Android And Symbian Sitting In a Tree: Suggested Merger Pretty Unlikely

Analyst J Gold and Associates has come out with a prediction that Symbian and Android will begin merging into one open source OS within 3-6 months, and it's gotten a fair bit of airplay. The reasons?

-- "Google's ( NSDQ: GOOG) investment in Android is "diluting the potential for it [Google] to build compelling cross-device applications where it can generate substantial revenues".-- Symbian could get some cred with the open source community.-- Fewer platforms for the market, which would benefit everybody.

"A combination of the Android and Symbian efforts would be good for the industry, good for Google and good for Symbian," J. Gold said. "It would also help spur a growth in the availability of applications and services. The downside is minimal. Everyone wins," reports Information Week. It's true that Symbian does need to attract unpaid developers to its open source effort, and it's also true that Symbian CEO Nigel Clifford said that the organization would be happy to work with Google"on the application level or?could be on the more fundamental operating system level"?although I thought this would be more about Google's applications and services rather than Android.

Against: From a technological point of view there is little to recommend a merger. Symbian and Linux are sufficiently different that there's no real way to easily combine the code?they both use Java in some form but that doesn't amount to much. So any merger would basically have to choose between Symbian or Linux?probably Linux?with the other slowly being abandoned. Effectively, that's throwing in the towel and I don't think either organization is willing to do that just yet?which is the business/ego argument against it too.

There is likely to be some consolidation in the mobile OS industry, if by consolidation you mean some players just losing, but I wouldn't bet on any mergers any time soon. Here's an interesting quote from Morgan Gillis, executive director of the LiMo Foundation, in a CNet article about the mobile OS battle: "Gillis recognizes that by the time the Symbian Foundation releases an operating system in 2010, some of today's current players may have fallen by the wayside. "The question is really what is the right number of platforms from the industry. Major players say there has to be rationalisations down to some number, but the right number is not bigger than four. ...It's much more efficient to have a small number," he said."