When DoCoMo and Intel announced their new phone handset architecture specs, enabling dual Operating Systems, the press coverage was wide, but also simply repeated all or part of the press release.
Commentators seemed to be at a loss to explain the rationale and especially the business case behind the Open and Secure Terminal Initiative (OSTI) Architecture initiative and its specification.
It certainly is a little mysterious to fathom the business case from outside the elite inner circle of DoCoMo and Intel, but let's face it those are two of the most innovative and commercially successful companies in the world so something important is going on with OSTI.
In a nutshell, the single most important outcome, if and when implemented, is that business users, with all their personal choices of mobile phones and handsets, could, within one company, have a separate "company approved" OS installed with associated data stores, and corporate security policies.
Masanori Goto, a spokesman for DoCoMo, said that most of the carrier's current handsets are based on the Symbian or Linux operating systems, but phones built to the new specifications "would be able to run other operating systems, such as Windows Mobile or additional applications".
This is an example of how two elephants are trying to keep control over a third elephant who is slowly but surely entering their domain to eat their lunch. The biggest winner ultimately will be Microsoft, but DoCoMo and Intel are fighting a rear-guard action to keep others in the game and to try to tame the beast.
It's reasonably clear that corporate customers have told DoCoMo that they want nothing to do with investing any coporate money or development time into Symbian or Linux-compatible applications, and that they do not trust the data and policy security of those systems.
That's why DoCoMo has rushed to Intel to come up with way to create a closed garden around MS yet one which will satisfy the demands of corporate users for data security, synchronisation and integration with corporate officeware.
Is OSTI simply a cludge, an expensive solution which will make everyone's lives more complicated - quite possibly. Its implementation through an abstraction layer and potentially then another virtual machine layer (in one form of the implementation) adds huge inefficiency to already overloaded handsets. But that's another story - that's for another lesson!
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