Dig a little deeper, and Nokia’s problems with its smartphone OS
strategy are evidently problems with software more generally. The
company fundamentally didn’t
get software, says Gleeson — so they
didn’t understand the crucial significance of apps and building an
ecosystem around apps. “Nokia has almost always produced high quality
hardware; but it was its software that was the weakness,” he
says. “Nokia vastly underestimated the importance of third-party
applications to the smartphone proposition. Each Symbian UI required its
own custom build of the OS which limited the addressable market of any
third-party apps.”
“Furthermore, Nokia had a blasé attitude towards compatibility of
apps; breaking backwards compatibility on OS upgrades on multiple
occasions e.g. S60 third edition, Windows Phone 8; and developing phones
incapable of using some games available for earlier devices
(e.g. Nokia 500, Lumia 610),” he adds. “Consumers are attracted to
smartphones for their ability to be more than just communication tools,
and so the lack of apps hinders adoption. One can simply look at the
lack of some key apps such as Spotify from Nokia’s latest flagship as a
continuation of this problem (Spotify is available on the Lumia 800 and
900 however).”
Nokia has almost always produced high quality hardware; but it was its software that was the weakness.
Gleeson argues that Nokia still hasn’t fixed its attitude to software — evident in the recent issues with the
schism between WP 7.5 and 8.
“This is an issue that Nokia has not fully addressed yet,” he says.
“While this may seem to be Microsoft’s problem now, Nokia were well
aware that there was going to be a break from WinPho 7.5 to 8.”
It’s not too surprising that a company that started life as a paper
mill, way back in the 1800s, might be more comfortable with physical,
tangible things, than digital stuff. But the problem for Nokia wasn’t
just that it was slow on the update where software was concerned, it was
also now competing with companies born and bred in the digital era –
with bits and bytes in their blood.
Nokia’s decision to open source Symbian in 2008 to try to compete with Android was of course
too little too late.
The platform itself was not competitive with next-gen rivals in the
ways that counted: It still put the phone function first, rather than
Internet-connected services. Regardless of how technically powerful
Symbian was – something die-hard Symbian fans will always point out (yes
it could have apps and ‘true’ multitasking) – there was no getting away
from the problem that it was legacy technology, built in and for an
earlier mobile era when phones were phones first, not pocket computers.
As Gartner analyst Carolina Milanesi puts it, Nokia was guilty of
“trying to fix Symbian for too long.” It was also too busy worrying
about not upsetting the apple cart of its current customers to start
making the disruptive changes needed to win future ones, she says. Or to
put it another way, Nokia was fiddling while its platform burned.