Rest in Peace Symbian 

After 11 years, this is the first quarter when a S60 Symbian phone will not be shipped. Though in its day, Symbian had a very strong fan base with over 75% market share, it has since lost all of it.

Symbian was, along with the original Palm OS, Windows Mobile, and earlier versions Blackberry OS, among the first generation OS’s. Most of these OS’s were superseded by new versions of the OS such as Windows Mobile, BB10 or Web OS, but Symbian is unique in that it lasted so long and yet failed to develop a viable successor.

What can be learned from Symbian’s 11-year reign and its rise and fall?

Innovate or Die

The key challenge for any mobile ecosystem is how do you change without alienating your user base? The major reason that Symbian failed is that it did not innovate fast enough. Nokia’s first response to the iPhone was to produce a touch screen phone 18-months later that required a stylus to use it! 

Organizations made the mistake of treating the smartphone ecosystem like the PC ecosystem. They assumed that it was hard for people to move from one smartphone OS to another, and that consumers would be locked in by legacy.  I’m sure they would point to Windows XP as their poster child, which was launched at the same time as Symbian, and still has 33% market share.

Mobile is different. Smartphones are a consumer’s most personal compute device. If you do not offer what the consumer wants they will switch. In the mobile world there is no legacy, there is just continued innovation. With a great user experience it is easy to change from one ecosystem to another. As an aside, it is amusing that an enterprise can issue someone with a PC with a 2002 user experience and get away with it. Try doing that with a smartphone.

Consumers Don’t Care About Underlying Technology

One other trap that Symbian fell into was being focused on technology changes rather than user experience changes. They would launch a new version of Symbian that had significant underlying technological changes but the user experience did not change. All Nokia had to do with Symbian was give it a decent touch based UI, clean up the settings menu and they would have kept their installed base.

Lessons For The Future 

What are the key lessons for today’s OS’s?

• Keep evolving: Mobile is evolving rapidly and if you cannot offer the features and user experience that excites your consumer base, they will move. Mobile is like fashion, it does need to change each season to allow the consumer to do new things and to keep buying your devices.
  
• There is no legacy:
• User experience matters, technology does not:  Technology does not matter, unless it is visibly improving the user experience. If Version 7 of your platform looks like Version 6 to the consumer, then you are taking the wrong path.  It does not matter to a consumer if your platform is HTML5 based, C++ based or written in Middle English, they just want a great user experience.

After writing this, I will dig up an old Symbian phone, try and find the charger, play with it for 5 minutes, and then put it back in the drawer, thinking how lucky we are to have this amount of mobile innovation.