I have written about Nokia and the need for the company to reinvent itself several times in the past. When the iPhone was announced in early 2007, I was lukewarm and slightly frustrated that the Mac, Apple’s former, at times sole and by far most important strategic product was complemented by a formidable ‘opponent’. I was accused lots of things: from being pessimistic to being excessive, but I could already see the potential of the newly announced device, even if its flaws were staring me in the eye. I went ahead claiming that the Mac was demoted — and it was, in a way, with Leopard coming out later due to the increased workload caused by the iPhoneOS development, but — most importantly — with Leopard lacking most of the impressive features previously promised by Jobs.
So slightly more than two years later we stand at a time where the mobile phone market is in flux. Nokia/Symbian and Windows Mobile, erstwhile masters of the smartphone realm now look increasingly fragile, with dwindling market share and swelling losses.
Reinventing yourself is hard and few manage to do it without sacrificing too much; when it comes to companies that number is much much smaller. If anything Nokia’s Symbian now looks more dated than ever, with expectations being so high and — in a rare occurence whenever this happens — not leading to disappointment. The iPhoneOS 3.0 that was announced a few weeks back seems to propel the iPhone even further out of reach of anything the Symbian universe offers (or, indeed, can offer in the near future).
At the same time, Blackberry seems to be the new Palm, going through its best period ever, but seeming fragile against the onslaught of a rapidly evolving Android software ecosystem and the iPhone.
With this in mind, I was, at least satisfied that my predictions were not far off when I read that Nokia’s net profit fell by 90 percent. I’m not happy about it. A dying Nokia, or in any case, a weakened Nokia is not going to help competition which in turn is not going to help more and better devices coming out. It is, however, interesting as it has already been too long before Nokia presented *anything* close to countering the iPhone.
With falling prices on new iPhone, BlackBerry and Android devices, the promise of great new products by a reinvigorated Palm and the vastly superior experience offered by its aforementioned competitors, time is running out for Nokia to actually revamp its products and present a competing development ecosystem that is not riddled with aging, esoteric C++ programming intricacies, a vastly improved user experience and an top-notch application suite. Despite the current difference in the sales volume between iPhones and Android devices it won’t matter how many units Nokia sold. What will (and already does) matter is that Nokia is — for the first time in its history as a mobile handset manufacturer — in a uniquely bad position against formidable enemies; that the company has dwindling profits and mindshare and that its products are increasingly ‘low-end’ at a market iwth minimal margins. And this means that unless it manages to reinvent itself there won’t be much left of Nokia before too long.
