Nokia Is Lost

A recent NY Times piece about Nokia underscores how lost the company seems to be:

[Nokia Struggles to Regain Market Share in U.S. by Kevin O’Brien]

Nokia, the Finnish company that is the world’s biggest maker of mobile phones, is an undisputed powerhouse in Europe, Asia and Latin America, with market shares regularly topping 30 percent.

Nokia’s new products include the Nokia Booklet 3G, a mini laptop, and, clockwise from center, the Nokia Twist, Nokia Surge, Nokia E71X and Nokia 5130 Xpress Music.

But in the United States, Nokia’s signal has faded. As recently as March 2002, it led the American market with a 35 percent share. By last year, though, it slipped to 10 percent and by June of this year — the most recent figure available — Nokia’s share was only 7 percent.

Now the company is struggling to make amends in America, and its comeback effort has started to make some headway. And yet, going into the crucial Christmas shopping season in the United States, Nokia does not have a strong offering for the American smartphone market, the only part of the mobile industry that is growing. Three years after Apple introduced the iPhone, Nokia still has no alternative.

I recall when I last spent serious time with the Nokia folks was in Barcelona, at the World Mobile Congress in early 2008. [Disclosure: As part of the Nokia Bloggers program, they subsidized my travel there, along with a handful of others.] There was a press conference with the CEO presenting (his name escapes me), and he was visibly upset by the press questions about the iPhone touch interface and how it was going to revolutionize cell phones.

His response was oddly passive. They had things in the works, he suggested. They had a long range development plan, and touch was only one element of the innovations to come, he said. Blah blah bla, woof woof, he seemed to say.

That was 18 months ago, and the phones coming out these days look like they were designed in the late 90s.

I admit that I miss my 5 megapixel camera in my old Nokia, but I sure don’t miss the horrible software, the weirdo navigation, and trying to figure out where files were stored on the device. I will never go back to that sort of old school, DOS-feel Nokia hell again. And I am sure that is going to be true of nearly everyone who has experienced iPhone.

I am not saying there is no room for experimentation, or alternatives to iPhone. Android, for example, may yield some very fruitful results. But Nokia and Symbian just isn’t innovative. It’s like GM in a world with Mini Cooper, Toyata Prius and Smartcar.