China wins, Symbian loses in Sony Ericsson reorg
The UI moves East
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Sony Ericsson announced a company reorganisation yesterday, intended to rationalise its R&D investment. The 2,000 job losses had been announced after another brutal quarter back in July, so yesterday's announcement tells us where these will fall.
User interface development will be centered in Beijing. The move also sees significant job cuts in the company's North Carolina operation, sources said, although there will be new hiring in its California development center. The latter focusses primarily on Windows Mobile devices such as the Xperia X1.
Symbian development hasn't been entirely abandoned, although there will be a considerable lacuna until Sony Ericsson's next Symbian devices appear, we're told.
Symbian development will focus on the company's Lund office, near Malmo, which will become the company's new Symbian "competence hub". Symbian application development isn't a priority, sources suggest, with the focus instead on integration.
Yesterday's announcement made no mention the UIQ office at Ronneby, Sweden. UIQ is the joint venture with Motorola which began life in the 1990s as an Ericsson R&D lab, and which had invested heavily in system and application development for the UIQ user interface for Symbian devices.
UIQ was the first casualty of the announcement by the acquisition of Symbian by Nokia back in June, as Sony Ericsson decided it would develop new UIs based on Nokia's S60 instead. UIQ's London and Budapest offices were closed, and deep redundancies at Ronneby left the office as little more than a stub. One source suggest all Sony Ericsson's Symbian application developers will leave by the end of next March.
Sony Ericsson had not responded to our request for comment at time of writing. ®
COMMENTS
The Market prevails - even in Sweden
Sony Ericsson once helped pioneer the smart phone market with the R380 and P800 handsets, which were the among the first touch screen devices to market. But it has been a downhill slippery market slope ever since - primarily due to poor product planning and execution. Sony Ericsson's Symbian group simply could not executive in the face of growing global competition. Now they will form a new division in San Francisco around the Experia line of high end devices. Look for the Symbian group to all but disappear to lower OPEX in the face of lower global demand.
Kind of inevitable really...
By the end of the year we'll all be using iPhones (execpt the linux beardies who'll be dronging on about how much better their Google Hemorrhoids are)...
Oh dear
The fusion of the dog's breakfast of a UI they've already got and subtle Chinese design. What could possibly go wrong?
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