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Nokia says the fightback starts now. Oh Really?

2010.Realization that iPhone is a threat from new dimensions (user experience). Planning begins on reshaping the software base as a market-driven (not technology-driven) asset (5 year cycle). Apple begins to be evaluated as a competitor in devices and services, although still not compliant with current market definitions.

via asymco | Assessing Nokia’s Competitive Response.

I wrote these words a year ago based on observations made three years ago.  My expectation was and still is that Nokia does not quite understand what they are competing for and what the competition actually consists of.

On Friday Anssi Vanjoki wrote that “The fightback starts now.” He seems to contradict my timeline which has the “fightback” starting in 2014.

How do we settle this?  Let’s turn to the claims:

In the article he says they sell 2 in 5 smartphones on the planet, yet, he turns around and says that Nokia is now the challenger in that space.  He says Symbian is the way forward on smartphones, yet he says MeeGo is the way forward on ‘connected devices’. He writes that he is obsessed with getting Nokia to being number one in high-end devices (presumably by volume or sales or profit) but a recent survey by third-party tool developer Appcelerator shows 90 percent of developers surveyed said they were interested in the iPhone while 81 percent expressed interest in Android; for Symbian and MeeGo, the related figures were only 15 percent and 11 percent, respectively.

I’m not ready to revise my timeline. The fightback begins in 2014.

Open always wins, unless it's Symbian or LiMo or Openmoko or Qt

In June 2008, Nokia made its first big move to turn around the platform, and announced that it was acquiring Symbian, with the intent of turning the OS into an open source project.

Two years later, the move to open source has proved to be a miscalculation that is slowing down Symbian’s development. It would be better for Nokia to take full control of the OS, according to Wood. A lack of support from other vendors means Nokia has to do most of the work itself, while the open nature of the platform allows competitors to keep a close eye on its progress.

via Nokia on long comeback trail after smartphone misses – Digital Lifestyle – Macworld UK.

Then there’s LiMo foundation open source mobile Linux. Maemo is/was open source, Openmoko and Qt Extended and PalmSource/Access moving to open source and there was the Motorola Linux OS that launched years ago. If Open always wins, whatever it wins, it’s not market share.