Mobile phone manufacturer Nokia has in this week, advocated their staff to take in their stride, a sense of “radical change” in a bid to avoid being engulfed by “burning flames” for which they have amalgamated with Microsoft to fight the big players like Google and Apple.
Nokia confirmed on Friday that they would soon integrate the Windows Phone OS (operating system) as their only software platform. This would be done for all their upcoming smartphones which is essentially a part of their “broad strategic partnership”.
As the new chief executive of Nokia, Stephen Elop was hired for the purpose of redefining the leadership qualities that was once exuberated by Nokia and stabilise its position at the top once again to which he said, “It's now a three-horse race.”
Nokia has been incurring a smaller share of the pie as they are loosing the rewarding smartphone market share to Apple’s iPhone and other phones instilling the usage of Google’s Android OS. The Android emerged as the winner as against the others in the last quarter.
The Windows Phone OS by Microsoft is considered as a pioneering technological feat by many industry critics. However, does lack the ‘acclaiming’ factor from the user’s perspective. Nonetheless, it does take a step back on the appeal factor from a users angle.
Under this umbrella of the merger, Nokia seeks to attain from the Windows Phone OS, innovative technologies being implemented for the usage of areas such as imaging where it still holds on to its position as leader.
Onto other features then, Microsoft’s Bing would be the fuelling factor for Nokia’s search services across a plethora of Nokia devices while Nokia Maps would remain as the significant part of Microsoft’s mapping services. To further quantify, development tools created by digital broadcaster Microsoft are going to be integrated to craft applications that could run on the Nokia Windows Phone OS.
Steven Ballmer, chief executive of Microsoft, said: "The partnership announced today provides incredible scale, vast expertise in hardware and software innovation and a proven ability to execute."
Geoff Blaber, of CCS Insight, said: "This is a partnership born out of both parties' fear of marginalisation at the hands of Apple and Google but there is no silver bullet. This is a very frank admission that Nokia's platform strategy has failed and underlines the seriousness of Nokia's position. Such a move would have been unthinkable just 12 months ago."
And to add to the criticism, Mr. Elop, who is the first non-Finn to lead the company, compared Nokia earlier this week to a man standing on a “burning platform” being forced to decide whether to stand still and be “consumed by the burning flames” or jump into “freezing waters”.
He further added, “We are standing on a burning platform. We have more than one explosion - we have multiple points of scorching heat that are fuelling a blazing fire around us. There is intense heat coming from our competitors, more rapidly than we ever expected. While competitors poured flames on our market share, what happened at Nokia? We fell behind, we missed big trends, and we lost time”.
And in a recent blog post which was leaked onto US technology website Engadget, Mr. Elop was heard saying it was “unbelievable” that Nokia still has not produced a smartphone to challenge the iPhone that was introduced in the market in 2007.
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