Arrogant. Disoriented. Unfocused. Accurate characterisations of Nokia? Perhaps. Still, who’d have thought in the early 2000s that the market leader of mobile phones, one of the most innovative companies in its field that owned the European market would be the dying king of the 2010s; high volume sales of silly feature phones, low profit margins, a chaotic software ecosystem, little to no mindshare in the most important, lucrative segments. Perpetually in denial about its ageing Symbian stack, its schizophrenic Maemo/Meego stack, its unstable, ever-changing APIs and the amateurish, mediocre, unpolished user-experience its products provide. So many unappealing devices. A nervous acquisition of Navteq in 2008 for $8.1bn upon that the company never capitalised, while Google and Tomtom keep offering less while gaining so much more from their users (e.g. Ovi Maps has had free navigation for a while and no one seems to care). Its repeated failed attempts to create a mobile service ecosystem/platform (n-gage, MOSH and now Ovi).
Prediction: With the N8 not being out until later this year and already looking like a device that should’ve been out in 2009, Nokia’s future certainly looks bleaker than it thinks. Unless it wakes up, ditches Symbian for good and makes Meego something more than the mickey-mouse platform it currently is soon, I can’t see how it will ever manage to compete with the super-polished iOS or the lightspeed-evolving Android. (The verdict is still out on Windows Phone 7)
