stoweboyd and the /messengers

A tactical sale of the Symbian professional services unit to Accenture speaks volumes about the changing fortunes of that old school cell phone OS, and Nokia's need to revamp itself:

[via Nokia Dumps Symbian Services Unit by Olga Kharif]

On July 17, Nokia announced it will sell its Symbian professional services unit to Accenture. The division provides engineering consulting and product development services to mobile phone manufacturers, chip makers and wireless service providers that develop products based on Symbian software for mobile phones. This software is the most widely used in smartphones today, but it’s been fast losing ground to rivals such as Android.

And iPhone, of course.

Cell phones are rapidly morphing into mobile computing devices, and the emergence of solutions like iPhone and Android have literally changed everything.

If Nokia is to have a place in this brave new world, they can't tie themselves to a sinking technology like Symbian.

But what place will they have? They fumbled the future with the rise of new mobile devices -- simply calling their handsets mobile computers didn't actually make them seem like more than phones. They missed touch, and big screens, and really deep integration into the web.

They are the leading producer of cell phones in the world, but at one point GM was the largest producer of automobiles. Like GM, they are confronted with a span and scope issue: should they pour their time and money into a few niches and build highly differentiated products? Or should they continue to have many product lines, leveraging production scale and common platform components?

GM is going to be down to Cadillac, Chevrolet, and GMC Trucks before too long, selling off or closing down a long list of brands.

Could Nokia specialize at the high end, like the very best camera phones? (I talked to them about a line with interchangeable high quality lenses, but they haven't gone there.) There is certainly a growth area there, and they have invested heavily in services for social sharing of images and videos.

Or should they focus on the low-end, and become the Toyota or Honda?

Or develop breakthroughs in modular phones, where people can roll their own, upgrading different elements of the phone independently of the others?

At any rate, I think they need to pick and focus, or they will find their future defined by the choices that others make.