Once upon a time, Microsoft owned a 90 percent share in the
browser market. Explorer appeared unbeatable, tied to Microsoft’s dominant
Windows, and fresh from crushing former market leader Netscape.
Not today.
What took down the giant?
Well, lots of things, but largely
Mozilla with its open-source Firefox browser.
Today the shape of the mobile operating system market looks
much the same, if diversified to some degree. You’ve got Apple and Google at the top, with iOS and Android
respectively, with Microsoft making a play for relevance. They’re all huge players backed by other
dominant products.
And here comes Mozilla again, this time with its
browser-based Boot to Gecko mobile operating system similar in some respects to
both Google’s Chrome OS and Palm’s failed webOS . The company announced the
system at the Mobile World Congress in February and recently announced that the
first Boot to Gecko phone would come out in Brazil in early 2013, in a
partnership with Telefonica (yet another bold move by Telefonica – and you can
read about that here
and here
and here).
According to
the International Business Times, “Mozilla and Telefonica will jointly
launch the Open Web Devices platform and it will be based on web apps and HTML5
offering developers complete access to core device APIs. Capabilities including
calling, messaging, browsing and gaming will be developed as HTML5 applications
and will be executed via experiences based on the Firefox browser.”
So why might Boot to Gecko thrive? Here are three possible reasons:
1. HTML5 is the future: We’ve written about the rise of
HTML5 before. If the mobile world really does throw off apps for the mobile
web, that could disrupt even the Apple juggernaut.
In a
keynote at the recent CTIA conference in New Orleans, Mozilla CEO Gary
Kovacs predicted a “momentous platform shift” in the mobile world and predicted
that there will be 2 billion HTML5-compliant devices by 2016 and that walled
app stores will inevitably fall.
"Will one or two companies be able to curate the
interests of five to six billion people around the world?" he asked.
2. Mozilla is aiming at the right market: It is no accident that the first Boot to
Gecko phone will come out in a rapidly developing market like Brazil with a
forward-thinking Latin American-focused operator like Telefonica. From a Rethink
Wireless post:
[Mozilla] sees this as an easier way to deliver a full mobile experience to fairly humbly specified, and low cost, hardware … By relying on streaming and hosted services, the need for expensive local storage and processing is reduced.
If most feature phone owners in the world can’t afford an
iPhone, what will they buy? Maybe
Mozilla. And the first Boot to Gecko phones (complete with a catchier new name)
will apparently
be 10 times cheaper than the iPhone.
3. Things change … even for Apple and Google.
Mobile is simply an immensely disruptive space right now,
with mobile operating systems like Symbian, MeeGo and webOS just a few examples
of once significant players discarded by a ruthless market.
And, as Steve Costello asked in
a post on the GSMA website, might Google get bored with Android?
When Android begins to look as if its time has come, will Google feel the need to shoulder the burden of refreshing the platform from the ground up? Or will it feel that this role now falls to someone else, either evolving the open source Android code or through a shift to a completely fresh platform?
If the aim of Android is to drive use of mobile internet services by consumers, it is job done. And there are no shortage of platforms that – could – fill the gap created by the departure of Android.
This brings us back to the rise of Firefox. No one thought
Microsoft could be beaten. But they could. Same goes for Apple and Google.
And who’s to say that Mozilla (with help from operators like
Telefonica) can’t take down a giant twice?
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