With all the competition out there, Nokia is in for a rough year or more. They took a large gamble by switching their OS, and so far it has back fired. Nokia is going to have a hard time bringing sales back and looking for new customers. My guess is new CEO by the year's end, and some drastic changes to try and hopefully rebound from what could be a death spiral.
Most were very skeptical when Nokia announced to change its OS. It was a risky move and one that will haunt them for some time to come. I can't see how Nokia would quickly turnaround its negative projections and make any kind of positive announcement that would raise its value in the industry's eyes. Companies like TI should have incorporated the gamble in their projections to protect them from similar scrutiny.
Once upon a time, Symbian used to be a popular OS.. I used to run lots of cool apps on my Nokia as well. However end users and developers are flocking to iOS and Android nowadays.
Taking a risk after good assessment and stategic planing in order to make a headway is common practice by many organizations. Sometimes you make it and get hailed as a hero or things don't go as planned and you are a villain. Nokkia's gamble at present time seems to be the latter.
Your comment "My bet is on him being run out of town" is more likely especially with members of Elop's excutive team, i.e. Richard Green already defecting and the spokesperson Paivyt Tallqvist explanation of him taking time off "to attend to a personal matter," at a time like this sends alarm bells through the ranks and the stakeholders. Soon the stakeholders will be calling for the head of the CEO. Unfortunately that comes with the job.
The Win-Nok deal in my opinion was announced way too early.I am not sure what they wanted to accomplish by announcing this way before any new products leveraging the partnership were ready.I believe the deal can be a positive deal, but the premature timing of the announcement may have done more damage than planned.
Dave, probably if they were not to announce, the situation would be worse. I believe a handsome of people out there believe in the future of this partnership as well.
App stores and the availability of “useful” apps is what will dictate device sales.Nokia will have to pin their hopes on the growth rate of Microsoft and Microsoft partners’ app stores.This is the same for many of the other device manufacturers, as for the most part, I would expect many of the mobile devices to generally be on par with each other in terms of features and functionality.Here are some charts that may hold a glimmer of hope for Nokia and the Win-Nok deal:
In a January 2011 report on App Store growth rate conducted by Distimo, Microsoft achieved the highest growth rate at 30% followed by Android at 18%:
Those are some interesting charts, Dave, but it's not hard to have that type of growth rate when you're starting from pretty much nothing. And now that many of the "easy" ports from other platforms are out of the way, what does the future hold for MS apps? It's a really tough sell for developers.
Clearly, if you're an app developer that wants to make money, you need to be on iOS. It's the obvious and most profitable platform by a gigantic margin. Despite Android's growth and install base, it is clearly not as appealing as iOS for many reasons: less potential customers, more devices to worry about being compatible with, etc.
A counter-argument to this is that if you have a unique app for less-developed-for platform, you may still be able to make money because there's less competition. Perhaps. Still, it's hard to imagine Microsoft placing any better than 3rd in this race, and even that seems way, way, way too ambitious. 4th if they're insanely lucky. 5th-6th-7th more realistic.
Hi DennisQ, it’s amazing how these two titans (Microsoft and Nokia) are now considered underdogs in the quest from mobile dominance.I’ve stated in the past that there is too much too lose for both of these companies and that is why I expect these two companies not to go down without an all out fight.For Nokia, it is a matter of survival.
Microsoft has enough top-notch engineering talent that it could easily surpass the wow factor brought on by iOS and supported apps. Just as a casual observer I see a business-heavy approach though to product development at MS. True their strategic decisions have boxed out their competition. At the same time, their developers are boxed in. MS also seems to be shy on marketing too, and more of this kind of effort might have won the public around to a Nokia-Windows platform.
I agree that timing is everything in business especially when a strategic move is being considrered. The window of opportunity was not timed right by Nokia in this instance.
Not sure why Nokia didn't adopt Android instead of Windows, having said that recent acquisation of Skype by Windows has raised hopes that "Nokia + Windows + Skype" can still compete with Android/iOS.
From your blog is more than Clear that Nokia and Stephen Elop's facing huge problems. I don't believe the move of adopting Microsoft OS instead of symbian is a wrongfully move. Maybe it was better instead of using Microsoft OS to adopt the Android platform but this is another story.
The time is the best judge, and the future will show us if it was a fateful move for Nokia.
It's a shame that Nokia's devices and services unit will report a lower than expected sales and margins in the second quarter despite a deal with Microsoft.
Glaring as it may seem that Nokia is in further troubled waters; however, I don't foresee further weakness than it is already in. I think Nokia could still reap many of the benefits it expects with the Microsoft relationship given time.
Susan, in addition to movements at managerial level, it seems there is still much confusion on strategy: once definitely left Symbian and launched WP7 as best OS environment to promote Nokia-Win success, yesterday one step back is done as tool's announcement to support Android apps porting on WP7...or is a step forward?
I'll like to understand this comment, this means no one anticipated custom baseband will down even when expectations were that Nokia would decline 22 percent in the same period?
Somehow I'll like to think nobody expected to reach 53% down, but based on Nokia expectations they should be aware custom baseband will be downhill.
:Simply put, while weakness at Nokia has been very apparent in the marketplace, no one anticipated that custom baseband would be down 53 percent in the span of two quarters, especially given expectations that Nokia units would decline 22 percent in the same period. "
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