After all, the global market share of the open-source operating system will surpass that of the Symbian OS in smartphones by 2010, according to The Diffusion Group.
However, a panel discussion at the conference earlier in the day highlighted the challenges ahead of the mobile Linux industry to reach this potential.
While Motorola, the world’s No. 2 mobile handset maker, will continue to release Microsoft Windows Mobile and Symbol OS devices, the company said it would move its broader portfolio toward Linux.
Life in the mobile space has changed and it’s all about Linux, said Greg Besio, Motorola’s VP of mobile devices software. We think it’s the next big opportunity, he said, during a brief keynote session at the conference that kicked off in San Francisco. However, Besio did not elaborate on any product or timing specifics.
Schaumburg, Illinois-based Motorola released its first Linux-based phone in China about three years ago and has sold more than five million Linux handsets to date, Besio said.
The company’s newest Linux handset, called Ming, grabbed more than 1% of the mobile phone market share in China since it was released earlier this year, he added. Among Ming’s snazzier feature are a business card scanner and a language translation service. The former Ming model is currently the leading mobile phone in the country, Besio claimed.
Future mobile features the company is looking toward from Linux include streaming radio, ecommerce, electronic wallet and search, Besio said.
Motorola hopes to find such applications with its tactic to engage the most innovative partners in the Linux mobile industry, he said. We’re ready to partner.
But, based on feedback from the mobile investment community in Silicon Valley, including the venture capital arms of major mobile carriers, there doesn’t seem to be an abundance of Linux mobile developers actively seeking funding.
There’s not that many out there, said Satya Mallya, France Telecom R&D LLC’s director of Personal Sphere, wireless and terminals, who is based in San Francisco. The ecosystem is building up and it will take a little while before we get the traction.
Swissnex, the investment unit of Swisscom Group, Switzerland’s largest telecom company, has had a similar experience, said its head of technology Thomas Jakob, who is also based in San Francisco. We haven’t had many people knocking on our door, he said.
It’s too early to decide what’s the real way to go, so we’re trying to monitor and follow what’s going on. I think when the time is right and we have enough people knocking on our door, we will work with those guys … to bring something of value to the customer.
What makes mobile Linux very important are flexibility and cost, France Telecom’s Mallya said.
Of investment interest to T-Venture of America Inc, the corporate venture capital arm of Deutsche Telekom, are technologies that simplify the technical help users require, said the company’s Claas Heise. The smart the phones get, the dumber the customers look … So cost of support is a really big concern.
Many of the Linux-based mobile startups that approach T-Venture for financing have point technologies rather than the broader applications that are more likely to peak the interest of a Deutsche Telekom product manager, said Heise, who is based in Foster City, California.
They really only get moved by large things, notably applications that generate additional revenue for a large part of the carrier’s customer base, he said. So, these smaller Linux apps tend not to rouse the attention or the investment.
Heise also pointed out that with open-source software, investors couldn’t claim much of a stake in the intellectual property. So, it’s an investment model that’s not fitting the traditional investment model that much, Heise said. In part, this is why strategic investments are more common among Linux-based platforms.
Partnerships will be the new competitive advantage in the mobile space, said Greg Franklin, a principal at Intellect Partners, a Palo Alto, California-based venture capital firm. It’s the quality and the ability for partnerships that’s going to be the differentiation for the wireless space going forward, Franklin said.
A large reason for this is the frighteningly small number of large companies in the wireless industry, Franklin said. We still have to deal with this concentration of power, he said, noting that three companies, Motorola, Nokia and Samsung, ship about two thirds of the world’s handsets.
The dominance of just a few players in the market makes it challenging for sources of innovation, Franklin said. No one company is able to deliver the solution to the customer – we need to work together.
Harshul Sanghi of Motorola Ventures, the VC arm of Motorola Inc, agrees that large and small companies being able to partner in a meaningful manner will drive and propel the propagation of applications for Linux in the mobile space, he said.
Sanghi also noted that because Linux is in the very early stages on the stack of platforms in mobile, there remain a lot of problems that need to be solved.
A Motorola exec who joined Besio onstage said the biggest risk to the mobile Linux industry right now is fragmentation, which could impede creativity over time. The industry needs to create one Linux with an API set that can be used by a very large ecosystem, she said.
Motorola also thinks there need to more tools available for mobile Linux, she said.
