Nokia planning to sit back and relax until 2012

Ask some people ‘which company created the hand phone’ and you might get Nokia as an answer. It is the wrong answer, but you can’t blame them. That was how successful Nokia was in the market. Models like the 3210 and 3310 hit the market like a bomb which made these people notice the existence of a mobile phone. No doubt, Ericsson, Motorola, Siemens, Alcatel and a few other companies already had their hands on producing great hand phones, but when Nokia entered the market with those models, it kicked them into the middle of last century. Its turnovers increased almost fivefold from 6.5 billion euros to 31 billion euros in 2001. The Nokia 1100 handset was the best-selling mobile phone of all time and also the world's top-selling consumer electronics product with over 200 million units shipped. Over the years, Nokia has kept up with the market requirements and released greater number of mobile phones compared to any other companies. It spread its hand phones over a wide range of different series. Today, there is the E, N, and X-series, and the lower-end models. Nokia was so strong that they didn’t feel the impact when the giant corporation, Microsoft entered the market with its Windows Mobile fitted into smart phones such as HTC and O2. In fact, there were many brands which had their go at trying to bring down Nokia over the years. They all failed. Its sales in more than 150 countries generated global annual revenue of over €42 billion and operating profit of €2 billion as of 2010. However, when Apple introduced, its iPhone, it redefined the way we look at mobile phones. Everyone wanted a smart phone. Nokia knew they were already in trouble at that time but they were holding to their plans to just improve the Symbian operating system they were already using on their phones to make it more like a smart phone. By this time, all the other phone makers had already started making proper smart phones with either Windows Mobile or Android, which is probably the second most successful operating system.

Android devices and iPhone were going much forward leaving Nokia and Windows Mobile devices behind. Microsoft studied the market and made a drastic decision by changing its entire OS to a new thing. It brought out the Windows Phone 7 OS which gave the same user experience as an iPhone or an Android based phone. Nokia on the other hand was stubborn. They kept on trying to do things differently. They sort of pulled it off with a few models such as the 5800 music express and the N97. Even so, it was no close to its competitors. Ovi store, the market for its applications is also far behind iTunes app store, Android market and even Windows market place. They continued their attempt by using different operating system such as the Maemo OS on the N900 and rumours also said they were going to try Meego, another operating system. They even released a new version of their symbian last year, Symbian 3 on devices such as the mighty N8 which had a 12 mega pixels camera. Frankly speaking, the hardware produced by Nokia these days are one of the best and even better than iPhones and Blackberrys, but the only set back is that Symbian OS. It’s too slow and not as cool as the others. Nokia was in big trouble by this time and had to reduce its size by cutting off workers. On February 11 2011, Nokia's CEO Stephen Elop, a former Microsoft employee, unveiled a new alliance with Microsoft, and announced it would replace Symbian with Windows Phone 7. Although it isn’t the greatest move (android would have been better in many ways), it looked like a solution. Photos of the upcoming Windows Phone 7 based devices were also released but there isn’t any device until now. They are still releasing phones that run on Symbian3 such as the new E7. I really can’t understand why they are moving slowly. I mean in 2004 Nokia's share of the Finnish GDP was 3.5% and it was the 120^th largest company in the world in 2009. In July 2010, Nokia announced that their profits had dropped 40% in the global smart phone rivalry. So what are waiting for? Haven’t they learnt their lesson the hard way? They are just sitting back and watching themselves committing suicide. Last month, Nokia announced that its Windows Phone handsets won’t be available until early 2012. If you ask me, I think they were already too late 2 years back. They have to do changes quickly. They say in the mean time their primary business strategy is to reach the 3.2 billion people who don’t currently own mobile phones, and the other nearly 3 million who can’t or don’t access the Internet on their devices. So they aren’t exactly aiming high there. What they are saying there is, “We are going to step back and let the others feast in the high-end, money-making market”. It’s simply pathetic isn’t it? Another question that bothers me is how they are going to update their Symbian3 for the new device if they’re going to kill it next year. If they do kill it, wouldn’t it be unjust for those who have just bought the E7? The right thing to do would be to update the Symbian3 or to simply update the device to the new Windows Phone7, but I just doubt they would do that.

Looking at the way things are going, I ‘m guessing the next generation won’t know what is Nokia. They’ll have their iPhones, Blackberrys and android devices. Nokia might just go down, bringing Windows Phone with it because let’s face it, without Nokia as its strong hardware partner, Windows Phone will never survive in the unforgiving market. It would be sad to watch the 100 years old Finnish company go down just like that.

-jaggy jagadis-