Previously it was a race to get as many people to buy your phone as possible. Now the name of the game is to get as many people to register and use your software as possible – and if they happen to buy a phone as well that's perfect. How does the strategy work out? Let's find out.
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I wonder if governments ought to start setting up online service regulators, to prevent mischief.
Obviously some people think regulation is a bad idea, but if online services are going to become so important then they ought to be treated the same way other public utilities are such as gas suppliers, banks, electricity generators etc.
Privacy is already covered by some regulators, but there also has to be a certain level of legal guarantee that data won't simply disappear because the company didn't feel like storing it safely enough. (Ewan touched on this topic in a previous editorial.)
There's also the question of competition: what happens if an online service provider also owns the hardware the service runs on exclusively? What happens if a large online service provider puts pressure on hardware manufacturers to include new services? There are all sorts of scenarios where both manufacturers and service providers with high market share can abuse their position, and that ought to be guarded against.
Imagine if car companies controled petrol suppliers, and forced you to use one brand of fuel with one brand of car while hiking up the price, no one would accept that and it would probably lead to government intervention. We might be facing a similar situation with mobile devices and online services.
Ideally, no online service would be exclusive to a single manufacturer, people should be able to use multiple service providers on every device, and multiple devices with every service provider.
I think it's more than just the fact that Google has a large installed user-base. I think Nokia has come out with a lot of cool social applications -- but they only work on S60 phones. Latitude is cross-platform, and any of my friends who are interested can sign up for it -- whether they were originally Google users or not.
I believe that Nokia should stop coming out with these "social" apps (Ovi Contacts, FriendView, etc) and instead do whatever it can to encourage 3rd party developers to step in and meet that need - hopefully with more cross-platform apps like Latitude.
What Nokia needs to work more on is stuff like Ovi Sync and the Ovi suite for mac - applications that will help integrate the phone more seamlessly with the user's day-to-day life.
Ewan, I think the description of reusing the existing user-base is very valid here. Yet, nor mobileme (2-5m) nor ovi (1m) has any significant user numbers - especially compared to Google (50-100m).
This is where the biggest misunderstanding from Nokia (and Apple) is coming: you have to have people by the millions as your baseline. It's not a problem, that something only works with S60 or S40 (disagreeing with JosephG here 😊. It's the problem that you don't have active users, who are using at least one service. Share on Ovi, Music, Maps and N-gage will get Nokia nowhere in this process, only Sync (and Mail) will do.
The problem with manufacturers using third party service solutions is that it leaves the manufacturer nowhere to go in the future.
Nokia doing Ovi etc is partly because they want something for the company to do when phones are no longer profitable.
If you look at the average sale price of a mobile phone it's going down and down, I think it's currently something like 80 euros whereas ten years ago it would have been several hundred euros. In another ten years perhaps phones will sell for an average of 10 euros?
Before you say that sounds crazy, one of Nokia's upcoming basic models (the Nokia 1202) has a SIM-free price of 25 euros (plus taxes) so the industry is clearly heading in that direction. This isn't just the low end either, even the high end is getting cheaper. A year ago, who would have predicted the 5800 would be available SIM-free for 300 euros?
If phones do eventually cost 10 euros a pop, the profit margin is going to be tiny and the manufacturers won't be making much money per sale. That's why phone makers need to find something else to do instead. That's presumably what's driving Nokia, Apple and others to concentrate so heavily on services.
Even as a big Nokia-fan I seriously think that without the Symbian-third-party-apps Android would now be the phone..
With Symbian however.. the G1 lacks a lot of simple "features".. starting with built-quality..