Nokia takes on Symbian development as Foundation scales back

Nokia and the Symbian Foundation on Monday announced a major restructuring that will see the handset giant take over the development of the Symbian operating system while the latter scales down its activities to focus solely on licensing its software and intellectual property.

The first phase of the transition will see the Symbian Foundation downsize its operations and its staff numbers, and by April 2011 it will be governed by a small group of executive directors. Meanwhile Nokia will invest its own resources in developing and distributing the Symbian OS.

“The future of Symbian as a platform does not depend on the existence of the foundation,” said Jo Harlow, senior vice president of smartphones at Nokia, in a statement.

The restructuring will have no impact on Nokia’s Symbian device roadmap, she said.
“The platform powers hundreds of millions of smartphones – including our own – and we expect to deliver ongoing support and innovation benefitting the Symbian ecosystem in the future,” she said.

The announcement follows the resignation last month of the Symbian Foundation’s executive director Lee Williams – who was replaced by then CFO Tim Holbrow – amid ongoing concerns over the platform’s struggle to compete with smartphone rivals Apple, RIM and Android.

“The founding board members took a bold strategic step in setting up the foundation,” said a statement from Tim Holbrow, who commented that it was “absolutely the right decision at the time”.
“There has since been a seismic change in the mobile market but also more generally in the economy, which has led to a change in focus for some of our funding board members,” he said.

Indeed, notable big names that have either ceased development of Symbian devices in favour of rival operating systems, or left the foundation altogether, include Samsung, Motorola and more recently Sony Ericsson.

Still, Holbrow said “we continue to see solid momentum behind the platform”.

“I’m immensely proud of the work we’ve done at the Symbian Foundation,” he said. “In the last year we’ve delivered the biggest open source project ever in releasing the entire Symbian codebase under an open source licence, and we did it four months ahead of schedule.”

The Symbian Foundation said its leadership team will work together with Nokia to mitigate the impact of the downsizing on the broader ecosystem, and that further details of the restructuring will be made available at a later date.