"Companies that don't evolve with the way the market is going, they will suffer for certain. Open source provides innovation. If there's an itch to be scratched, what you're looking for is the industry to step up and scratch that itch."
Holbrow believes Symbian is "in effect a method of everyone competing" even if there is convergence between platforms. "The point is if you have two Wi-Fi stacks going against one another, the members will decide which one to go for and if they don't like it they can branch. They have to make their amendments public, but they don't have to contribute them back in and we don't have to accept them.
"It really is an open platform. You could survive with a single huge platform and still have competition."
As we reported yesterday, Holbrow also talked up the possibility that netbooks could evolve into mobile devices that are essentially a processor, adapting to the environment in which they're put.
Referring to new converged devices coming onto the market – and those superconverged devices Symbian believes will enter the ring over the coming years - Holbrow added: "There's a huge amount of technology going on there and I don't think any one company can swallow the cost of that development.
"While we have these parallel operating systems going alongside one another there's inefficiency there. With the Symbian Foundation, and Android is a similar model, there's an opportunity to share costs with other people. And what it does is end up with a ubiquitous platform hopefully. "
And what do the coming months hold in store for Symbian? "We're coming up the anniversary [of Symbian Foundation], we're really running now. We're up to 70 or 80 people... starting to get a global base. And now we're really starting to grow our members.
"What we're really looking to do is grow the alliances around our members. I think we'll be seeing a lot more work around the Symbian Foundation. You can get beta test access at the site and see all the code there. I don't feel like it's a new start, it really is a new start."
