In my last column, I talked about some of the reasons good companies make bad products – and how sometimes, the products are fine, we’re just biased. Or that the product was made by engineers for engineers. Or that the CEO personally pushed for it and no one was willing to contradict him.
Sadly, there are several other reasons why good companies make bad products.
Leaner, tighter-lipped and very much aware of what’s at stake. Nokia may be a lot of things, but naive isn’t one of them. With a share price gutted by dreary financial predictions, and a quarter or two before the first Windows Phone devices are expected to do anything to change that, right now the only headlines tend to be bad ones: redundancies, reductions and generally biding time. SlashGear met with Nokia’s new UK team at what – though they were careful not to bill it as such – was in effect a corporate reboot, to talk lessons learned from Apple, the threat to HTC and why Symbian won’t go quietly into the night.
The Nokia E6 may be one of the last of its breed, before Nokia starts pumping out Windows Phone 7.1 Mango devices. The Nokia E6 runs Symbian Anna OS with lots of Ovi-branded apps and is perhaps Nokia's attempt to continue the legacy of its much-loved QWERTY smartphones. The device has been talked about for some time and has now popped up on Amazon for pre-orders.
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Analysts at IDC are making bold Windows Phone predictions again, and despite new devices being conspicuous by their absence, the incoming rush of Nokia hardware still leads them to suggest the OS will hold the number two smartphone position by 2015. That would leave iOS in third place, while Android is estimated to grow its current share by 5-percent to further cement its lead across the segment.
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Nokia‘s fall from cellular grace, decision to abandon Symbian and contentious shift to Windows Phone is still a touchy topic, especially for loyal Nokia fans frustrated by how MeeGo was marginalized in favor of the Microsoft platform. Listen to CEO Stephen Elop and key members of the Nokia team, however, and it seems MeeGo was never near being the salvation the company needed. In a lengthy Bloomberg piece on the company and its new CEO, the stand-out message is one of speed: at its previous rate there would have been a mere three MeeGo devices by 2014, but now, in less than three months since announcing the Microsoft partnership, Elop has “got a working Windows Phone in my pocket now … we’re moving at a speed that’s faster than Nokia has ever moved before.”
Uh-oh. Nokia's announcement a few hours ago that it would be falling well short of its Q2 2011 sales estimates seems to have made itself known, with the company's share price promptly ditching almost 18-percent (at time of writing). The market reacted with as much nervousness as we'd expected, shares in the Finnish company crashing to €4.74 apiece from the €5.75 the market closed at yesterday.
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Nokia has already frustrated recent Symbian device owners today, by releasing the Anna-toting E6 and X7 but not an upgrade for existing handsets to the newest version of the platform. Now the company is upsetting investors, with a warning that its Q2 2011 financial results will be worse than previously expected. Demand for existing handsets has slumped, leading Nokia to predict net sales "substantially below" the earlier estimate of €6.1bn to €6.6bn.
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Nokia's first two Symbian "Anna" handsets, running the updated version of the Symbian OS, are now shipping. The Nokia E6 and Nokia X7, announced in April, will each get the new, faster browser, a native portrait-orientation QWERTY keyboard, and a boosted version of Ovi Maps with public transport routes among other tweaks. Meanwhile, the Nokia N8, E7, C7 and C6 will get an Anna update "in the coming months."
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Although Nokia is switching platforms to the Windows Phone 7.5 Mango for its new lineup, it won't completely ditch its Symbian followers. In a recent interview with Nokia Conversations blog, China Edition, Nokia CEO Stephen Elop not only reiterated that the company will continue to support Symbian for a period of time, but that it would do so until at least 2016.
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All eyes may be on Nokia's Windows Phone Mango plans, but the company still has a 150m Symbian target for 2011 and is looking to niche (and expensive) handsets in order to hit it. The new Nokia Oro takes the C7 and gives it a decidedly gauche 18-carat gold plated casing, a sapphire crystal home key, and a Caledonian leather battery cover.
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Remember SYMBEOSE? The open-source project prompted no shortage of scratched heads late last year, when the European Commission revealed it planned to inject €22m ($31m) into turning Symbian into the "Embedded Operating System for Europe." Now, with Symbian's future well off Nokia's long term to-do list, it's been confirmed that the SYMBEOSE plans have been scrapped, and thankfully before a Euro has been spent.
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Behold the statistics! Millenial Media has put out their MobileMix report for April 2011 showing device and manufacturer data, device OS mix, and global mobile developer trends. Essentially everything appears to be turning up tops for Apple save for the smartphone OS Mix which has Android ahead by a country mile. Revenue for apps has about the same lead over all other platforms save for Android in a 50% / 39% comparison while Global OS impressions in Millenial Media’s network grew 47% since January, trailed by Android, RIM, and Symbian with 19%, 17%, and 5% also all since January of this year. This whole study, again, is as of April 2011.
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