NTT DoCoMo / Tizen – Spectre of Bit Pipe

NTT DoCoMo must succeed where everyone else has failed.

• NTT DoCoMo now faces one of the greatest challenges in its history as it too, is now at risk of becoming a bit pipe.
• Tizen’s status is looking increasingly uncertain as one of its major proponents has shelved plans to launch handsets based on the platform.
• NTT DoCoMo is one of its leading proponents of and holds the chair of the Tizen Association.
• However, it has cited the slow growth and saturation of the Japanese market as the reason for shelving the devices.
• This move comes just three months after NTTDoCoMo finally started selling the iPhone on its network.
• I see this as no co-incidence and suspect that NTT DoCoMo has realised that in its current state, Tizen has no hope of competing.
• Tizen is the end product of at least 10 years of industry co-operation to build Linux based smartphones that to date has really only produced two working devices both of which failed to have any impact.
• The idea is that by using common code, handset makers can make smartphones to their own specifications much more cheaply.
• Tizen has also long been driven by operators who are keen to preserve their own brand identities that are getting weaker and weaker as Apple and Samsung dominate the market.
• Unfortunately, almost all operators do not have the first clue how to design a user experience and so the users have continued to view them as simple voice and data bit pipes.
• Historically, NTT DoCoMo’s dominance of its home market has allowed it to have a huge impact on the user experience which in the early days of the mobile internet it did a good job.
• Hence, users identified NTT DoCoMo with the user experience on the device meaning that competitive pressure on tariffs was less.
• NTT DoCoMo’s need to preserve this position is what has driven it to look at Tizen as its own home grown Linux offering proved to be brutally expensive.
• While Tizen offers a solution to this problem, it has long suffered from two problems which no one has been able to fix.
  • First: Standardisation by consensus. Tizen’s specification is set by a series of committees.
  • Getting two engineers to agree is difficult enough at the best of times.
  • This has meant that the Tizen specification is a compromise on everything that is optimal for no one.
  • Second: Samsung does not really care about Tizen despite ist protestations of commitment.
  • Samsung’s main focus is Android and when it is ready, I believe that it will take Android off in its own direction thereby removing Google.
  • Samsung has to remove Google if it wants to maintain its long term margins and a custom Android version is best way it can do that (see here)
  • Samsung is dominant in Android and (currently) it will take the developers with it should it fork the code.
  • If it were to jump instead to Tizen, it would need to convince all the developers to add another platform which, as Microsoft is finding, is incredibly hard even when you have lots of money.
  • Hence, at this juncture it has no present and future need of Tizen and I continue to believe that it hangs onto it only as an insurance policy.
• Tizen continues to drift along but until these two issues are solved I cannot see anyone making handsets based on the software or it gaining any real commercial traction.
• NTT DoCoMo now faces a real challenge as there is now very little to set its user experience apart from KDDI or Softbank.
• If the glory days are to return, it must solve a problem that every other operator in the world has failed to solve.
• The longer it takes, the closer and closer NTT DoCoMo will come to being just another bit pipe.