20 August 2007
Snobs in Silicon Valley claims:
Nokia Has A Serious Software Problems
 Nokia may sell a phone somewhere on this planet every 18 seconds, but among the digerati in the Valley, that doesn't get the Finnish handset giant much respect.
In the Valley, the natives are all toting iPhones and BlackBerrys and raving about new horizons on the mobile Web.
Eventually the iPhone bigots will get to you, as they did to David Rivas, a Nokia vice president in charge of its smart phone software efforts. "You're ignoring Japan, you're ignoring Korea.
The statement that somehow the Web has not been mobile until the iPhone is absurd and back to the point about parochialism," he told a room full of venture capitalists and software developers at a conference in July organized by tech blog impresario Michael Arrington.
"Wake up!" someone heckled from the back of the room as Rivas spoke. Arrington, the Valley's answer to Judge Judy, wasn't buying it either. "I believe that Nokia and Symbian [the software that powers its smart phones] are irrelevant companies at this point," he pronounced from the stage.
Quite a verdict, considering that Nokia sells close to half of all smart phones worldwide (and 40% of all phones) and has 9,200 applications written for its phones. In early July it plunked down $410 million to buy the portion of Symbian it didn't already own.
Nokia intends to give away Symbian's code to any handset company that cares to use it. It has already signed on Motorola , Sony Ericsson, NTT DoCoMo, Texas Instruments, Vodafone, Samsung, LG Electronics and AT&T. An estimated 18.5 million phones running Symbian shipped during the first quarter of 2008.
But will that be enough?
Nokia is a phenomenal manufacturer, distributor and marketer of hardware, but it has some serious software problems. It can give away all the Symbian code it wants, but that may not sway mobile carriers and the application developers in Silicon Valley (a loud and influential bunch) that Nokia phones are a better home than the iPhone or Research in Motion's BlackBerry.
The success of the iPhone and Apple's online mobile-software store has underscored this. Apple has sold more than 7 million iPhones in just over a year, and $30 million in programs from its App store in the first month it was open. Later this year, iPhone will start showing up in every Best Buy Mobile store, the kind of mass distribution Nokia lacks in the U.S.
Battle between web and mobile heats up as well and Nokia's main intention over the past two years or so has been the fundamental desire to reinvent itself and switch from being a handset vendor only to being an "Internet company".
CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo said few weeks ago"Our goal is to act less like a traditional manufacturer, and more like an internet company." "Companies such as Apple, Google, and Microsoft are not our traditional competitors, but they are major forces that must be reckoned with. Make no mistake: We are taking on these challenges seriously and aggressively."
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