The joint statement, from the LiMO Foundation and the Linux Foundation (which hosts MeeGo), said the first combined release was scheduled for the first quarter of next year, with devices to follow around midyear. A development environment will be created, based around HTML5, a vital way to smooth over the differences between OSs and speed migration to new ones.
Imad Sousou, director of Intel's Open Source Technology Center, wrote on the Meego.com blog: "We believe the future belongs to HTML5-based applications, outside of a relatively small percentage of apps, and we are firmly convinced that our investment needs to shift toward HTML5. Shifting to HTML5 doesn't just mean slapping a web runtime on an existing Linux, even one aimed at mobile, as MeeGo has been. Emphasizing HTML5 means that APIs not visible to HTML5 programmers need not be as rigid, and can evolve with platform technology and can vary by market segment.”
Will carriers support Tizen?
The developer framework will also support WAC, betraying LiMO‘s roots as an attempt to provide an operator friendly alternative to Android and iOS. That bid gained credibility when Vodafone built its web platform, 360, around LiMO, but the cellco then switched its attention to Android and the independent OS‘s star faded.
Like Intel, the carriers realized that they were biting off more than they could chew by seeking to create their own OS alternative from scratch. It would be more realistic to use their combined market weight to support existing options which could still provide a counterbalance to Apple and Google. Hence the bizarre spectacle of the old dictator, Microsoft, positioning Windows Mobile and then WP7 as the cellcos‘ friend, the weapon against a too-powerful OS platform.
Despite all the ironies, some cellcos, especially Orange, have proved susceptible to these arguments and are willing to support WP7 in order to ensure a “third way” in the event that BlackBerry continues to decline and Android and iOS remain powerful. Last week, Verizon Communications‘ CEO Lowell McAdam said he expected a “third smartphone ecosystem” to rise within a year to break the Apple/Android duopoly.
Speaking at a Goldman Sachs conference, he named WP7, bada and BlackBerry as the viable contenders – not LiMO, even though that platform had built heavily on the JIL effort which Verizon, together with Vodafone and Softbank, co-sponsored. "The carriers are beginning to coalesce around the need for a third ecosystem," McAdam said. ―Over the next 12 months I think it will coalesce and you will start to see one emerge as a legitimate third ecosystem."