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Ok Smartphone Q2 Results part 1: SonyEricsson and Google

(Corrected) So we have the first results of the big Q2 results season (bearing in mind, RIM and HTC have already reported as their Q2 ended a month earlier). Today we have SonyEricsson and Google with results. I will keep this short.

SonyEricsson reported a decline in its overall handset sales of 31% in just one quarter, but its smartphones did grow 8% to 5.3 Million units. That gives SonyEricsson roughly 5% market share so they are holding steady from Q1 to Q2 but may have fallen behind LG in rankings. We also learned that SonyEricsson ships 11% of all Android phones so that gives us a Q2 Android number of about 49 Million in total. That is a nice number as I reported in my analysis of Android handset partners' market shares for Q1 that I estimated SonyEricsson's Android share at 12%. This is what we forecasters call a bullseye and they are rare. As regular readers know, I get my share of mistakes in the forecasting trade haha..  But back to SE. The bad news is that SonyEricsson dropped back to generating a loss in Q2. So this puppy is not yet a healthy one. Growing sales while making losses is no way to remain economically viable in the long term haha..

Then we have Google. The monster stat we heard was that Google is now activating 550,000 Android handsets, and yes, the word they used was handsets (so this number excludes tablets and other Android devices). That correponds to an annual level of 200 million smartphones and in terms of market share it is roughly 43% of the total market already. Note this is the number now. But as it is growing, it was a smaller number at the start of the quarter on April 1, so the actual Q2 Android number is smaller than 50 million. We do have the SonyEricsson 11% number and get a rough 49 million as the number of Android handsets sold in Q2. That number would be up 17% 40% from Q1. It also means an absolute growth of 7 14 million Android handsets in the past 3 months.

Ok, that was the quick word on Q2 results. I will return as we get more results.

Formbook for Q2 - How to read the smartphone maker quarterly results over next two weeks

From Friday 15 July (SonyEricsson) to Friday 29 July (Samsung) we will get the Q2 results from the major smartphone makers whose quarters ended in June, meaning all the majors except for RIM and HTC which have already reported in June as their Q2 ended in May. While the smartphone market has been incredibly volatile and unpredictable the past few years, this Q2 seems the most mysterious, with so many of the smartphone makers rumored to be breaking with the recent past. So I thought I'd do a quick run-down of the big brands in smartphones to guide the reader into what numbers are 'good' and what are 'bad' in the context of this likely very surprising Q2.

And right off the top, I have to say that even the big number (Q2 total smartphone units sold) is uncertain. If the year is progressing on schedule towards what most major analysts suggest, to finish selling about 450 - 475 million smartphones (up from about 300 million last year) - then as Q1 was essentially flat compared to last year's Q4, we have to now pick up the rate of growth. And a good number to get us on the way would be that the Q2 total number should be about 10% more than Q1, or we should sell about 110 million smartphones. And that we won't even know until in August when the four big analyst houses (Gartner, Canalys, IDC and Strategy Analytics) give their counts - and I will use their average here as our total, from which I will be calculating the market shares.

But this is such a strange time. We know that RIM had a very bad quarter and not just their market share dropped, for the first time, their unit sales of Blackberries actually declined from the previous quarter. And RIM was the third biggest smartphone maker. When that big a player is losing sales, the others have to pick up the slack else we won't see growth in the quarter.

And while we do already know that the Android family of smartphones by many makers did grow, its likely that Apple (second biggest smartphone manufacturer) did not. So now when we factor in that the biggest smartphone maker last quarter and every quarter since the invention of the smartphone - Nokia - has had a disasterous quarter with a reseller boycott of Symbian phones - we have a huge hole to fill with RIM and Nokia definitely down, and Apple flat. So numbers 4, 5, 6 etc will have to work far harder just to bring the quarter to 'flat' sales, not to mention if we are to have anything like 10% growth from Q1.

But lets set the market share issue to one side. We do know the actual unit sales and we can at least examine what would be good or bad performance in the real numbers. As I said, I'll come back to the market shares in August. So lets examine each smartphone maker and each OS platform in order of who was biggest the last time we had all numbers, in April.

NOKIA

So, Nokia itself has said this whole year is now a wasted year for Nokia branded smartphones, the sales will definitely fall as the consumers wait for new Microsoft Windows Phone 7 powered Nokia smartphones. What Nokia did not foresee was the total collapse of Nokia smartphone sales (and the resulting reseller boycott). Nokia should have known, it was British computer maker Osborne who is associated with the tech marketing disaster called the 'Osborne Effect'. Maybe Nokia's new CEO hadn't paid attention to smaller and long-since-gone European PC makers haha.. But yes, for example consumer surveys of European smartphone adoption tell us that Nokia has lost two thirds of its smartphone market during essentially five months since the February 11 announcement. So we can expect dismal sales numbers from Nokia.

But who knows? This is a strange year, the Year of Bloodbath 2: Electric Boogaloo. So the form book tells us, Nokia should have sold about 24 million to 27 million smartphones in Q2 - to hold station and own about a 24% market share as it did in Q1. I want you to keep that number in mind, as Nokia reports its catastrophic Q2 results. Any normally competent and normally competitive, well managed company should roughly hold market share from one quarter to the next. Now it looks like Nokia has lost perhaps 10 million of those, could be more. Its possible Nokia has lost half its market in one quarter even. But we'll see. And obviously this is now a race of who does comparatively better, between Nokia, Apple and Samsung. One of them will be the biggest smarpthone maker this quarter. It has always been Nokia before. That may very well change now, so we are likely witnessing history being made. The last time we saw a change in the mobile handset (hardware) space in the leader, was when Nokia replaced Motorola as the world's biggest mobile phone manufactuer in 1998. And yes, remember Nokia is very likely going to continue still as the biggest mobile phone maker in Q2, but in the ever more important category of smartphones, its very likely they have lost that lead.

APPLE

Another very unpredictable number is that for Apple's iPhone. The iPhone had previously had a strong pattern that looked like a staircase, three quarters of nearly flat sales, then a huge jump. So when the new iPhone model was released in late June, the July-August quarter was the big jump. A small additional gain came usually from Christmas sales. Then a slight further climb came from January-March quarter Chinese New Year's gift-giving season. And as the old iPhone model sales would decline in the April-June quarter, Apple would then release the next iPhone in the last days of June, so the total quarter still had solid sales.

And that pattern is now broken. For the first time since Apple gave us the original iPhone in 2007, we have a June/July with no new iPhone to buy. A-ha, you may say, therefore iPhone sales must be down in Q2 by something like 3 million from Q1. Yes, that sounds reasonable except for two rather big wrinkles in the equation. First, there is the 'Verizon' iPhone, ie the CDMA version. The CDMA version was released during Q1, so this will be the first full quarter that the CDMA version is sold. That should help boost some sales. And then there is the White iPhone. That is rumored to have generated a lot of interest, in particular in China, the world's biggest telecoms market and strongly growing smartphone market.

Apple sold 18.7 million iPhones in Q1. They should now be selling between 18 and 20 million iPhones to roughly hold steady in keeping about 18% market share. Its quite plausible that the iPhone sales number is down from that, and many analysts are suggesting iPhone sales in the 17 million range. It is equally plausible that Apple is benefitting from Nokia's troubles, is doing particularly well in America with Verizon and in China with White, and they could be having another record quarter. We just don't know. But I did break the story that the iPhone has sold more than Nokia's smarpthones, so if that now turns out to be true, then definitely Nokia would have lost its crown.

SAMSUNG

But even if Apple has sold more smartphones than Nokia, its not a guarantee that Apple is now the biggest. There is a strongly circulated rumor of Samsung having a spectacular quarter and the number they are suggesting is 19 million. That would leapfrog Sammy past both Apple and Nokia into first place, and Nomura were the first analyst house to actually call it for Samsung some weeks ago.

But if trying to guess how Apple or Nokia did, its far worse for Samsung. First of all, Samsung is not releasing a lot of detail about their different smartphones on the platforms they support (Android, bada, Windows Mobile and Windows Phone). Secondly, while Samsung is in the total mobile phone market the biggest handset maker of North America and of Europe, in smartphones their US and European presence has traditionally been modest. Their successes are more hidden in Asia, Africa, the Middle East etc for which we don't get as much public data.

But to show how wild that 19 million number is, consider Samsung in Q1. They sold .. only .. 12.6 million smartphones in Q1. They weren't even the third biggest smartphone maker (RIM was, Sammy was 4th). And Samsung arrived in Q1 with a huge jump from Q4 sales - 20% growth, the biggest of any of the major manufacturers in that quarter. So if Samsung was really performing 'perfectly' in Q1 and doing 20% growth, and we'd now plot another 20% growth for them, that would only bring their number to 15.1 million units. And yet the gossip talks of a massive 19 million number. 19 million would mean that Samsung grew 51% unit sales in a 3 month period! Wow! That would be epic.

The form book suggests Samsung would 'need to' sell about 13-14 million smartphones now in Q2 to hold steady and maintain market share. That would be an acceptable performance. Any numbers above it is good, any numbers below it bad. And now the expectation is that Samsung has had a stellar quarter. We'll see in about two weeks when they reveal their Q2 performance.

SONYERICSSON, LG, MOTOROLA

Then we have the three smaller player in the top 6, who all are stuggling not just with the market shares but also in the ability to generate profits. SonyEricsson sold 4.9 million smartphones in Q1. They'd need to do about 5 to 5.5 million now in Q2 to hold steady.

LG number was 4.7 million so we could say they'd need between 4.7 and 5.2 million.

Motorola saw a decline in unit sales into Q1, and sold 4.1 million smartphones. So they should be aiming for roughly betwen 4 and 4.5 million unit sales of smarpthones in Q2, just to keep abreast of the market.

SYMBIAN

So then the operating systems. We already know Android's activation number (500,000 daily) so we know roughly the quarterly sales and growth level for Android. And we know Blackberry's number. But the rest we need to discover. And again in order or their size, lets start with who was the biggest, Symbian. Symbian sold 25.7 million total smartphones (remember Nokia is not alone, there are several other makers, especially in Japan who make/made Symbian phones). So Symbian's target number would be between about 26 and 29 million. And yes, especially after the Nokia announcement of Microsoft partnership on February 11, we heard that NTT DoCoMo would rapidly shift their focus away from Symbian and onto Android, we should see a rapid decline also in Japanese Symbian sales. So yes, if Nokia collapsed and the rest of Symbian is declining too, its quite possible the are down to about half their previous market share. It woudl be a world record in destruction of market share by any multi-vendor platform in any technology, ever.

iOS

Then we have Apple's number. As Apple doesn't licence iOS to others, the iPhone unit sales is also the market share for iOS in smartphones (and we need to remember, while in smartphones we cannot count iPads and iPod Touch devices into the totals of smartphone sales - it would be as wrong as adding motorcycle sales into the totals of car sales - the iOS total installed base is of course very relevant to app developers, so they should always remember to count the iPads and iPod Touch devices into their totals, just like now with Android, the various Android tablets need to be added etc.

BADA

So, after Android, Symbian, iOS and Blackberry OS, who is the best biggest? Its not Microsoft's new Windows Phone 7. Its not Microsoft's older Windows Mobile either. Its not Palm ie WebOS that is now owned by HP. Who is fifth biggest? Its Samsung's bada OS. They are pretty cagey about their numbers but they had roughly 3.5 million sales in Q1. For Q2 to hold steady, they should have between 3.5 million and 4 million sales. They are likely to have far more than that..

WINDOWS MOBILE

And while Microsoft desperately tries to kill of WinMo, good ole Windows Mobile still soldiers on, and annoyingly for MS, WinMo still outsold WP7 in Q1, with about 1.8 million sales. It now should be ramping down but if they do between 1.8 and 2.0 million sales, Windows Mobile would still be holding its place in the competition, while being a tiny player obviously.

WINDOWS PHONE 7

So then Microsoft's newest mobile OS, WP7. We just heard from Steve Ballmer that the sales of WP7 have been tiny. I reported earlier here about the reseller boycott that hit Microsoft because Microsoft bougyht Skype. That is likely hurting WP7 even more. But the number to look for is 1.6 million. If MS sold between 1.6 and 1.8 million smartphones using WP7 operating system, then they'd be doing about the same as the industry overall in holding position.

Thats the form guide. I will examine the actual results as they come in and dig deeper.

PS - as a small personal plug. This blog tries to give you as much of the data, stats and research that is in the public domain, that I am able to find. I also provide regularly exclusive output of research and analysis done by my consultancy, TomiAhonen Consulting, about the mobile industry including the handsets. If this blog is not enough, and you'd really want more info about the handset business, like market shares over time, like installed bases of phones by features (how many cameraphones, how many smartphones, how many have WiFi or Bluetooth or Java etc) or by brands or by form factors (QWERTY, Touch Screen etc) or to see such information spread by regions etc; but you can't justify spending a couple of thousand dollars on one of those 'expensive' reports, then I have just the thing for you. Consider downloading the TomiAhonen Phone Book 2010 for 171 pages, 98 charts and tables for a mere 9.99 Euros as an ebook download, and best of all, its formated to fit your smartphone screen so you can easily read it on your Android, iPhone, Blackberry or whatever phone you have in your pocket (or on a Kindle, iPad etc tablet or other ebook reader). See more here [TomiAhonen Phone Book 2010]

Wanna See Tomi Ahonen do keynote at Digital Now in Florida about Mobile and Media?

I had the great pleasure to do the keynote at Digital Now in Orlando Florida in April. They videotaped the keynote presentation and kindly posted it on YouTube. If you'd like to see and hear me, rather than just read this blog - and perhaps get the 'big picture' overview rather than this minutiae of the blogs, you might enjoy the video. The presentation was called "Digital Now: And What Role Mobile"

 


In the presentation I start by examining the size of the mobile industry. Then I talk about the consumers of mobile services and focus on youth trends. I then discuss mobile as the 7th mass media channel and illustrate each of the 8 unique abilities of mobile. I then put mobile in the context of digital convergence and talk a bit about mobile and money. I end as usual, with some magical services. I think of recent presentations of mine, this is a good 'generalist' presentation about the state of mobile that would probably be of interest to most readers here on the blog. Enjoy! (Tomi Ahonen presentation at Digital Now 2011)

Best Blog Article of Year (maybe of Decade) advice on how to hire and manage consultants. MUST READ

To anyone who ever considered hiring me as a consultant. To anyone who ever considered hiring ANYONE as a consultant. To anyone who ever considered the competence of any expert you are considering, whether directly to help you, or perhaps considering what to read or whether to go see at a conference etc. PLEASE read this brilliant blog by Mike Myatt over at Blogging Innovation: How to Hire and Manage Consultants.

Also if you are a consultant, or are considering a career in consultancy, go read it now. I will not excerpt from it. Please go read the whole blog. Its not long, it is brilliant, it is 100% spot-on, and I will from now on, always when anyone new approaches me about consulting, I will honestly send everybody to this blog first. Go read Mike Myatt first, then lets talk if you still are interested. Seriously. Best blog article of the year! (and thanks to Jonathan JMac MacDonald for mentioning it on Twitter)

Now What's Microsoft's Play in Mobile? Mostly Missed Opportunities

Microsoft is the ultimate under-achiever in mobile. They have always talked the talk, and consistently failed to walk the walk. But as a corporation they are as big as Nokia, a giant. And Microsoft have said that they see the transition from the PC metaphor IT and internet world to the mobile metaphor for a decade already. Why are they not dominating the mobile world like they do the PC world?

IN THE BEGINNING THERE WAS SENDO

Many recent to mobile may be surprised that Microsoft has been in smartphones more than twice as long as Apple's iconic iPhone. They launched into mobile a decade ago. Their first launch customer was a brave British smartphone maker called Sendo. You never heard of Sendo? Thats because Microsoft crushed this partner who spent years in litigation with Microsoft, won in the end but the company was kaput by then. Early on when Microsoft brought its Windows to mobile we had plenty of other long-gone smartphone platforms like Palm, like Compaq's iPAQ etc. Oh, and there was something called Symbian also back then.

Microsoft did launch with Taiwanese HTC and then we would occasionally see some activities from Microsoft. Much more talk than walk, they would announce great things, which would inevitably be delayed, ship late, ship with bugs, and missing promised components. Microsoft Windows Mobile became known as the operating system that was even worse than Windows on a PC and most developers hated it.

Microsoft built its ecosystem acound Windows Mobile for nearly ten years and landed as handset makers the 'rest' of the top 5 biggest handset makers, when you remove Nokia. So Samsung, LG, Motorola and SonyEricsson were all suppliers of Windows Mobile handsets. When you add HTC into the mix, it is the six bestselling phone makers now doing Android phones for Google. Microsoft owned this field, had all those makers, and by every tiny bit of logic, if Google can take 45% of all smartphones sold now in July to be on Android, made by Samsung, HTC, LG, SonyEricsson and Motorola - why didn't Microsoft - after ten years of trying - not own 45% of the smartphone market?

Microsoft Windows Mobile did, briefly hold onto number 2 ranking a couple of times in the past decade. But they got there with total market share of just over 10%. Then they were overtaken by RIM Blackberry and Apple iPhone. The last guys Microsoft were able to 'defeat' in the smartphone battles were Palm. They were defenseless against the Blackberry and the iPhone. And Nokia's Symbian phones outsold Windows Mobile always by at least 5 to 1. In the latest quarter we have data, Q1 of 2011 - when Nokia had killed Symbian, Microsoft's Windows Mobile sold 1 handset where Symbian sold 14. I have made the analysis that if you remove Nokia branded Symbian phones, and only take the 'other' Symbian phones like those made by Sharp and Fujitsu etc - even those Symbian phones outsold all Microsoft phones in Q1. Thats how bad Microsoft had become.

Microsoft made many relaunches of Windows Mobile which reached its 6th iteration by 2010. Every relaunch came with top management commitments of learning from the past, of fixing the problems and taking mobile seriously. Along the way Microsoft convinced several handset makers to focus on Microsoft Windows Mobile, including Motorola at one stage and LG at another. Even with Nokia, Microsoft didn't get Nokia to run Windows Mobile, but got Nokia to integrate with its E-Series enterprise/corporate business phones, the Microsoft Office Suite (when that project coordination with Nokia was led on Microsoft's side by Stephen Elop, yes who now is Nokia's CEO).

That great collaboration between Nokia and Microsoft resulted in colossal global market success in the enterprise/corporate space, using Nokia E-Series phones and Microsoft's global Windows PC platform and the Office Suite.. When I say 'colossal global market success' of course I mean 'nothing'. There was zero success, even when Microsoft made this a 'top priority' and placed their wonderboy Stephen Elop in charge. While this is not a blog about Nokia, one should take from this the lesson, that Microsoft's power in PCs and the Office Suite are not a strong factor in helping Nokia sell more smartphones. But I digress. That was failure of Nokia partnerships. What of Motorola and LG?

Both felt they had wasted their effort with Microsoft, nothing delivered on time, nothing worked and their effort was wasted. Both saw their Microsoft efforts being a drag on profits - both saw their profitable phone business go unprofitable during the Microsoft phase - and both left in disgust. Motorola was so upset, they said they will no longer do any Microsoft phones and went 100% Android. LG said they were shifting from a Microsoft based strategy with Android as option, to an Android based strategy with Microsoft as the option.

NO MIGRATION PATH

Microsoft was lumbering along with Microsoft Windows Mobile, until their nemesis, Apple, entered into the phone space. And before you could say 'Palm' Microsoft's market share was in freefall.. So Microsoft said they'd abandon the Windows Mobile platform, because that was now a decade old, and release a whole new operating system in 2010 for smartphones, Windows Phone, which would be totally new, and be optimized for touch-screen phones. Now, as this was 'totally new' it meant that there was no migration path for developers who had made apps for Windows Mobile.

To me at the time, that seemed truly odd. Microsoft if anyone, should have known better. It was DOS that built Microsoft. Then came Apple with the Mac (like now with the iPhone) and showed a far better way to do personal computers than DOS. So Microsoft had to reverse-engineer the Mac OS and try to create a clone, which we now know as Windows. And today DOS is dead. But Microsoft had a massive global PC lead in DOS based machines in 1984 when the Mac was announced. Even as Macintosh PCs were sold, Microsoft based PCs sold more. And Micrsosoft made Windows first as an add-on over DOS, as a 'GUI' (Graphical User Interface). The first versions of Windows were horrible, it wasn't until Windows 3.0 that it was in any way usable, but the point was, that all Windows PC's were also using DOS, and any recent DOS machine could be upgraded to run Windows (while the older the machine, the more slow this made it). Anyway, it took years, but Microsoft patiently migrated all DOS based PC users to Windows and kept its massive market share edge over Apple. Why they would not do it now, is a mystery to me. But clearly Microsoft messed up big time with Phone 7 (and incidentially, this is why I am so adamant about the migration path from Symbian to MeeGo but thats another story)

And Microsoft didn't really care about that. Right after they announced that there was no migration path, the market share crashed. It was devastated from 9% at Q4 of 2009 to 3% by Q3 of 2010 when the new Windows Phone handsets started to arrive. So Microsoft lost two thirds of its customers in a period of 9 months.

This is incidentially the model I used to estimate what happens to Symbian when Nokia announced on February 11 that they will no longer support the previously-announced migration path from Symbian to MeeGo.

Now, how well did that go with Microsoft partners? They have been bailing out of Windows Mobile for a while. The biggest partner, HTC - who had produced half of all Windows Mobile phones ever made - said they will not even launch smartphones on the last editions of Windows Mobile. But they returned to Windows Phone and gave it a try. Now the latest numbers we have from Q1 is that HTC's Android phones have been outselling HTC's Microsoft Windows Phone smartphones of similar specifications and in essentially the same markets - by about 9 to 1. The new Microsoft OS, which is optimized for touch screens, is doing so badly, that Microsoft's longest running handset partner sells 9 times more on Android than Windows Phone. And HTC was so disgusted by this new boycott against Microsoft (because of Skype) that they shifted their emphasis now to more Android from Q3.

And meanwhile, LG, another maker who does both Android and Windows Phone, has just today announced that they are lowering their target for total smartphone sales from 30 million to 24 million this year. This comes on the heels of Android growing dramatically and activating 500,000 new handsets per month. And LG has been selling tons of Android phones. The annual target lowering is - my analysis, not LG's words - the result of dramatically underperfoming Microsoft Windows Phone smartphone sales. Android is doing just fine for LG, but the reseller boycott is killing Microsoft.

So where was Microsoft's new Windows Phone now? Funny you'd ask. Those who use it, love it. It is a very modern and easy-to-use operating system for modern touch-screen smartphones. But. There aren't any users. In Q1 of 2011 Microsoft Windows Phone had 1.6% market share. While Microsoft had been trying to kill of Windows Mobile, WinMo was still outselling Windows Phone in Q1 ! And the upstart, Samsung's new bada, as old roughly as Windows Phone 7 was not just selling more than Windows Phone, bada was outselling both Micrsosoft operating systems combined! So all Microsoft based phones sold by LG, SonyEricsson, HTC ... and Samsung itself - were outselling bada which is only one of three OS's that Samsung supports, and is not its best-selling OS (Android is, obviously) and yet bada on only Samsung and only as one of 3 OS's is already selling better than all makers of Microsoft smartphones.

ITS EXECUTIVE ATTENTION

So why? Microsoft is the biggest PC operating system maker by a massive margin, with Windows. It kind of inherited that being there at the beginning (although Apple was bigger at the very early age of the PC). So maybe Windows is kind of special. But what of the Office Suite? That is something Microsoft did not own from the start. The world's biggest spreadsheet before Micrsosoft Excel was Lotus 1-2-3. Before Word, the world's bestselling word processing software was WordPerfect. And so forth. Microsoft (under Bill Gates) fought and won those battles. Even Xbox, it was the smallest of the three gaming platforms but for a while was the biggest. I haven't looked recently but I think Wii took over as number 1, and if you add Playstation Portable, then probably Sony is still biggest. But Microsoft has roughly a third of the home gaming console market. Why does it have 3% of the smartphone market after ten years (And a peak of about 12%).

I think its executive focus. Compare to Google. Compare to Apple. When these guys say they go mobile, they are all out. They do everything in the whole company to get there. Eric Schmidt the Chairman of Google says 'Mobile mobile mobile' and he says 'Mobile first' and he says 'Put your best people on mobile' etc. He's dead serious. Or look at Apple. When they were the world's bestselling portable music player brand (iPad and iTunes) they went out to design the device that will cannibalize iPad sales - the iPhone. They admitted later that the iPhone is the direct result of Apple concluding that portable music will migrate from iPads to musicphones. This is bold, this is decisive. No wonder when Steve Jobs announced the original iPhone, they also announced Apple Computer, would change its name to Apple. And now Apple calls itself a 'mobile' company. And make the biggest profits of any tech company on the planet.

But look at Steve Ballmer. He says Nokia is their strategic partner and mobile is their top focus. Next day he says Windows is their top focus. Then he says Office is the top focus. Then he says Cloud computing is the top focus. Then they announce RIM as a strategic partner (oops? What happened to Nokia?) and so forth and so forth and so forth. If you want to win in mobile, this is the biggest contest, the biggest race, the biggest prize in human history. I've estimated conservatively that the 'floor' ie the minimum level of the value of this 'prize' of the digital convergence is in excess of 5 Trillion dollars annually. The real prize is likely double that. And to put it in context, the total PC industry of which Microsoft is a small part, is worth only half a Trillion dollars. It is no accident that Hewlett Packard says the future is mobile. That Dell says the future is mobile. That Intel says the future is mobile. That the BBC says the future is mobile. That Visa says the future is mobile. And so forth. But Microsoft has been in this game for a decade and have squandered every chance they ever got.

NOW NOKIA

So they have yet another chance. It is now clear, that without Nokia, Microsoft Windows Phone would have already died. It is a total market flop. Microsoft is wealthy, could have kept it alive for some quarters, but without the Nokia excitement, it would have died a quiet death like Kin phones and Zune music players etc.

With Nokia Microsoft had a unique opportunity, with ex-Microsoft guy, Stephen Elop (and good friend of Steve Ballmer) in charge. This could easily have been a happy partnership not unlike what Bill Gates had with Apple's Steve Jobs early on (Microsoft's first applications were written for the Macintosh, yes that is where Word and Excel come from, honest!) And Microsoft gave Apple a big corporate loan at one point when Apple was in the doldrums. They were once very close pals.

Now we'd have the world's biggest software operating system maker Microsoft working with the biggest handset maker. Both had tried to do each others' business - Nokia making operating systems with Symbian and Microsoft phones with Kin and could easily say, they should 'stick to their knitting'. This partnership has the potential to be very strong if both work together and use their strengths.

When Microsoft was negotiating with Nokia in late 2010, Nokia's global handset market share (all phones) was 26% and Nokia's smartphone market share was 28%. While earlier many were questioning it, by 2010 a consensus was forming that yes, all 'dumbphones' would migrate to become smartphones during this decade. So Microsoft was approaching this partnership just when Nokia's giant global lead in dumbphones would be ready to migrate to smartphones. Nokia sells over one million handsets per day. The PC industry sells about 300 million devices per year. If Microsoft could get Nokia to adopt Microsoft's OS - and most importantly - get Nokia to agree to pay for the licenses (where Symbian was free to Nokia and MeeGo was free to Nokia, and Google's Android would also have been free) - then Microsoft would have a massive profit engine into this decade.

I think its fair to say, that most who looked at Nokia in 2010, and projected deep into this decade, would say, that with Microsoft, its very fair to assume Nokia could keep most of its market share and should have more than 20% market share into this decade. That is also what we've heard from several analysts this Spring. I think that was a fair assuption from data from last year. If Microsoft then looked at its 2010 performance, saw it has some sales from HTC and SonyEricsson and LG and Samsung and could add some of that into the mix, Microsoft could easily expect the total footprint of Microsoft Windows Phone could be in the 25% to perhaps even 30% range, towards the second half of this decade when all Nokia phones would start to be smartphones.

SHORT REPLACEMENT CYCLE

So then the cold lessons. First, Microsoft would have known this if they bothered to think. The mobile smartphone market is not like the PC market (or the videogaming console market) in that the replacement cycles are the shortest of any industry. The average replacement cycle is under 18 months globally and far less for smarpthone users. So while in PCs there is time to wait for a couple of years and not lose lots of customers, not so in the smartphone space.

Then we have Apple. To borrow from the crude sex joke about 'when you go black, you never go back' haha (please don't be offended) its very fair to say that about Apple. Once any consumer starts to use some Apple device, the Mac or the iPod or the iPad or the iPhone - in that category, they will never go back. Very much of the evidence currently is that disgruntled Nokia Symbian buyers are going to Apple iPhones. And once you use an iPhone, there is almost no switch back to any other phone brands. Apple has by far the greatest loyalty of any phones.

So the top end of the smarpthones that Nokia was fighting for, quite successfully by Q4 of last year with the N8 - is now rushing to pick up iPhones. The early Microsoft Windows Phone based smartphones by Nokia will not be low-end mass market phones, they will be premium high-cost smartphones. And those customers are now leaving Nokia in droves, never to come back.

And now we have a global reseller boycott of Nokia Symbian phones. So while the Microsoft management hoped they'd 'land' Nokia with something like 20% or more in smartphone market share (like it was in 2010) they now have to watch how badly Nokia falls, and hope it is still big by the end of 2011 when the first Microsoft phones will come with Nokia branding.

Most consumers are not coming to the store to buy 'a Microsoft phone' or 'an Android phone' or 'a Symbian' phone - they come asking for an HTC or a Samsung or a Nokia. So its the Nokia smartphone market share which is critical here. And that is now in freefall because of the reseller boycott.

I cannot recalculate how bad it will be until we have hard data on Q2 sales from Nokia but before the boycott I counted that Nokia will end this year with 12% market share. So the old 'best case' scenario for Microsoft was not that Nokia can have 20% market share that can be migrated to Microsoft, it was down to 12%. That was before this boycott. Now, today, as the resellers refuse to sell Symbian phones, when the customer walks into the store and asks for Nokia, they will typically sell either an Android or iPhone (or in some cases Blackberry). These customers are gone. They now have a memory of their old 2009 model Nokia Symbian phone that didn't do touch screen or had a very cumbersome touch screen experience and they have the wonderful new Android or iPhone (or Blackerry) and are totally in love with the new phone. Their next phone is that brand, not Nokia. These customers lost during this boycott are lost forever. (and the sad thing for Nokia is, that the new version of Symbian is so good, that it would actually build Nokia loyalty if there was no boycott).

But the situation is that bad, that analysts are already saying Nokia in Q2 lost so much sales, that they have fallen behind perhaps Samsung smartphones, or perhaps Apple iPhones (or perhaps even both). Just in Q4 Nokia was bigger than iPhone and all Samsung smartphones added together.

THE WORST THING TO DO NOW

Note, as Microsoft's own Windows Phone OS is selling so badly they are under 2% market share now, anything from Nokia will be better. But the trend is very clear, that when Nokia smartphones are sold in mass market quantities in the Spring of 2012, the remaining market share for Microsoft Windows Phone is not 'the third ecosystem' in size. They will be smaller even with Nokia than Android (first), iPhone (second) and Blackberry (third ecosystem). Its quite possible, depending on how Samsung prioritizes its smartphones, that Samsung's bada will be bigger than Microsoft even with Nokia (as it already is now). So Windows Phone would be at best the 5th ecosystem. And thats before we see what Hewlett Packard does with Palm WebOS (they are seeking partners now) and when Intel's MeeGo based phones are released next year from ZTE, Huawei, Panasonic and LG.

Microsoft thought they were buying into a winner. Nokia looked very strong as a hardware manufacturer last year. Making still solid profits etc. Massive market share advantage over all rivals. Now they are limping in, and we just heard this week that Nokia is resorting to 15% price cuts - after they are making losses. This is desperation moves by Nokia.

Now. If Microsoft really believed in mobile. If they did their homework (ten years in the smartphone space etc) and abandoned the fantasies that Microsoft Office Suite will matter at all in this fight, they would understand that the biggest factor in mobile phone success is... not handset design, not operating system, not user interface, not app store, not ecosystem, not number of apps, not mobile web, not music, not TV, not camera... it is carrier relationships.

Nokia had the best carrier relationships on the planet. They were able to use those carrier relationships to build 130 carrier billing relationships to Ovi for example. This is what every app developers says, is the preferred way to pay for apps, you get the biggest conversion rate of interest to purchase, if there is carrier billing. Its the hardest thing to achieve. And Nokia is the grand master. Ovi has carrier billing for over 20% of all carriers on the planet including most of the big ones.

Now Nokia faces a carrier boycott not of the Nokia brand, but of Symbian. So Microsoft can safely hope that once that the carriers have a new OS to sell that is not Symbian, they will liff the boycott and sell Microsoft Windows Phone 7 based phones happily ever after.

Not so fast. Just one speedbump: Skype.

Microsoft bought Skype in May. And coincidentially at the start of June we hear from several sources that all of Microsoft operating system phones (Windows Mobile and Windows Phone) are under sales boycott. Why?

Because carriers/mobile operators hate Skype. About 70% of the total mobile operator/carrier revenues and about 40% of their profits come from voice calls. Skype is killing voice calls not in mobile, but on the fixed landline side, where if Skype was a telco, it now would have half of all fixed landline subscribers. Wow. And we all know, most Skype calls are free. So Skype has decimated fixed telco revenues and profits.

What is far worse for the carriers, is that Skype hits the most expensive calls - where most of the profit is. International calls and long distance calls. And for those who believe in videocalls - very relevant to many 3G mobile business cases - we do use videocalls but not the way 3G forecasters expected - 40% of Skype data traffic is videocalls. Note that is not number of calls or minutes, but because videocalls take much more data bandwidth, when measured by total data load, 40% of Skype is videocalls.

So Skype is killing the landline fixed telecoms operators/carriers by revenues, decimating their profits and destroying the future path to videocalls.

The carriers in mobile are having none of that. They can't stop us doing Skype via WiFi but most carriers will forbid us from using our phones to Skype, or have 'fair use' clauses in their data plans, and those unlimited data plans that used to be so popular, are all vanishing, latest to kill its was Verizon yesterday.

There are exceptions. Three the 3G operator group is offering Skype as part of their service bundle. That means, that Three has packaged Skype pricing into their monthly data price. But no carrier/operator in mobile is offering Skype for free. Not when voice is 70% of revenues and 40% of profits. (And Skype messaging - SMS is less than 20% of revenues and well over 50% of profits for most mobile operators/carriers).

When Microsoft bought Skype, I am sure it made a lot of sense for Redmond HQ in the overall big picture at Microsoft to have a bigger presense in the internet business, in telecoms and in social networking. But what they did not factor in, is that no carriers/operators (except those few who bundle it in like Three) will want Skype anywhere near their networks to overload their data and steal their profits.

Now Microsoft is seeing a conflict. It believes in Skype obviously. I also believe in Skype and I think it will finish off most of fixed landline telecoms and will be a nice telecoms 'new' carrier on the fixed side. They will also eventually do some deals on some networks in mobile. But all carriers/mobile operators will do Voice Over IP (VOIP) but (almost) all will do it without Skype. The carriers do VOIP in their way, with their billing and their pricing plans, making sure they get some revenues from their VOIP services. And they will not do that with Microsoft.

And the carriers are very cautious. They do not rush into silliness. So they have calculated the Skype effects in their networks for years. And they know Microsoft, the Evil Empire, very well. They will never accept any Microsoft smartphones even if those have Skype 'crippled' or blocked, knowing if they let Microsoft in, they will only postpone the eventual launch of Microsoft's Skype into their market.

No, this was the wrong move. Now Microsoft's Windows Phone (and Windows Mobile) are instantly the most hated smartphone OS by the carriers. So they go elsewhere. There is plenty of choice. But Microsoft just destroyed its last chance to come back in mobile. They better hope for a strong long life of the PC..

What is Wrong with This Picture? iPhone Use is Declining? And Symbian Use is Growing?

This is so counter-intuitive and bizarre, but I think we can make some sense out of it. This is StatCounter who measure global web and mobile traffic. So this is not new phone sales, this is not a measurement of installed bases, it is a measurement of actual usage of devices. I have used the filter of 'mobile OS' for Mobile device operating systems. Note, it is not just cellular use, it includes WiFi use (so Sony PlayStation Portable is included) which means that the iOS category includes both the iPhone and the iPod Touch use. But look at the graph. And look at Symbian use for the past six months.. What the Heck is happenin' here?

 


The graph is taken from StatCounter website, so please link there to get latest numbers. But the finding is bizarre and very counter-intuitive. It does show clearly the rise of Android (purple line) - no problem there. It shows clearly the peak of the Blackberry (black line) and the decline in the past year of Blackberry, no surprise there.

It shows a strange gradual decline of the Apple iOS (green line) for the past year and a half, but do not worry, that makes perfect sense as this is a percentage of the whole of global mobile OS usage, so remember, while iPhone and iPod Touch users have very high usage, their proportion of the total installed base is now declining, as a percentage, vs Android specifically. So early on, we could all download the Angry Birds only on an iPhone but Angry Birds then went to Android and now is on most platforms etc..  So some of the exceptionally heavy usage that only iPhone (and Touch) users could do a couple of years ago, is now spread more evently across all platforms. So the iOS total usage is still well above its installed base, due to the fact that all iPhones are very easy to use, most are on data plans, and the iPod Touch WiFi usage boosts the iOS total usage number. The iOS line (green line) will continue to decline and eventually settle somewhat above Apple's actual market share ie somewhere near 20%

So. The weird odd-man-out is Symbian (blue line). What? Symbian has been losing market share of new phone sales forever (as it started with 100% initially, obviously so its only way was down over time) and from Q1 of this year Android has passed Symbian as the bestselling smartphone OS in new sales. The installed base will lag that statistic, obviously (many of us still have older phones) so yes, Symbian is bigger in installed base and it makes sense its usage is above that of Android, while Android is growing. But what happened from about December 2010?

In the last seven months, Symbian usage has grown significantly! Even as new sales of Symbian based phones are now crashing, the USAGE of Symbian is growing. More than that, look at the graph - Nokia's Symbian is TAKING MARKET SHARE FROM APPLE? Wot? Yes, obviously Android is taking 'more' market share (in usage) from the iPhone and both Symbian and Android are taking it from Blackberry, but Symbian?

This is the 'burning platforms' Symbian, the same one that Nokia CEO said was rejected by consumers and had to die. The one he wants to replace with Microsoft Windows Phone 7 (which is so little it doesn't show in the graph, it is part of 'other'). And since about December the usage of Symbian has grown quite strongly from about 30% to about 35%...  This from the platform that was killed on February 11?

So, first, why is this? Its mostly because of Ovi, secondly because of operator billing and operator/carrier support, and thirdly because of Nokia reach in markets where there are not many PCs (Asia, Africa, Latin America) where for many less affluent users, their Nokia phone is their PC equivalent. But if you show this graph to any .. say advertiser or app developer or brand or bank or partner, isn't this verification that Symbian is clearly the biggest OS out there, has the biggest total traffic and should be not 'one of the big 3' platforms, it is clearly the biggest platform. (and while we are on the 'big 3' - Microsoft does not register, so the bullsh*t that Microsoft is one of the big three platforms is sheer rubbish).

But yes, the uptick. Why is the reversal of the trend in December? That timing is because Nokia's new OS Symbian S^3 came to the market globally on the N8 and other premium Nokia smartphones. So the latest Symbian S^3 is indeed far more user-friendly and consumers like it - and users are using it! (And now in July Symbian has been updated even more with Anna).

Why would anyone argue that Symbian is dying? That Nokia is somehow losing to Apple, if Symbian USAGE is taking market share from iPhone USAGE? Wot? That is what this evidence is, globally. Don't tell me the N8 is a lousy phone and Symbian is obsolete. It would be impossible to see these stats if that was so.

Symbian in its latest edition is strong, and if you ask users - of their actual usage of what they have in their pocket - these numbers are rather clear. Symbian usage is growing. I think the CEO of the company who owns that platform should not be setting fires, but rather embracing this GROWTH in usage and cherish it and support it. (And support the migration of Nokia developers from Symbian to MeeGo so that MeeGo would become the third platform with about 35% of total global mobile OS usage... Yeah, the obvious strategy is pretty.. obvious).

Wanna Be Nokia CEO? Take the simple quiz to see if you're qualified

Take the CEO Quiz: Could you be the new CEO of Nokia? We understand that the Nokia Board of Directors uses a very complex quiz to test out its potential CEOs. This quiz is how the Board noticed how obviously incompetent the candidate Anssi Vanjoki was, and he was rejected. This quiz is how the Board discovered the highly valued wunderkind Stephen Elop the Magnificent, who was hired to run the world's largest mobile phone manufacturer, also world's largest smartphone maker, also world's widest-reaching mobile phone ecosystem by a massive margin, and also (then) world's largest smartphone OS platform.

The questions are in the form of hypotheticals from various very different management scenarios in wildly different industries. This is the full quiz:

Question 1 - You hear that your reseller chain - the mobile operators/carriers - has gone into sales boycott because of one decision made by your company. Do you

a - apologize in public and reverse that one decision which is causing your resellers to boycott your products or

b - announce your support of a series of new technologies that the carriers specifically hate, to really infuriate them, like Dual SIM phones and Skype

Question 2 - Your smartphones have suffered years of declining average sales prices, and thus, declining profits. Suddenly in Q4 of 2010, you find that the new smartphones running the new version of Symbian, like the N8, are so big hits globally, that your average sales price jumps an unprecedented 15% - that means your company earned a bonus profit of 565 Million Euros in just one quarter or the annual equivalent of 3 Billion dollars of bonus profit. You take the bonus 565 Million Euros of pure profit, and

a - thank the Symbian team and premium Nokia smartphones designers and celebrate Nokia's huge comeback and put most of the bonus profit into promoting Symbian S^3 based phones like the N8 and E7, or

b - fire the Symbian team and a total of 7,000 Nokia software developers as incompetent fools for making profitable and highly desirable products for Nokia

Question 3 - Your company has had several recently failed flagship smartphones in the past, like N96 and N97. In June 2011, your newest flagship smartphone, the N9 is not just the hottest Nokia phone as far back as anyone can remember, it is legitimately the hottest phone the tech press has seen for at least a year by any manufacturer. Do you

a - say we will sell it immediately in every market and it will have full management support and you increase the marketing effort allocated to its launch or

b - say it will not be sold in ANY of the largest European markets where Nokia is traditionally strong, such as the UK, Germany, Italy, Spain, France; and also it will not be sold in many of Nokia's biggest markets outside of Europe like Brazil, India, Indonesia, Philippines, South Africa etc.

Question 4 - Your operating system Symbian is widely seen as obsolete but the new version S^3 is released for Christmas 2010, and you find that Symbian S^3 is making a true comeback - it is both loved by consumers and is establising a Nokia record for new OS launch success. Do you

a - celebrate the sudden success and give Symbian your complete support, or

b - issue a 'burning platforms memo' full of mistakes and falsehoods which suggests Symbian is obsolete

Question 5 - You are witnessing a sales boycott of Symbian smartphones. But you also see that one of the two options for replacing Symbian is itself in boycott, as the resellers have stopped selling Microsoft WP7 based smartphones because they are punishing Microsoft for Skype. The resellers have not put MeeGo devices into a boycott, in fact they are in love with MeeGo. Do you

a - launch the N9 phone with MeeGo now in every country and carrier and market that now has a Symbian boycott, or

b - tell your resellers that in most markets there will be no MeeGo phones and all have to wait until December to see the one new smartphone made on WP7 that itself is now in boycott (replacing one boycott with another boycott)

Question 6 - You know your main operating system Symbian is growing old and needs to be replaced. You have two choices to replace it, one is MeeGo that you control but you were not sure if that will succeed in the market. The other is an operating system owned by a third party, Microsoft. MeeGo would be free to Nokia. Microsoft's WP7 is a costly license where you pay a license for every single handset using WP7 and the control of the OS's development is totally with Microsoft. Now you find that MeeGo is met with complete market love and affection and very positive support all around by the tech press. Do you

a - say you are happily surprised by the reception MeeGo is having, congratulate Nokia's MeeGo development team, and say you will support MeeGo and release it on several handsets, or

b - declare that "even if the N9 and MeeGo are a success, you will not release any more phones on it"

Question 7 - After years of attempting to match the iPhone with failed phones like the N96 and the N97, your predecessors have spectacularly failed to deliver a hit 'flagship' product. But now for Christmas 2010 you discover that you have in the latest flagship handset, the N8, for the first time in many years a true hit product - so hot, it sets an internal record for biggest new Nokia phone launch ever, selling 4 million units in only three months. Do you

a - celebrate the success of the N8 and use its buzz to preview newer Nokia S^3 phones coming soon in Q1 like the E7, X7, and to teach the market about newer Symbian versions like 'Anna', or

b - release a memo saying Nokia phones are years behind the competitors and you announce the death of the Symbian OS.

Question 8 - You are committed this year to two paths with different partners and different ecosystems. One is open source, using industry standard tools like Linux thus being a close cousin of Android and has a carrier (the giant China Mobile) among its supporters. The other is closed, using proprietary tools, no conceivable commonality with Android and it has no carriers to support it. While you thought the MeeGo option was not commercially viable, it is now proving vibrant and strong. At the same time the WP7 option that initially seemed strong, is proving very weak and already seeing its suppliers abandoning Microsoft while the resellers have gone into boycott. You obviously

a - announce that you will shift emphasis to the ecosystem where you are in control which is most open, using industry standard tools and which has the most partners including a carrier - ie MeeGo, or

b - you announce that even as that open system is proven viable, and even as MeeGo will continue with or without Nokia, you will abandon it and rather go with the smallest, closed, ecosystem where you have no control where there are the least number of partners and where the partners themselves are abandoning the platform.

Question 9 - You surprisingly find that your N9 phone is the biggest hit phone of the summer. The reviewers are both impressed by N9 hardware, and MeeGo software. You have a second smartphone designed to work also on MeeGo, called the N950. It is ready for release for the vital Christmas season. Do you

a - ride the buzz and excitement of the N9 launch and MeeGo, and promise the N950 to hit the market as soon as possible, launched in every country and on every carrier by Christmas and rushed to all Nokia promotions now, or

b - refuse to sell the N950 in any market, and only make some prototype versions for some developers

Question 10 - Your brand is the market share leader on five of the six inhabited continents both in smartphones and dumbphones, by a wide margin. But in the US market your brand once held the lead but lost it seven years ago and today lingers in tiny market shares in both categories. Nokia's demise in the US market was not because of bad handset designs, or bad user interfaces or bad operating systems or bad ecosystems; you yourself admit the biggest key to the US market is carrier relationships which had become poisoned around year 2004, and the US carriers have carried a grudge for the past seven years. You learn in January 2011 that your US sales staff have made a long-awaited breakthrough - some say deliver a miraculous sales success - and secured a carrier deal to promote the new touch screen X7 smartphone running the newest 'Anna' version of Symbian, with none other than AT&T. The Carrier is so eager to launch this phone with Nokia, they are set to come to the world's biggest mobile telecoms industry event, the Mobile World Congress held in Barcelona in February, to a joint CEO event with you to announce the return of Nokia to the premium end of the US smartphone market. You

a - drop everything else, as the US investors more than anything else, would love a major carrier to embrace a new Nokia smartphone as a flagship phone - and this one event would establish you as the biggest hero, achieving what both of your predecessors failed to do in returning Nokia premium phones and Symbian OS to carrier supported status in the USA, or

b - you cancel the launch - yes, you Nokia cancel AT&T's launch of Nokia's X7 - and say you would rather take the stage in Barcelona with Microsoft's CEO Steve Ballmer, to announce a partnership which includes no carrier deals in America or anywhere else.

Question 11 - As you face a reseller boycott and your own giant smartphone factories are running idle, but as your factories are wholly owned by Nokia, it means you have highly skilled and competent handset manufacturing staff being paid for doing nothing, you have to launch a completely new smartphone running Microsoft WP7. You

a - use one of your own idle smartphone factories to manufacture the new smartphone to the highest Nokia standards of quality and manufacturing, or

b - you bypass your own factory, and go sign a contract with Compal of Taiwan, who also make 'highly successful' and 'popular' smartphones for three less-than-spectacular smartphone brands.. Motorola, HP/Palm and.. Acer.

Question 12 - You are talking of ecosystems and with them, the importance of developers. You have two future options. Nokia's 400,000 strong Symbian developer community has a decade-long history and your CTO built a migration path for the total Nokia developer community, via a set of tools called Qt, to arrive at MeeGo. The Qt tools can also be used to create apps for featurephones running Nokia S40 operating system, and to develop apps for other open Linux based platforms like.. Android. Your other future platform, Microsoft WP7 has no migration path from Symbian. It is not compatible with Qt and is not compatible in any way with Android's vast army either. In fact, Microsoft cared so little for its past developers that even Microsoft's own Windows Mobile developers do not have a migration path to WP7. Now you hear that the carriers have started a boycott of Microsoft WP7 but also that your resellers (and developers) love MeeGo. So you obviously

a - announce a shift in the strategy, where MeeGo will be the center of your strategy, especially to support the strong Nokia developer community, or

b - announce that even as MeeGo would be the best for Nokia's existing developers and WP7 the worst, you will still insist on no more MeeGo devices, and the future will be all WP7, and effectively saying like Microsoft tends to say to its developer community: "f*ck you!"

Question 13 - You have to migrate your handsets away from your current operating system to a new one. You have made your selection in February and announced your primary new smartphone OS would be WP7. Since you announced your choice, the maker of that OS, Microsoft, has suddenly acquired the one branded service that your reseller chain ie the mobile operators/carriers hate: Skype. Because of this new acquisition the carriers/operators started a boycott of Microsoft in May of 2011, and the carriers are now telling you, they will never support Microsoft based smartphones. Your whole strategy has been torpedoed by your partner, Microsoft (something it was famous for doing to all of its previous telecoms partners like Sendo, Nortel, LG and Ericsson, every one of which left previous partnership attempt with Microsoft badly damaged if not bankrupt). Do you now

a - announce you are shifting away from Microsoft because you listen to your reseller channel, the carriers, and you know they do not support this path (and because you have a credible replacement strategy in MeeGo) or

b - do you announce proudly that yes, Skype will be central to the Microsoft smartphone strategy by Nokia, to further anger the reseller channel and guarantee all Nokia phones will be boycotted not just on Symbian now, but also on WP7 in the future

Question 14 - You are the freshly-hired new CEO. You know your predecessor was fired for two reasons - one, his strategy of dumping prices led to the company arriving at the brink of making losses; and the share price crashed 55% over a 4 year period. Now you have been in charge for 9 months. The stock market rewarded your early actions of your first five months by raising share prices by 10%. But in the past 4 months, your actions have destroyed share value by another 52%. Do you now

a - say you understand. Apologize. Reverse all of the actions of the past 4 months. Abandon Microsoft. And return to that strategy which worked so well in the first five months, or

b - now adopt the same strategy of your doomed predecessor CEO with a massive price dump of 15% across the board to further accelerate the downward spiral of your share price and plummet the corporation into making ever bigger losses?

KEY TO ANSWERS

The quiz is quite particular and some might say it is controversial even. There is something thought of as 'old school' management thinking that is based on the MBA (Master of Business Administration) teaching which tends to still taught in most misguided and obsolete business schools like Harvard and Yale and Oxford and Cambridge and Insead etc. That has become completely irrelevant in a new world of Microsoft.

There is a new management philosophy which supercedes the MBA, it is the MMBA, The Microsoft Muppet Bullshit Academy which is based on the teachings of grand guru and learned leader Steve Ballmer (The Grand Microsoft Master, the man who single-handedly conquerred the whole smartphone world with ten years of Microsoft Windows Mobile; whose earthshattering Kin phones were the global hit, so popular they had to be withdrawn from sales in only six weeks; and the Microsoft Windows Phone 7 an operating system so powerful most of its handset makers are deserting the platform and the reseller channel is actively boycotting it). The head of the MMBA is of course Stephen Elop the Learned, the sharpest knife in the cabinet, the quickest brain in the business and the smoothest operator of the whole universe of telecoms.

The newer Redmond Microsoft based learnings taught at the Microsoft Muppet Bullshit Academy tell us that the ecosystem is what decides who wins. But if you already have the bigger ecosystem like Symbian, then you have to of course terminate that, and replace it with the smallest and weakest ecosystem out there like WP7. The MMBA teaches us that you have to care for your developers, but only so far, where you can then screw them so they don't have a migration path, like Microsoft so kindly did in not offering migration from Windows Mobile to Phone 7 - and if you find an ecosystem which is open source and actually has a migration path like from Symbian to MeeGo, that has to be destroyed.

The MMBA teaches us that you have to listen to the carriers, but only up to the point, that you know what will anger them the most - and then do only that. So it is not enough to find that the resellers are in boycott today. That is only step one. Then you have to listen to them so you can anger them more - so you find out they hate Dual SIM phones. So you can then tell them that yes, you'll release dual SIM phones. Tell them you'll give them West Coast designed phones like the Kin and the Razr and the Palm. And listen to them to find out what they hate more than you. When you discover that they hate something even more than the combination of Microsoft and Nokia, then go and embrace that additional part - Skype, insisting it will be integral to all Microsoft based Nokia phones.

There is the overwhelming logic of the Microsoft Muppet Bullshit Academy, by which if you find something is so hated by the shareholders that they punish you with a declining market share, the correct response is of course to do even more of that. This is where Dick Cheney went astray and didn't follow through. He didn't 'stay the course'. He was the surrender-monkey who didn't 'surge'. Its not enough that you go hunting with your friend, take a shotgun and shoot your friend.. in the face, the true Microsoft Muppet way is then not to apologize, but to reload, and shoot again.. your friend.. in the face.. and repeat, and repeat. This is the MMBA way.

This is how Stephen Elop has run Nokia. February. Burning Platforms (utter lies) Bam! Reload. Will end Symbian and go Microsoft. Bam. Reload. Will not do MeeGo. Bam. Reload. Kill migration path for developer community. Bam. Reload. Carriers in sales boycott. Fine. I'll do Dual SIM. Bam. Reload. Didn't like that? Fine. We'll do Skype also. Double-barrel Bam! Reload. What? Now you have Microsoft WP7 also in boycott? No problem. We will still do WP7, with Skype, even with the boycott. Bam. Reload. And the N9 is a hit phone? Won't be long. Let me show you the new WP7 phone, please you tech bloggers, don't go showing pictures of it, eh? Bam. Reload. MeeGo still desirable? Go ahead punk. Do you feel lucky? You want MeeGo? I'll show you 'mee-go' here: Bam! Reload. You want the N9 with MeeGo in a major Nokia market like the UK or Germany or India or Brazil. I won't give it to youBam! . Reload. Most of the countries where it will be sold will be teeny-weeny lilliput countries so it can't achieve big sales. Bam. Reload. And if by some chance, the N9 is still a hit phone, I won't release more MeeGo phones anyway. Bam. Reload. Bam. Reload. Share price crashing? No problem. I'll now slash Nokia smartphone prices 15%. Bam. Reload

(I worry what comes tomorrow. I mean. 15% price cut? This IS what got OPK fired by the Board. How utterly incompetent a fool is he, Stephen Elop the Microsoft Muppet)

Nokia Board! Time to fire Stephen Elop. He is singlehandedly destroying your company. You are incompetent Board Members if you let him continue destroying the company like this. It is clear Stephen Elop will face a lawsuit for deliberate, wanton destruction of Nokia value. Soon you, Board Members, if you don't act fast, are also going to be sued for incompetence for letting Elop ruin your company. Do not wait anymore! Fire him now! Time to act is NOW!

Bloodbath update: Smartphone market at end of June (before the Q2 results)

Lets do some Bloodbath news. How is the smartphone market doing mid-way in this Year 2 of Smartphones, the Electric Boogaloo? The weather report for the summer is sunny for some, shady for others and stormy for some. Lets start with the two who already reported.

RIM IN TURMOIL

Blackberry maker RIM reported Q2 results first. As we saw on his blog, that was the first quarter for ages that RIM reported a real units decline in smartphone sales (not just a decline in market share, which RIM had reported for several quarters while still growing total unit sales). RIM sales hit 13.3 million units, down from 14.5 million in the previous quarter. The market share for RIM is down to 13%. Now the staff at RIM is panicking, seeing what happens over at Nokia, and feeling that the management is not focusing on the right problems. An open letter by an anonymous employee has attracted a lot of attention by the industry. Meanwhile there is now speculation if and when RIM will fall behind HTC in total smartphone sales (it is taken as a given that Samsung has now passed RIM already). Well, we have the actual reported Q2 numbers from HTC, so lets see.

HTC GROWING STEADILY

So, the biggest Android manufacturer, HTC keeps growing. They just reported Q2 numbers at 11.0 million smartphones sold. That is a strong growth of 13% from Q1 when they sold 9.7 million smartphones. HTC has picked up another market share point and now their market share in Q2 is 11%. But clearly they did not catch up to RIM yet. If these trends hold, they would be neck-to-neck by Q3 and HTC should pass RIM by Q4. That is assuming that RIM cannot turn around their sales during the autumn sales (going-to-school quarter in Q3, youth sales of Blackberries, etc)

HTC gives us an very interesting glimpse into their split of handsets by operating system. They said that in Q1 HTC sold 9.3 million Android-based smartphones (ie smartphones of the HTC 'Sense' series). Why is that interesting? Because the total HTC smartphone shipments of Q1 were 9.7 million. So 'all other' smartphone platforms - Windows Mobile and Microsoft Windows Phone 7 - combined - sold for Microsoft's strongest partner, HTC - a total of 400,000 units. Thats nothing! So smartphones made by HTC, sold by HTC and running Microsoft's two operating systems, sell so poorly that HTC's own Android based phones outsell them by 23 to 1 - this is exactly why HTC had such a disappointing quarter in Q1, and why they said they will shift their emphasis away from both Microsoft operating systems to Android. 

And to show they know how to do cool funky future tech phones, HTC is now showing their newest model that has 3D display and dual cameras for stereoscopy 3D capture. Similar to what Sharp first did out of Japan and LG has been starting to sell this Spring. So HTC is the third smartphone maker with 3D displays and 3D cameras.

APPLE RUMORS

Apple didn't give us a new iPhone 5 for June. Its delay is rumored to be because Apple designed the iPhone 5 to have a virtual SIM card, and the operators/carriers were having none of that. So Apple redesigned the iPhone 5 to have a micro SIM card and this redesign caused the delay to around September. Its all rumors, but we do know that Apple submitted to ETSI the standardizing body for such things in mobile telecoms as SIM cards, a new specification micro SIM in May for which Apple got Orange of the UK to support it (necessary to get the specification to be considered).

We have no official word when the iPhone 5 (or whatever the next iPhone will be called) will be released but Apple analysts expect late September launch to help boost Q3 sales, then offer strong iPhone sales for a strong Christmas quarter. There is growing speculation that Apple will split the iPhone into two products, a premium iPhone like the ones we have had, that is a showcase of Apple excellence at roughly the 600 dollar unsubsidised price range; and a cheaper iPhone 'Nano' with smaller form factor and more modest tech specs, to sell at roughly half the price, for the entry level model and intended in particular to help Apple sell in the Emerging World markets. (Regular readers remember I have been advocating Apple to do exactly that for more than a year now, its high time!). Those who estimate iPhone sales seem to be converging on a Q2 sales level of about 16-17 million iPhone units, thus about 16%-17% market share if that happens. We will know later in July when Apple reports.

SAMSUNG STRONG

So we then hear from the raging bull of the smartphone market, Samsung. Samsung seems to be giving the industry nothing but news of big successes. The latest is that their newest model of the Galaxy, the Galaxy S2, has set a Samsung record for fastest sales of a new Samsung model ever. The previous Samsung record was with the Galaxy S which sold 3 million in 85 days. Samsung is now performing better than the best Nokia could do who did 4 million with the Nokia N8 in Q4 of last year (3 million in 55 days is the speed of about 4.5 million over 3 months). But the grand master is still Apple, the iPhone 4 sold 3 million units in only 30 days. But Samsung is catching up and growing by leaps and bounds. Oh, and as usual, the newest phones don't launch in the USA, Samsung's Galaxy S2 is coming to American shores... 'later' this year (maybe).

Meanwhile I am still hunting for those elusive bada shipment numbers. My projections say they should have passed 10 million bada devices sold already, but Samsung has not released the number. Is bada not selling as well as we expect, or are Samsung waiting to surprise us with a massive number at their next quarterly results later in July. We have to see.

And while I projected that Apple has grown past Nokia for Q2, Nomura analysts have calculated that Samsung has passed Nokia in Q2. It suggests its a close three-way race who is first, second and third. My gut says Apple is still ahead of Samsung in Q2, but yes, Nokia may well have fallen behind both. Then the big race is for Q3 and as Samsung is in a strong growth trajectory, it is up to Apple, can they release the iPhone 5 in the final week of Q3 to jump their sales. It will be interesting times.

NOKIA KILLS MEEGO AGAIN, AND AGAIN, AND AGAIN

So, Nokia had its biggest buzz and positive press reaction to the MeeGo powered N9 smartphone that Nokia had seen for years. It was a massive positive story for Nokia. Even the stock market loved the story and Nokia's share price got a jump. MeeGo was slick and sexy, the N9 was a hot phone with excellent specs. Any CEO who loves his company would celebrate and cherish the moment and do his best to promote and prolong that success. But not Stephen Elop. No. What did he do. He immediately moved to quash any possible good will that the N9 and MeeGo were generating. He first 'revealed' the first look of a Microsoft Windows Phone 7 based phone - which looked to most analysts identical to the N9 except for one mysterious button. And he did it in a most clumsy way telling a packed audience "don't show these pictures" while at least two news outlets were videotaping his presentation. The stock market rewarded Stephen Elop's new Microsoft Phone 7 based Nokia phone preview with a share market decline. He stole all the thunder and bizarrely for a CEO, he actually stiffled a stock market rally. What is wrong with this guy Elop? Who does he work for? He certainly doesn't seem to be working for Nokia.

If thats not enough to help kill Nokia N9 and MeeGo, Elop went in public to say that "even if the N9 and MeeGo were a success, there will be no more MeeGo devices". What? Even if this totally new Nokia product is a market success, the CEO will kill it. Thats a very special kind of love, isn't that. Its not euthanasia, which one might argue, Stephen Elop was doing for Symbian. (Euthanasia is a mercy killing of someone who is already dying). No, its pure murder what Elop is now committing to MeeGo.

And to be absolutely sure, that MeeGo has zero chance of even a 'fair fight' - Nokia has since kindly announced to us which markets will get MeeGo. The N9 will not be launched in.. the UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain and the Netherlands (and several other major Nokia markets). Thats the 'big six' Western European markers where most of European smartphones are sold! Not a one of them gets to play with MeeGo, none of them get to buy the N9 ! This is Nokia's way of killing Me softly with Microsoft, killing Me softly, with Microsoft, killing Me softly, thats Elop! And by weird coincidence, have a guess what are the six European countries that will be the launch markets for the new Microsoft WP7 phones? Yes, the UK, Germany, France, ITaly, Spain and the Netherlands! Is Elop really this afraid of MeeGo? He has to sterilize Western Europe against MeeGo, keep it pure, so its not 'polluted' by the better OS that Nokia's own designers created, so that Europe would be willing to buy Microsoft's OS. Who is Elop working for? This is not in Nokia's interest, this is a CEO who is working for the best interests of a rival corporation! Elop is not looking after Nokia's best interests, he is looking after Microsoft's best interests.

UPDATE only 2 hours later - as I was posting this blog, news emerged that Nokia has cut its prices across the whole range of its smartphones, as high as 15% at the top end - the top end - of its smartphones. Nokia is already at about zero profit or making a loss in Q2 which ended June 30. Now for the start of July we hear that Nokia cuts the prices of its biggest source of any remaining profits - top end smartphones by a sixth! That is massive. It means Nokia is STARTING the race into Q3 with far deeper losses already. The reseller boycott is really hurting Nokia and now its obsitnacne to not even release the much-loved N9 into those markets that refuse to sell Symbian only shows that the CEO prefers to damage Nokia than let a Nokia-built hit product help rescue the company. Stephen Elop is destroying Nokia as we speak. This price cut across the board now by Stephen Elop is EXACTLY what got Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo fired last summer! What madness in Nokia management and the Board of Directors allowed this Microsoft Muppet to REPEAT a FAILURE that almost destroyed Nokia just LAST YEAR... Duh? What part am I not understanding in this?

MOTO, SE - NOTHING NEW ON THE WESTERN FRONT

In the Motorola and SonyEricsson corner, I find nothing remarkable to report for now. We await their quarterly results.

HUAWEI, ZTE CHINA GROWING

But in the Asian corner, Huawei the Chinese telecoms manufacturer better known for its infrastructure gains, is reporting strong growth of its smarpthones. They say they are on pace to do 12 million smartphones sales this year, which would put them at about 3 million level for Q2. They would soon be nipping on the heels of say a Motorola.

And Chinese rival ZTE more known for handsets but also selling infrastructure is not to be left behind. They just celebrated their 2 millionth Blade smatphone, a touch screen Android device.

I'd like to hear how the LePhone is doing from Lenovo. After a noisy launch the smartphone whose name is translated as 'Happy Phone' in Chinese, is not really giving Lenovo the sales success we were expecting. It seems its not that easy for PC makers to transition into handset makers haha...

HP WANTS TO LICENSE PALM WEB OS

So in the PC corner, HP is still showing nothing significant out of its Palm acquisition. A couple of handsets have been announced, nothing spectacular happenin' anywhere. Now we hear from HP that they are eager to licence the Palm WebOS to third party manufacturers. I can see this would be to HP's interest yes, to build a bigger ecosystem etc. But I can't see the benefit for any handset maker to go with this miniscule and unproven OS. If you want to go wtih a manufacturer who also makes their own phones, then going with bada will get you instantly what, a 10x bigger market and app store and installed base. And if you want to go with a new OS that is not controlled by a handset maker, then go with Intel and MeeGo, where three dozen device manufacturers are already signed up and half a dozen devices are already available (mostly tablet PCs but obviously Nokia will have two MeeGo devices this year).

ANDROID MASSIVE

So we hear the latest numbers from Google and in June Android passed the 500,000 daily activations level. Thats an annual level of 183 million, and on a quarterly level it means that at the end of June Android was activating at the level of 46 million devices per quarter. That is not Android's actual performance in Q2 for two reasons - first, it includes the tablets, so smarpthones will probably be a million or two below that - and secondly, its the performance at the end of the quarter, when it was far less at the beginning of the quarter. Nonetheless, Android is clearly the biggest OS out there and still growing very strongly.

SYMBIAN BOYCOTT

Then in the Symbian corner, we hear that the sales channel is boycotting all Symbian phones. In many stores the carriers have pulled all Nokia phones off the shelves. Nokia is releasing several cool hot new phones and most carriers are actively ignoring these, because they are on the Symbian OS. Stephen Elop initially said that Nokia would commit to 150 million more Symbian phones, which meant Symbian sales would end in the summer of 2012. Now Elop is talking of far extending Symbian's 'life' (for what that is) and is talking of Nokia supporting Symbian to year 2016. Its far too little, Mr Elop, and far too late. You killed Symbian on February 11 and you cannot bring it back alive.

MICROSOFT ALSO IN BOYCOTT

The more interesting twist to the tale is the sudden Microsoft boycott. This was already reported by severeal US newspaper who surveyed US resellers (Microsoft's best market) and found that there were no Microsoft phones, or the only phone on exhibit was a broken phone; and that sales staff were very actively steering customers who asked for Microsoft phones, to buy Android. Why is this? Its like I said when we learned of Microsoft buying Skype - this is the death-nail to Microsoft Windows Phone 7. The mobile operators/carriers hate Skype with a passion. Its their number 1 hated service and brand. The carriers witnessed how utterly Skype devastated the traffic, revenues and profits of the fixed landline cousins in telecoms operators/carriers. The wireless carriers/mobile operators will not allow Skype to come and mess up their nice little voice-calls based playground. And immediately after Microsoft bought Skype, the carriers placed Microsoft based smartphones in boycott. I predict that there will be no subsidised Microsoft WP7 based phones ever. The carriers will never support Microsoft becasue Microsoft bought Skype. And thus, the smartphone operating system which is most guaranteed to fail - is Windows Phone 7. It is destined to fail not because the OS is good or bad, not because the ecosystem is good or bad, not because the handsets are good or bad - its because the carriers hate Skype.

PS look at the biggest (and longest serving) Microsoft smartphone manufacturer, HTC, is doing. They are shifting their Microsoft-based phone manufacturing away, and onto... Android. This is the biggest Microsoft partner, actively shifting away from Microsoft to Android.

Even the news from Microsoft's home market is dismal. The latest Nielsen survey tells us that even now, a year after Microsoft Windows Phone was launched, it lags the older sibling from Microsoft, Windows Mobile by a ratio of 9 to 1! Even that 'obsolete' Symbian is in twice as many pockets in America as Microsoft's mighty Windows Phone, according to Nielsen. Even the near-invisible HP owned new Palm Web OS has achieved twice the penetration than Windows Phone, and Microsoft's miracle OS can only match that of the older Palm OS, at one percent penetration - in the USA, Microsoft's best market! That is evidence that the market is truly rejecting your offering on a massive scale. In new phone sales, Nielsen says exactly the same, Microsoft, for all its amazing branding and marketing, has managed in Q2 to sell... 1% of all new US cellphones. That is miserable.

MEEGO

And Intel, after Nokia pulled away from MeeGo partnership, is working double-time to ensure MeeGo is viable and will survive. They've had several netbooks released on the MeeGo operating system and have heard from reassured partners that they will remain with MeeGo. There are over 3 dozen manufacturers committed to MeeGo (mostly car makers, home electronics and PC makers) but also at least 4 handset makers - ZTE, Huawei, LG and Panasonic. And probably the most significant partner in the MeeGo ecosystem is China Mobile, the world's biggest mobile operator/carrier which alone is about twice as big as all USA based mobile phone operators/carriers added together. So when China Mobile says their preferred smartphone OS is MeeGo, they can very well dictate that to be the OS on all smartphones that China Mobile would support in its marketing and its stores and its campaigns. Still, the buzz around the N9 and the very warm reception that MeeGo got, has come as a very welcome boost to the rough year that MeeGo is having. MeeGo is the youngest and newest OS for a good reason - it can therefore also be the best. But is it coming too late. Time will tell. If Nokia had bothered to support MeeGo, it would instantly be one of the big platforms, especially after Nokia built the migration path for the 400,000 strong Symbian developer community to develop apps for both Symbian and MeeGo using the Qt tool.

JAPAN

I want to also include a few highlights from a couple of national markets. After Stephen Elop killed Symbian on February 11, Japan's NTT DoCoMo, which has been the biggest and most loyal partner to support Nokia, immediately moved away decisively from Symbian and onto.. Android of course. We hear now that for Q2 in Japan, Android has passed past the iPhone. Same phenomenon as we saw in the USA a year ago. It is inevitable (that Android will grow past the iPhone) because of Android's 'army' of suppliers. And consider how crazy the Symbian death was - this was a closed market, where several million Symbian handsets were sold every quarter regularly as clockwork by makers such as Sharp and Fujitsu etc. Now they are shifting to Android.

INDIA

In the India market, Voice & Data the market analysts calculated that the total India handset market (not smartphones but all phones) grew 15% in the past year. They measure by revenue not by unit sales but the findings are still indicative of what is happening in the Emerging World markets. Voice & Data report that Nokia sales are flat, ie Nokia was not able to grow where the industry grew (so in effect, Nokia has witnessed a one sixth loss in market share in one year). Nokia which has owned as high as 70% of India's market share is now down to 39%. Samsung is gaining, and grew by 22% to reach a market share of 17%. Domestic Indian brand Micromax is in third place, and grew 43% in the past year to 7% market share. And the astonishing performer in India is Blackberry where all other bigger rivals mostly sell dumbphones, Blackberries are very expensive smartphones, yet grabbed 6% of the market in India. But please remember, this measurement is not by unit sales, it is by dollar sales revenues, so of course a few unit sales of expensive Blackberries will count the same as many sales of cheap Micromax 'dumbphones'. Nonetheless, by revenues, RIM is India's fourth-best-selling handset. Quite an achievement in the world's second largest handset market.

USA

Lets get back to the Nielsen Q2 study of the US domestic market. They found that Q2 was the first quarter where more smartphones were sold than dumbphones, and for the installed base in the USA, already 38% of all phones in use were smartphones. These are trends that follow leading Western European countries, which themselves follow leading global countries in smartphone adoption like Singapore, UAE and Saudi Arabia. Those three countries have passed the point where more than 3 out of every 4 phones sold is a smartphone already..

But yes, in America.. Nielsen reports that Android has 38% of the US domestic smartphone market. The iPhone is ranked number 2 at 27%. Blackberries are at 21% - but remember, Nielsen measures domestic users not business users so Blackberry's total penetration rate is higher than this. Windows Mobile the old and defunct Microsoft OS has 9%. Symbian has 2%, HP's WebOS (the new Palm OS) has 2% and the old Palm OS has 1%. Oh, and Microsoft's new Windows Phone OS has .. 1%.

THATS IT FOR NOW

We await the results of the most unpredictable quarter ever in smartphones, as Nokia crashes and burns after Stephen Elop set his company's strong platforms on fire. In Q1 we only got a partial impact of that fire, now we have the first full results. Will Nokia land at 14% or 13% or 12% market share in Q2? Who knows. It was 29% in Q4, the last full quarter before Stephen Elop made his big announcement to kill Symbian and abandon MeeGo,

What of Apple. The iPhone had its China effect in Q1 but now for the first time in years, there is no new iPhone for the end of June. But the iPhone had spread from AT&T to Verizon, and Apple released the White iPhone (said to be very popular in China for example). How did Apple do in Q2. We have to wait to see. And we know Android grew strong but how did the Android members fare? We heard from HTC but how about Samsung, LG, SonyEricsson and Motorola. We'll know during July. And yes, Microsoft? What kind of numbers do we hear from Redmond. Will they even dare to release the Windows Phone sales numbers or will they attempt to hide the numbers. This will be an interesting month to report whats happenin' in the smartphones space. Stay tuned.

Future of Mobile Money? Yeah. Mobile Will Kill Cash. See my video from Belgrade Telenor event

I had the great pleasure to do the keynote presentation at the Telenor Platimo event in Belgrade with my good friends from Halcom the mobile money specialists. Even better, it was recorded on video and is my latest top-line view of the future of money. This is what many digital money conferences have seen recently from me, ie 'What if Money Had a Screen, If Money Remembered, if Money Could Talk' etc.

You may enjoy the video (its in English) and see the latest cool examples and stats and innovations in the mobile money space from our fave stories here on this blog like M-Pesa out of Kenya and Swedish Busses and German m-Stamps etc. The link is here [Tomi on video about Future of Money]