would now start working on a smart phone using software from Nokia and Symbian, software that Sendo calls "uniquely flexible."
Microsoft calls Sendo's decision "baffling," and it insists that its software is as flexible as anyone else's -- but others in the cellphone business aren't sure whether to believe Microsoft. Von Tetzchner, for example, says that phone makers are deathly scared of Microsoft because they know the company's history: If Windows is allowed to become the dominant brand in cellphones, the handset industry could go the way of the PC industry -- in which hardware is considered an interchangeable, brand-less commodity.
Von Tetzchner is a competitor of Microsoft, and because his company is betting heavily on Symbian's success, his views are tinged with personal profit -- but he still makes sense. Perhaps Microsoft will become a major provider of cellphone software, as some observers expect, but its chance of taking the whole cell market is slim; Microsoft's aggressive behavior in the desktop world, as well as its determination to push the Windows look and feel in other markets, has made manufacturers of cellphones -- the most popular electronics devices in the world -- wary of taking its call.
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