Monday, February 27, 2012

Mozilla Bets on New Mobile Operating System

Can another new operating system get traction in the global mobile service provider market? Mozilla and some service providers hope so.

Mozilla’s “Boot to Gecko” project aims to create devices that can "boot to the web," running an HTML-based platform that works as well as other operating systems, at much-less cost, allowing production of lower-cost smart phones.

Those of you familar with Google’s Chromebooks will understand the idea. Some would say the “Open Web Devices” initiative uses the Android kernel but has an entirely new layer on top based on HTML5. 


Others might prefer to say B2G uses some of the same low-level building blocks used in Android (Linux kernel, libusb), but is not based on Android, and will not be compatible with the Android stack (in particular B2G will not run Android applications).


It’s essentially a complete phone system run on web technologies that gives the on-board software access to core APIs through an embedded version of Firefox. That, in turn, means all apps on the phone essentially run in the browser.

Carriers looking for new ways to inject themselves back into the revenue stream, since Apple’s iOS and Android have created independent roles within the value chain, creating a situation where end users buy based on the thrid party device first, with the choice of a service provider being a secondary consideration.

The issue is whether a brutally-competitive operating system market has room for a major new player. One might also ask whether Boot to Gecko is really as "carrier friendly" as some carriers might hope.



Boot to Gecko, based on HTML5, by definition will rely on cloud-based access to work. That means it is going to put more demand on mobile network bandwidth; it has to. Telefonica now is supporting G2G, but Mozilla is going to have to convince the major hardware manufacturers to support it. Who is going to do that do that?
Also, manufacturers and carriers have been arguing there are too many mobile operating systems to support. Even with the decline of Symbian, WebOS and potentially RIM, Mozilla will find it hard to overcome those objections. 
Boot to Gecko essentially is a thin client that will require good Infernet connectivity. Want to guess how many end users are going to trust any service provider in that regard? 



No comments:

"Tokens" are the New "FLOPS," "MIPS" or "Gbps"

Modern computing has some virtually-universal reference metrics. For Gemini 1.5 and other large language models, tokens are a basic measure...