Nokia is losing a few points of market share every quarter, and even though their revenue is growing, mostly because the whole smartphone market is growing very fast, they are being outpaced by most of the important smartphone players.
That is because the world is moving away from the old Symbian smartphone, and choosing an iPhone or an Android phone. Nokia’s real answer to this threat has been Maemo and Meego, but so far they haven’t pushed Maemo hard enough, and Meego is most likely late to the game. If Windows Phone 7 which was adopted by 3 important manufacturers (Samsung, LG, HTC) can’t make a dent in the market with 10 models, then I don’t think even Nokia can do a whole lot with one or two Meego phones they might be releasing in 2011.
Next month, Mr. Elop, the new CEO of Nokia, will meet with investors to decide if they are going with other 3rd party operating systems, and if they are, which will it be Android or WP7? I think Nokia has no room for error ar this point in time. Their market share is dropping rapidly, and if they make yet another big mistake that can’t be fixed for a few more years, they might become irrelevant in the phone market. This mistake woul be choosing WP7 which is already doing very poorly, while Android is more like a king-maker. Every manufacturer using Android is doing a lot better than they would’ve done using other OS, whether it’s theirs or from another company like Microsoft.
There are a lot of Nokia fans who would love to have a Nokia phone with stock Android, and there are a lot of those who left Nokia for an Android phone from other companies, and would love to buy from Nokia again if they started using Android.
Nokia believes that Android will commoditize them, but even so it’s better to offer your customers something they want than something they don’t want. Choosing Android will be a much better solution for their revenues, and they must believe in this and change course early on, before their market share and revenues drop even further.
