Opinion: Nokia vs. Nokia

(05/01/2009 8:45 H EDT)

The biggest is: What's next for Nokia? And, almost as big, among all of its competitors, who should Nokia be most worried about?

Is it Apple and iPhone? Or RIM's Blackberry? Or, should Nokia honchos be losing sleep over Google's Android and this whole open-source community thing?

OK, trick questions. The real answer is: None of the above.

Nokia's biggest enemy is Nokia itself. And it's about time for the world's largest mobile phone vendor to address the issue.

Sure, as any corporate executive at Nokia would tell you, "Nokia's global reach and scale" is something no rival can offer. Nokia uses this argument -- the largest installed base of Nokia phones reaching a huge global market -- as the key reason it is too attractive for developers to ignore.

I disagree. The large installed-base of the company's products could cut both ways. Its bigness can easily make Nokia lose focus, while spreading resources thin over too many different projects.

I appreciate that Nokia understands -- there is no one-size-fits-all mobile phone for every social, geographical, cultural and economical stripe of consumers on the global market.

But Nokia's efforts to manage so many different product portfolios, sometimes on different legacy development platforms, seems to be slowing Nokia down when it must quickly respond to specific needs or requests by developers who may be on their way to develop the next big killer app.

Remember. Despite being the world's largest mobile handset vendor (and Nokia is among the five most-recognized consumer brands in the world), Nokia hasn't recently had one really "iconic" product that everyone on earth instantly associates with the Nokia name.

Sure, the "coolness" argument may be overrated. And yet, it is still important if the company wants to be recognized as a nimble, fresh, aggressive and revolutionary entity poised to take the market by storm with its next product. Don't get me wrong. I am not saying that Nokia doesn't have plans along these lines.  

Ovi Store

For example, Nokia is expecting its Ovi Store, when it is finally launched next month, to pit Nokia squarely against Apple's App Store. The Ovi Store will have at least 1,000 applications on opening day, according to the company.

But as Srikanth Raju, director of product marketing for Forum Nokia, acknowledged, "With Ovi Store, we've just built a WalMart." The real hard work has only begun. "We need to keep stocking the shelves with more applications with regional relevance at the right price."

With the N97 handset scheduled for launch next month, Nokia is putting inside its latest model a cool home screen that rivals that of iPhone, in addition to a QWERTY keyboard that matches with Blackberry.

Eric John, director of marketing at Forum Nokia, noted, "I am anxious that 'cool' will be re-defined with our new N97."

Raju also predicted that N97 will become "an iconic device." He said, "It hits upon some of the top segments of users' needs -- those who are style-conscious, those who can't live without multimedia, and even those who need it for enterprise applications." Undoubtedly, Nokia is betting big on N97 and betting on the developers' community to come up with apps that ultimately differentiate N97 from competitors' handsets. But we all know how finicky consumers could be. The jury is still out 'til N97 actually hits the market.      

Calling on web designers

With the company's growing emphasis on Web Runtime (WRT) tools, Nokia hopes to win over Web designers -- who know nothing about mobile phones, let alone S60 -- to join Nokia's developers' community.

In Apple's iPhone, web applications are not available when the phone is offline. In contrast, Nokia, with its WRT tools, makes it possible for N97 to offer web data even when offline, because it caches that information locally when it was last connected, explained Michael Bierman, senior product manager for WRT Tools at Nokia.

On the software front, Nokia is also making available for developers QT for S60, a C++ application development framework. Its goal is to make it easy for developers to create apps once and then deploy them on any of the Windows, Mac, Linux, Windows CE, Windows Mobile and embedded Linux platforms.

It is not clear yet, though, how many developers will embrace QT for S60, which could make a difference in their multi-platform software products.

Just like Android, Nokia -- through its acquisition of Symbian and turning it into a non-profit entity -- is definitely planning to leverage the collective power of the open-source community in future software development.

But as Lee Williams, executive director of the Symbian Foundation acknowledged, this week, Symbian has to do a lot of "scrubbing of its existing codes" before the Symbian Foundation can completely hand off its software to open-source developers.

Symbian needs to untangle copyrights and intellectual property rights attached to a massive collection of third-party commercial software -- originally gathered and implemented by Symbian when it was a for-profit commercial entity, he explained. It won't be until late this year -- at the earliest -- for Symbian to complete this transition. Every move Nokia has made over the last 18 months is smart and strategic. Some have been downright bold. But let's face it. None of these efforts, as outlined by Nokia, is trivial. They are hard to execute.You can't be all things to all people all the time. While executing all of its plans, Nokia must accept this more modest reality and make hard choices -- in its product portfolio, development platform support, and its real focus.