Friday, March 23, 2007

The Motorola news

So Motorola are losing money, and decided, among other things, to concentrate on Linux from now on. Their proprietary RTOS P2K will be no more. I haven't managed to pick up any info on whether this means that they're going to drop Symbian and Windows Mobile as well, but I assume they will. Working with just one platform, both for smartphones and feature phones, definitely makes sense.

People can keep going on about how immature, unfocused and untried Linux on mobile devices is, but its 40-50% market shares in the Japanese and Chinese smartphone markets should make it obvious that that's just not true. Japan and China aren't exactly second league when it comes to hitech stuff. This Motorola story looks like just another piece of evidence that Linux will be the dominant OS on phones in a few years. Both Symbian and Windows Mobile have their strong points, but technologically Symbian is quite horrible, and Microsoft keep failing in their attempts to gain market shares outside of North America.

1 comment:

ul7 said...

Market sharing is market caring!