Even All About Symbian reckons there's a problem, Nokia
Ewan Spence has posted an opinion piece on the always respected All About Symbian titled, “Is PR more important than specs for the smartphone ecosystem?”
He goes on to discuss the reality that whilst Nokia are in the process of delivering against their stated targets, the company needs to give serious attention to the broad message and get stuck in to begin setting the agenda rather than responding.
I particularly liked this section:
Let’s take a few examples from the recent news – all of which are cases that directly affect a product, but have very little to do with the mechanics of what is going on.
Gartner first, and a blog post (with a lovely link-bait headline) from Nick Jones on the fortunes of Symbian going forward over the next few years. The argument is a well worn one on both sides – the delay in getting Symbian^4 and the new UI into the hands of the consumers (and the analysts!) and the loss of market share during this lull – and I’m not going to go into that now. What I wanted to draw attention to was that this article damages the perception of Symbian and needs to be countered. Actually not even countered, Symbian’s point of view should already be out there and a robust rebuttal needs to be delivered.
People will not buy a dying system – it’s not cool. They will buy a system that promises the future. Deep in the story of Symbian is the path the future will take, but is it front and centre and easy to see so that people will buy into it? Apparently not.
Spence finishes with this point:
Vanjoki [the top guy at Nokia’s Mobile Solutions] has the hardest challenge of his life. To make people want to buy Nokia again. He can’t do that just from having the best hardware. He has to make Nokia’s name attractive again, he has to make it cool to like the Finns (again), he has to go on the offensive. And there are no half measures, he needs 100% commitment to win back the cool points.
Read the full post here.
Nice write-up Mr Spence. I trust we’ll see some movement soon.
