Nokia has to do something. On the surface, it sounds great: they sold 111 million mobile devices last quarter. But their profits were down 40%, in a world in which most smart phone vendors are riding a new wave in smart phones. Apple made more profit than Nokia (and LG and Samsung... combined), even selling far fewer phones. In the first half of 2010, even with Android outselling iPhone for the first time, Apple pulled in 39% of the industry's profits.
You can't compete, forever, with a company that's basically eating your lunch, quarter after quarter. Sure, Apple's profits are primarily in the USA, and Nokia does well here, but has virtually zero presence in the Smartphone market. One reason Apple makes so much -- they only sell full featured Smartphones. They're making a 50% gross marging on iPhone hardware, while Nokia's making pennies.
I don't think they can pull it off with SymbianOS, and so far, they've done nothing interesting with MeeGo. Maybe they'll do better with MeeGo than with SymbianOS, but really, they're not making enough money on Smartphones to match Apple or Google's level of development on any of these OSs. And despite Intel's involvement, they still look pretty alone there with MeeGo. Nokia may even be part of the problem -- they are still mighty, which other cell phone vendor wants to go head-to-head with them. Same reason open sourcing SymbianOS didn't help... the few other companies (Sony Ericsson and a few companies OEMing for NTT, it seems) are all largely jumping into Android.
As Android and iOS spread into Nokia's strongholds, they'll have to offer SOME competition. They've lost 10% market share on smart phones in just the last year -- that can't go on indefinitely.
SymbianOS isn't doing that. Part of it is the simple fact that many users don't even know their SymbianOS phone is a smart phone. They use it as a feature phone, but most of the SymbianOS phones don't even come with the Ovi store installed... the N97 was the first.
The Ovi store is a distant third in terms of available apps, behind iTunes and Android Market, even given the obviously huge number of compatible devices in the world. And they're late to the party... the Ovi store only opened last year, apparently following the path established by iTunes and Android. So there are plenty of users who are dropping SymbianOS for something else, and it's not even necessarily due to a weakness in the OS, but Nokia's lack of imagination over what a Smartphone should be.
So it's an open question if Nokia is really going to be competitive. You can't look at their 40% share and claim they are -- they built their share in the days of Windows Phone, Blackberry, and PalmOS. They had 50% of the market last year, and yeah, it's a growing market, but you don't lose 10% share without doing something wrong. They have to do something, soon, or they well be overtaken in share. They're already losing in profits.
s a long list of departing Nokia executives.
