two announcements from Nokia got many rubbing their hands…why?
Oh how the mighty are fallen. To judge by certain reactions you’d think that Nokia had recently said that it was outsourcing all handset manufacturing to an Taiwanese ODM and offering white label handsets for operators to brand up and flog as part of their pre-paid packages. In fact, for those who missed it, Nokia made a couple of nods to the market in recent days. First, it said it was joining the GSM Association as an associate member. Second, and of less headline value but perhaps more actual use to millions of device users, it said it would be introducing support for SD memory cards as well as MultiMediaCards. Both these announcements were greeted as evidence of a great climbdown by Nokia, as if the company were descending from its lofty perch to come and play with the mortals. Maybe it has been Nokia’s admirable tendency not to pander to journalists by handing out the new phones like confetti, maybe it has been the company’s refusal to bow to other design othodoxies, but the company had managed to create an image of arrogance. So joining the global GSM trade body is viewed as a comedown. But what trade body is it joining? One that represents the interests of the world’s GSM operators. Let’s not be sentimental about the other equipment vendors’ reasons for taking associate membership of the GSMA. For all the guff about leading standards development and formulating common approaches to market challenges, the real reason they were in there was to get closer to the operators. Nokia never felt the need. Big deal. Its networks business, whilst never a clear number one, stood on its own two feet, and its handset business virtually propped up certain operators’ sales figures in the late nineties. Of course, things have changed. Operators have got much more aggressive about asserting the primacy of their own brands, and Nokia was slow to react trusting instead the power of its own brand to attract sales over the heads of the operators. But now Vodafone has Nokia phones as part of its 3G portfolio — supporting Vodafone live! as well — most recently the 6630. The networks industry as a whole is getting hammered by operators fencing for interoperable technology and the lowest prices possible, fuelled by the stick of the hugely competitive Asian new entrants. Also, 3G networks have proved a much tricker beast than thought, especially in terms of interoperability and backwards compatibility. Nokia has been one vendor fighting hard to hold on to 3G contracts in the face of these pressures, and perhaps sees the need now to mix it with the other vendors to overcome these problems. Witness another September announcement that went less noticed – that Nokia was co-operating with NEC on proving IMS interoperability in advance of 3GPP R5 releases. So Nokia is being castigated for what, exactly? For doing what some commentators said they wanted it to do all along — plough less of a lone furrow and admit that it cannot stand alone all the time. This reaction to Nokia’s symbolic acceptance of the inevitable is probably one reason why it delayed so long in the first place — at least as far as GSMA membership is concerned. So, Nokia, now we’ve said a little word on your behalf, how about an advance go on one of those 9300s for Christmas, seeing as you’re now in harness with the rest of the world’s priorities?
Get your “told you so” into: keith.dyer@nexusmedia.com