April 8th, 2009 by Arjan Olsder Posted in Development Platforms | No Comments »
The Multimedia Research Consultancy has released more information about what experts think of the industry. In their latest release, they open up on the future of the mobile operating systems.
According to the panel, PalmOS, DoJa, Symbian (inc. N-Gage) and J2me will face a serious challenge to remain in the market on the long term. Funny enough, Palm announced the end of PalmOS a few weeks after the survey.
Vic Whiting TMRC’s MD commented, “Some of the scores attained by individual DPs/OSs were nothing short of dismal and will raise alarm bells amongst their management teams. For instance only 15 per cent of respondents feel that Palm is ‘Here to Stay’, 43 per cent saw N-Gage as a ‘Fading Star’ and 22 per cent feel that Java/J2ME is ‘Unlikely to be around in five years time. We acknowledge that these results represent industry sentiment at a particular point in time and we do not expect rival DPs/OSs to simply lie down and die. (In fact, Palm unveiled its new Palm Pre and Web OS in the middle of our survey.) However, they will all have to raise their games quickly and forcefully if they are to counter the momentum and impact being achieved by the likes of Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android. A report based on the results from the survey is now available and anyone in this industry trying to effectively orientate their business strategy would find it invaluable.”
The survey was carried out in January & February 2009 amongst 147 senior executives from 136 mobile games enterprises in 38 countries. 73% were involved in development, 39% in publishing, 21% in content aggregation, 23% in distribution and 27% in running portals. 85% of respondents were CEOs, MDs, Presidents, Directors, SVPs, VPs, EVPs, COOs, CTOs or Studio Heads.
