Why is NOKIA sending Symbian down the tubes?

As rumored by Financial Times Germany, NOKIA is about to replace Symbian with Mameo (it’s own interpretation of Linux on small devices) on smartphones.

Looking at NOKIA’s current product offerings, this move may make sense. NOKIA currently has no competitive offering in the iPhone/Android space and it’s “Business E-Series” does not stack up well against the Blackberry.

Looking at my crystal ball last year I figured that NOKIA was simply taken by surprise. The market-leader – who has not been leading the market on a conceptual level for years – was simply out-innovated. However in 2009 it seems that NOKIA is also having a hard time to catch-up and one of the reasons for this may be it’s platform strategy. The FT article speculates “Symbian is far to clunky to keep up with modern operating systems”. This is consistent with the NOKIA user experience.
My user experience with Nokie E60, E90 in this case: Integration of higher-level functionaity is generally poor and highly inconsistent. Overall device performance ranges from “somewhat sluggish” to “apathic”. Ovi seems to be mostly “missing in action”. Symbian applications are scarce and overpriced.

Why can’t NOKIA deliver on Symbian?
Again the FTD article: “Symbian bases on the EPOC OS from the 90s [..] it is very difficult to add new features in such a complex structure”.

Intresting. Symbian (and it’s predecessor EPOC) is a purpose-build system for small devices with limited memory, CPU and I/O resources. It’s design is from the 80s it was first put on a phone in 2000. So it should be a rather modern (modular, flexible) operating system.

Mameo on the other hand is basically Linux + some extras. It’s monolithic kernel design and it’s primary APIs date back to the original Unix form 1969. Same is true for Android. This is also mostly true for the iPhone OS being Mac OSX which in turn is Mach+FreeBSD.  All of these are older designs. And the Linux kernel is not exactly small either, it clocks in at slightly over 10 million lines of code. The statements above only apply to the kernel, the UI and large parts of the application APIs are  a very different story.

I can only speculate why can’t NOKIA compete on a more recent, purpose build OS against something that was conceived as a (not very good) multi-user timesharing system.

My 0.02€: The system (and especially S60) got screwed up badly and a rewrite on top of the Symbian kernel would be more time-consuming than switching platform. The really bad news is that Mameo (as a platform) is just another run-off-the-mill Linux for small devices. It’s UI concept is far from being innovative. I don’t even know whether it’s up to date (I quit using Mameo when I sold my N800 quite a while ago).
If NOKIA is viewing this as their best play on the smartphone market I assume that we are not going to see much innovation from NOKIA in that market in the future, unless they can finally breathe some life in Ovi.
Sell, Sell!

Opinions?

UPDATE: See also Eike’s analysis on Mameo as a phone platform.