Well, one commenter wrote that my sentence-long analysis of Nokia's acquisition of Symbian in this post was too simplistic. I agree. Innosight Senior Partner Steve Wunker, who worked at Psion in the 1990s, had the following thoughts:
Ten years ago, a bevy of companies shocked the communications industry when they announced the formation of Symbian—a for-profit consortium that would transform the PDA software of Britain’s Psion PLC into a platform powering high-end smartphones.
Back then, these smartphones were gleams in engineers’ eyes (the first—Ericsson’s Project Pamela—was the size of a small book and never commercially produced). But, almost unanimously, industry analysts foresaw them taking over the premium tiers of the mobile market and requiring a common software platform for the third party developers who would create the applications that users would demand. At its peak in August 2000, equity markets valued Symbian at nearly $10 billion.
This week, Nokia bought out the remaining shareholders of Symbian for about $410 million, and immediately declared it would give away the software code to a non-profit Symbian Foundation.
Was this tumble because Symbian produced a bad product? Not at all. By most measures—system reliability, power consumption, etc.—Symbian’s mobile operating system is the best on the market.
Rather, the world changed in ways very few industry analysts expected. A decade ago, intelligent people reasoned that the processing power of the mobile would start catching up to PCs, and so people would start to demand PC-like functionality on their phones. Moreover, the mobility of the phone would lead to many unique applications being developed for this platform.
Read the rest on Scott's Harvard Business blog, Innovation Insights.