Hugh Thomas Quotes
[Finding experienced staff still remains Taproot's biggest challenge and the single largest constraint on growth. Even so Taproot is now the largest independent Symbian OS software development organisation in North America. To achieve this it has pulled in people from all over the world including Europe, Asia, and North America. As well as employing experienced staff Taproot has also hired graduate students, which they have trained themselves.] I think, from a global perspective, skilled staff is one of biggest challenges for the Symbian ecosystem... Not just for us but Symbian, all the handset manufactures and ISVs, it is still a challenge. 
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[So what does the growth at Taproot tell us about the overall Symbian device ecosystem?] We really only see a sub-section of the market... We currently make our living out of 5 to 10 customers, but this is twice as many customers as we had last year. Perhaps the most significant sign we see is that our semi-conductor partners, who see a broader section cross section of the customer base, have clearly recognised the value of the smartphone market and the features and capabilities that are pulled together by Symbian OS. Really you just have to look at the numbers to see Symbian is making its play.
- Hugh Thomas
Symbian's history and pedigree has always been around the mobile phone... Other operating systems have migrated from a desk top world where there has been LAN connectivity for sometime. Creating WLAN technology for Symbian OS meant we had to create a number of new components, in the areas of network discovery and security. All in all we invested over 50 man years of programming in the development. When it is added to Symbian OS it accounts for almost 10% of the total firmware footprint.
- Hugh Thomas
We made the decision to go down this path because we could see that Symbian was on the right track... Eighteen months ago, when we put the business plan together, there were still some question over the ownership of Symbian and whether the market share was going eventuate. But we made the bet that Symbian was going to be successful and we wanted to be part of that success. Now I think that is a forgone conclusion that Symbian will be successful. They are growing their customer base and the device volumes are getting into the very significant numbers.
- Hugh Thomas