I’m getting some sort of ‘end of Cold War’ feeling. Y’know, the one where the USA outlasted the spending-spree battle versus the Soviet Union?
Well, Nokia had a very strong quarter (link below). But, our CEO has this choice comment.
"Much work remains in order to realize our ambitions," Kallasvuo said. "We will not underestimate the competition."
Uh, who is the competition? Nokia’s _device_ market share was more than the next three companies. Lenovo is stepping out (isn’t that the third S60 licensee to bite the dust?). And now there are rumours Moto, the father of them all, is finally throwing in the towel.
And why do I get this ‘end of Cold War’ feeling? Well, the competitors in the device space are coming out of the woodworks – Dell, Google, Apple, Garmin, and others are proliferating wildly, changing the whole world order. Competition will come from many non-tradiitonal fronts, and hopefully innovative products will pop-up all over the place.
Eh, I think things are just getting more complicated.
Is Nokia ready?
Nokia is getting ready and anxious about the competition because they’re laying the groundwork for the mobile phone space to become like the pc space.
What do I mean by that?
Two very important things happened in the last 6 months:
1: Nokia licensed their modem technology to ST Micro and let other chipset vendors license the technology as well: http://www.nokia.com/A4136001?newsid=1144797
2: Nokia purchased Trolltech who not only makes Qt, but has a seat at the table of the LiMo community.
Why are those 2 important?
With LiMo and Android and now Nokia licensing the knowledge to manufacture the part of a cellphone that actually makes calls we’re going to see the commodotization of the platform occur.
You’re right. Dell, Google, Apple and Garmin are coming out of nowhere making fantastic hardware and this is only the beginning. Nokia has 40% market share so they have a lot of influence on the market. If they can get chip vendors to support LiMo, which will most likely include Qt, then you will see plenty of people lining up to build cellphones and try to squeeze margins out of them.
Where does Ovi come in? I can totally see Nokia keeping Qt open source and giving manufactures who build devices with Qt support a cut of the profits they make with Ovi.
That’s where the future is, not in the nickel and dime cut throat market of margins, but the service delivery platform who easily integrates with all the platforms on the market.
Unlike all the other application runtimes on the market, Qt will not have a licensing fee. That is what makes it so attractive. Silverlight Mobile will run great on Windows Mobile devices, but what about the other platforms? J2ME is hell and you need to pay someone for support. Adobe has Flash Lite and soon Air for Mobile, again not free.
GTK … maybe, but it doesn’t have any major company backing it. The OS is irrelevant now, the application (service) runtime is where the bread and butter is. Maybe not now, but in 3-5 years, why not?
Great post, I am looking forward to the innovations Nokia can bring to the market during 2008, the integration of GPS as a mandatory feature in most of the phones I believe is something like the camera was some years ago.
But in the software front is where I think Nokia should put a lot of its efforts, developing a great user interface, Series60 needs to have big leep forward with great usability, ease to use software, more and more integrated with the online services users care the most, like Flickr for photos, Youtube for videos, Facebook for social relationship, Google for calendar, e-mail, RSS reading and of course Search and so on.
In the software front is where I think Nokia is most fragile, but it is not the only one in this position because all the manufacturers really suck in software matters, what makes it a great opportunity as well.