Engineer's Finance

I always thought that Nokia had interests in Symbian. Not a single soul would have predicted the Nokia’s smartest move in the decade i.e. Acquiring Symbian and making it OPEN. This is an open challenge to all the Mobile OS Companies to face the GIANT NOKIA. This may not be a very bad move for the OEMs because they all will be benefited with this path breaking move.

I always feel that No one does anything without self interests not even charity. People do charity to please themselves. There has to be some motives for Nokia to make such a drastic move. I am sure many would agree with this. But still not many ponder about it, since it does not fetch anything to them until unless you are an analyst. So basically everything happens with a motive. I love blogging hence this entry in my BLOG(my motive).

So why does Nokia acquire Symbian and make it free? How can one share the goodies with the competitors? (I believe in Live and Let Live) This is a ridiculous move then to most of them, since Nokia is wasting money on acquiring Symbian and losing money on licenses of S60 UI.
Still Nokia says it is going to do what it intends to do. There has to be something.

What I feel is this.
Nokia realized that being the world leader in the Smart phones and Mobile phones is not that big a deal since the margins in phone manufacturing is becoming drastically less day by day. So what better ways are there to ensure they can sustain in market and lead the pack? It is content and only content can be the next hottest happening thing in the mobile world and Nokia does not want to be left out. It has decided to hit the nail right on the head and I think it is perfectly a great move.

Wondering how this might happen?
First thing since mobile world has different flavors of OS, a need for unifying the OS platform and UI was needed. Nokia acquired Symbian and convinced Sony Ericsson and Motorola to provide the UIQ and NTT Docomo to provide the MOAP. Now we have one tested OS and three great UIs. Nokia achieved the Unification. If a developer develops an app to a smart phone he had to do either a native symbian app or two different versions to get S60 and UIQ customers, Third party developers can’t develop MOAP applications. Since MOAP is locked with NTT Docomo.
The situation changes now, the same developer develops just one app and he gets loads of customers (S60, UIQ, MOAP). The best part is, he gets even the MOAP customers which I feel is the greatest advantage. Since I feel Japan is only the place where smart phones are used the way it has to be used. So the developer gets the best of customers and he makes huge money. This is fine, but where does Nokia come into picture? Here comes Nokia, their intension is to ensure that Symbian becomes the most widely used software in the world with one mixed UI (S60, UIQ and MOAP). All crazy applications will be developed with this great platform and since it is open source I am sure even the developers will get free tools to develop the apps and great support to them. Since great applications are present for Symbian phones, people will start buying Symbian OS related phones from various Vendors. While this is happening, Nokia will start pushing their services to their devices and all the devices that run on Converged Platform. So even if people are not buying Nokia Phones they will generate revenue since they will get customers because of the Converged Platform. Now it will become very simple for them to distribute the services and it will work like gem. Once this happens I am sure that Nokia’s cash registers will be ringing with dollars, pounds, euros and yen of course!!

I am sure you will be thinking I am just saying things with my imagination..
If so, here is my answer to you guys.. Just visit these sites.

http://mosh.nokia.com/
http://www.ovi.com/ovi/app/ovi/web/index/
http://musicstore.nokia.com/
http://share.ovi.com/
http://europe.nokia.com/A4509271
http://www.n-gage.com/

Now why should Nokia spend so much money on these??? Does it make any sense?? For some days it was not making a great sense..

After acquiring Symbian and convincing others to provide UI’s to make a Converged Platform makes perfect sense to me. The bigger picture is that Nokia wants to become the next Microsoft or Google and if everything falls as per my prediction then trust me Nokia is THE next Big thing on earth and I am sure this can happen since Nokia is gaining ground around the world and it is one of the well known brands. And to iterate this, Nokia is enjoying the title of being THE Most Trusted Brand in India for the year 2008..

Get back tomorrow, we will get back to our life!!