MobiThinking has great article interviewing me on many of today's hot topics

As I've been travelling heavily and mostly in regions of world where internet is very slow and unreliable (have a guess which continent haha) - I am somewhat behind on my blogging. But for regular readers maybe hungry for some of my thoughts, this is an excellent interview by MobiThinking that asked my views on many of today's hot topics from OTT messaging wars to wearables to Augmented Reality. 

 

http://mobithinking.com/future-of-mobile-interview-Tomi-Ahonen

 

(the story has excellent links to many companies and stats etc that I mentioned - thanks MobiThinking for doing the excellent legwork for any of your readers. And it includes mentions of many of my mobilista gurus such as Chetan Sharma, Osama Manzar, Dan Appelquist, Tony Fish, Peggy Anne Salz, Dave Birch, Madanmohan Rao, Russell Buckley, Martin Feldstein and Michael Becker.) 

 

Thank you MobiThinking!

Comments

[tontridge]

First Post ponkhead.
If your ponky and you know it ponk a ponk. ponk ponk.

[Broken Back]

Let us know if and when you ever tier of kissing/lapping your own hinder/frontal-parts.

[abdul muis]

@Tomi

http://www.kantarworldpanel.com/smartphone-os-market-share/

[baron99]

For all the WP apologists, ass kissers and astroturfers ...here is some more "hateful" news LOL!

http://bgr.com/2014/07/01/windows-phone-market-share-3/

Read some of the comments too. More and more people are laughing at the "wait for" strategy. Pretty funny.

...."Yes... Wait will WP7.5, no no, wait till WP8, no, we meant, wait till WP8.1... WP9, it's gonna be the winner, wait for that one."

[baron99]

An FYI, more of the same :

http://www.thestreet.com/story/12763746/1/microsoft-is-losing-market-share-it-cant-afford-to-lose.html

In further news, It also looks like the Surface mini is DOA ...too bad they cancelled, microsoft lost an opportunity to throw even more money away

http://wallstcheatsheet.com/technology/did-apples-rumored-iphone-6-phablet-kill-microsofts-surface-mini.html/?a=viewall

and

http://www.channelweb.co.uk/crn-uk/news/2353270/microsoft-mothballs-surface-mini-report

and, of course, after spending all that money on surface advertising they are looking at renaming it. Unfortunately, a turkey is still a turkey no matter what you call it

http://www.uswitch.com/mobiles/news/2014/06/microsoft_binning_surface_brand/

Conclusion: NO ONE WANTS A WINDOWS PHONE! ....and NO ONE WANTS A WINDOWS TABLET!

[Roniipa]

@Baron99

"...."Yes... Wait will WP7.5, no no, wait till WP8, no, we meant, wait till WP8.1... WP9, it's gonna be the winner, wait for that one.""

Isn't this just the same it was with Symbian? Wait for the new Symbian that's going to be released in 2008, wait wait for the Symbian with N97, wait for the Symbian with N8, that didn't do it, wait for Symbian Anna... I don't see any difference.

[baron99]

@Ronilpa. "Its for all the WP apologists, ass kissers and astroturfers": WP is irrelevant that's all. For more perspective:

http://www.liveside.net/2014/07/02/whats-the-future-of-windows-phone/

and the tablet ...going downhill too

http://wallstcheatsheet.com/technology/surface-pro-3-will-lose-out-to-amazon-kindle.html/?a=viewall

[RottenApple]

@Roniipa:

"I don't see any difference."

The difference is:

Symbian was the market leader that didn't have to fight against two overwhelmingly strong opponents.
And it's also obvious that the 'wait for...' strategy was no longer working once Apple and Android entered the playing field.

But you can't conquer a market from the bottom up if your products are constantly lagging.

[Roniipa]

@RottenApple

"Symbian was the market leader"

Symbian was the market leader in terms of unit sales, but Symbian also wasn't the market leader in terms of revenues. Which one of those is more important? For me it looks like revenues because that's how Tomi compares pretty much any business with mobile world. Even SMS is said to be huge because of the revenues. New services like WhatsApp can challenge SMS but when they are evaluated they can't match the revenues SMS is generating.

Why would it be different for mobile phones? From that point of view Symbian wasn't even close to being the market leader.

"that didn't have to fight against two overwhelmingly strong opponents."

While those two opponents weren't really overwhelmingly strong back in the days, for example January 2011, they were already very strong in terms of overall performance measured in revenues. Probably both of them were generating more revenues than Symbian did.

It looks like you are actually making the same point as I do. In January 2011 there were constant promises how the next version would make things so much better and make Symbian competitive again. At the same time the sales were focused on the low end as we can see from the ASP of the time. Maybe the ASP from 2011 is not comparable, but in 2010 the YoY ASP dropped every single quarter.

In conclusion both Symbian and WP were constantly promised to have those new versions and both had relatively low ASP compared to the average ASP of the two strong opponents. How was it exactly different from that point of view?

This is probably obvious but from my opinion WP is crap so no need to point that out.

[John Phamlore]

Nokia could not keep making the same kind of phones it was making because it stabbed its fab partner TI in the back way back in 2007 by deciding to outsource what had formerly been a core company asset, its wireless chipset. What Nokia's board failed to take into account is that TI will not stand to be number 2 in anything: If TI can't dominate, they'll leave a business, fast.

Here's the proof:

This article mentions that the Galaxy Nexus will never get an update to KitKat 4.4 because its SoC maker TI had exited the business completely.

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/06/nexus-program-manager-says-nexus-devices-cant-ever-go-away/

"As was speculated at the time, though, the decision was tied to Texas Instruments' exit from the consumer SoC market (TI's OMAP chip powered the Galaxy Nexus as well as other prominent Android-based hardware like the first Kindle Fires).

"It was a really extraordinary event," he [Google engineering director and Nexus program manager David Burke] said. "You had a silicon company exit the market, there was nobody left in the building to talk to.""

TI's decision to exit was not taken the day Elop joined Nokia. As I have documented, it was well known by 2009 that TI was going to leave that business.

The problem with the direction of this campaign to blame Elop is that the real tragedy is being obscured: Once again a Western company failed to keep investing in a historic strength and field of excellence and paid a horrendous price just a few years later. As the Germans have shown, the only way to survive against Asian competition is to retain excellence.

[baron99]

http://techcrunch.com/2014/07/03/windows-phones-market-share-in-the-united-states-isnt-growing/

You can read the article if you want ...the link says it all.

[abdul muis]

another JOKE from IDC
http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS24857114

[RottenApple]

@Abdul Muis:

Ha ha!
Yes, another year, same story.

And considering by what margin they continuously missed WP's market share I think we can safely assume now that it'll never grow again. :D

@John Phamlore:

Considering that you seem to be the only person in the world who sees a problem for Nokia in that TI-business, I think it can be safely ignored in the bigger scheme of things.

@Roniipa:

I think it's moot to discuss past failures of Nokia's management. But the fact remains: Nokia had 30+% market share, they had lots of satisfied customers who would have bought a Nokia phone again, (lack of) quality of their OS nonwithstanding, so by default they would have gotten some relevant market share with improved Symbian and MeeGo.
Where they would have gone from there is everyone's guess, but I'm certain they wouldn't have gone down the drain as they did with WP. Remember: They chose WP 'for the ecosystem'...

[Roniipa]

@RottenApple

Nokia had 30+% market share on unit sales, but on revenues it was probably something like 17-18%. Not that high when you really think about it. After all unit sales isn't really that good way to measure market performance. That makes it really hard to believe Nokia would have gotten some relevant market share by default. Why would it have been like that? People switching from Symbian to any other brand new platform just doesn't happen without losing some of the customers. The new platform is no longer the same as the old one.

WP was a definite failure but that doesn't prove that any other choice would have been even a moderate success by default.

[Fawning Tomi Sycophant]

One thing people seem to forget. The Xbox was extremely unpopular when it was first released. so much so that Microsoft was giving them away like banks used to give away toasters. So, however unfair (their advantage), they had enough of a money cushion to endure a protracted lack luster consumer response to it. Eventually it prevailed however, obviously.
That and the fact that Google has gone rogue, and has become a totalitarian, tracking, stalking, keyhole peeping nightmare, that sooner or later folks will either embrace as the new normal, or will rebel against, and seek any/all alternatives to will be key. Google made its best headway in mobile OS market share because they weren't the control freaks that is the Apple they have now become, with little difference between them. Their only saving grace over Apple was/is that very technically savvy users are able to opt out of Google's, now egregious, control freakery by using the AOSP core to reclaim their privacy and control. But as we're seeing, Google is slowly taking all that control back by making many of their core apps proprietary and forcing OEMs' to choose between producing AOSP devices OR Google Android devices but not both.
Don't fully discount Microsoft just yet. They (MS), Jolla, the new Blackberry, or even Firefox OS may eventually trump them because people (Due to Snowden's revelations)are getting a little tired of their phones being controlled by "ASSHOLE PSYCHOPATHS and SOCIOPATHS" who not only track and archive their every heartbeat, breath and move, but sell or give such to totalitarian "SCUMBAGS" who'll use the information to utterly control them.
As such, Microsoft still has a chance in this market, even with their low numbers at present... Any Questions?

[Huber]

@fts: And you honestly believe that MS and Apple do anything different with your data? Come on!

Also some people do not Seem to unterstand that Google had to move apps from AOSP to the play store to Make them available for customers not running the latest Android Version.

Have you forgotten the critics back then when everything was part of AOSP? People then complained that the latest versions of Maps etc. Was only available for Nexus devices and the newest flagships!

So no matter how Google does it, some people always will complain.

[AndThisWillBeToo]

@RottenApple
The impact of TI chipset discontinuation has been quite well reported in The Story Of Nokia MeeGo:
http://taskumuro.com/artikkelit/the-story-of-nokia-meego

although linking that article has been common reason why a comment is deleted here.

[RottenApple]

@Roniipa:

So, what are you trying to say? It seems to me, nothing! Yes, we all know, that Nokia's profit share was not as high as their market share. They still made good money, though, and they still had a large amount of loyal customers.

Their strategy should have been to convert that user base to their next generation of devices. And in clear terms that means: Offer something these people want!

Whether that should have been Android, Symbian or MeeGo I'll leave up for debate, but it should have been clear from the outset that Windows Phone 7 was just not good enough back in 2011. They should have done some market research to see how to proceed - and it's very clear they did not.

@FTS:

Nice piece of hate-FUD. I concur with Huber: What makes all the others so much better? Especially Microsoft with their 20+ year history of customer unfriendliness are probably the worst of the entire bunch.

As for Blackberry, Jolla and Firefox: None of these will ever enjoy some market success.
Blackberry's numbers look better than they are because some enterprises are still locked to BB7. BB10 alone would be quite a bit less. Jolla is a geek device with no chance of ever finding mainstream success. As for Firefox: Being HTML-only is certainly the right idea, but it's not the right time for that idea yet. So: Won't succeed.

@AndThisWillBeToo:

Yes, yes. I know that it happened and it may certainly have had some effect. But I simply do not believe that this one thing alone could have caused terminal problems for Nokia as a phone manufacturer.

[AndThisWillBeToo]

@RottenApple
I did not say it was causing terminal problems. But it seems we mostly agree here so... :)

[Roniipa]

@RottenApple

I wasn't talking about the profits. I'll repeat. In early 2011 Nokia probably had a smartphone market share of 17%-18% if the market share is checked from the revenues. That means that they wouldn't have been able to convert that market share of revenues into selling same unit sales of more expensive devices. Converting means selling on the same segment and on the same price range.

The biggest mistake Nokia did with WP was trying to replace the low end sales with high end devices. This can't happen. The same problem would have happened with MeeGo if Nokia would have tried to replace low end with high end MeeGo phones.

Anyway it's strange to see people saying how Nokia was the market leader when they clearly were not as far as revenues were concerned.

The biggest problem preventing MeeGo's success would have been the lack of low end devices. Without those it's very unlikely MeeGo would have been a considerably bigger success than WP. You simply can't make people switching from devices costing 100 to devices costing 500.