Nokia, OpenSource & Competitive Advantage

(Via Infoworld) Nokia needed to beat competition on features to sell more mobile phones. Open source provided them with some help.Open source is good for many things, but sustainable competitive advantage isn't one of them.Anything you implement using open source today your competitors can implement tomorrow. Nokia's real differentiators in this case was a little different – There’s a limit to which features can be added & hardware can be extended to a mobile handset through miniaturization, fancy color screens, and headsets. Software provides the edge in such a scenario. A PC in every pocket? Probably not. The industry tried that with PDAs and it didn't pan out. Low power, small screens, and half-baked input methods doomed those devices to a niche market of gadget freaks and the technology elite. Cellular phones suffer many of the same drawbacks, but they have one universal feature that PDAs lack: robust network connectivity. Not only can you make voice calls on them - still the most requested feature among American consumers - but you're also guaranteed a full range of Web and Internet-enabled data services.
If the mobile handset is viewed as a thin client - iIts underpowered processor and poor storage make it a lousy choice as an application platform. As the front-end UI to an application hosted elsewhere, however, it can be more than adequate. It can even excel. Much of the enterprise market has already chosen the Web as its application-delivery platform of choice. So, to capture that market, all Nokia needed was a Web browser - albeit one robust and feature-rich enough to deliver the same functionality users have come to expect from desktop PCs. Nokia went with WebCore, the open source Web-rendering engine from Apple Computer. This gave Nokia first-mover advantage. Its competitors might implement a full-featured Web client tomorrow, but Nokia can deliver one today. Apple's code freed Nokia to concentrate its development resources on areas where it really could gain competitive advantage. In Nokia's case, that means UI. For a manufacturer of consumer devices, implementing core technologies isn't half as important as making them usable - something Apple must have known when it adopted open source as the basis for its own Safari browser. Innovation doesn't always mean starting from scratch. For Nokia, and Apple, open source isn't an end in itself. It's a beginning - one that allows these companies to concentrate on what they do best: delivering great products. The key question is how enterprises can get focused in using opensource to its advantage.