Mary McDowell interview

GLOBAL – Nokia’s chief development officer is one Mary McDowell. She’s pretty involved in the whole Symbian Foundation thing and recently found time to talk to RCRWireless news about the recent announcement. Mary offers a pretty interesting perspective and the interview is well
worth a couple of minutes of your time.

Getting a touch technical, Mary gives some insight into what’s involved in making Symbian “open source”.

“The work is mostly crawling through the code to identify third-party components in Symbian and S60 and ensure that our suppliers don’t get ‘open-sourced’ if that was not their intention. So we have to go through the platform module by module to make sure the code is ‘clean’ before we transition it to open source.”

She goes on to mention Ovi and how the Symbian move better enables that strategy

“We do want to get out of the ‘plumbing business’ and focus more on interesting applications, creative services visible to the consumer. We’ve talked a lot about our Ovi strategy. This enables us to do that.”

Mary goes on to talk about how the R&D process will work and what it means for Nokia. Now, what do you think?