“This week… Matsushita Communication, the world’s
fourth-biggest mobile-phone maker, announced that it was taking a
9% shareholding in Symbian, an 11-month-old software joint venture
fostered by Psion, a small but pioneering British company that
makes handheld computers. … Why should that concern the mighty
Microsoft?
The reason is the identity of Symbian’s other shareholders-they
are Nokia, Motorola and Ericsson, the three giants of the
mobile-telephone industry. With Matsushita on board, Symbian’s
parents now account for some 85% of the world’s 175m[million]-odd
mobile phones. Because of its mighty parents, Symbian is a
potential powerhouse that threatens to lock Microsoft out of a
market that could reach 150m [million] devices by 2005 and may be
even more important for the development of the Internet than
set-top boxes.
Symbian was set up in the hope of creating a common software
platform built around Psion’s EPOC operating system for what it
calls ‘wireless information devices’. What drew the mobile-phone
firms to Symbian was the quality of the EPOC technology and their
conviction, born of Europe’s experience with digital GSM, that an
open standard was critical if the new market was to take off.”