I’ve published quite a lot today on Nokia. We’ve had Tomi Ahonen’s extensive piece then the Risku Manifesto post. And now, I thought I’d tie it together with this superb example of American mobile policy that totally excludes Nokia completely.
Tricia Duryee over at mocoNews reports on AOL’s VP of Mobile (“Ex-Palm VP Says It’s A Two-Horse Race Between Android And iPhone“) making it clear that since they’re ‘in the eyeball business’ it’s all about iPhone or Android.
Have a read of this quote:
As Palm’s VP of developer platform, part of David Temkin’s job was to build out the app catalog. But now as VP of mobile at AOL (NYSE: AOL), his focus is on Android and iPhone. “We are in a eyeball business. To the extent that Palm or Microsoft turns it around, we’ll pay more attention to it. It’s a two-horse race.”
Today, AOL is launching two apps for the Android, including an AOL portal and a stock-tracking site called DailyFinance. It also modernized its mobile site from being accessible on feature phones to being more multimedia heavy using HTML5. The AOL portal is the first app that’s launched on Android first before iPhone.
It’s breathtaking, of course. No mention of Qualcomm/Brew. No mention of BlackBerry although AOL do develop for the platform.
Tricia finishes the post with this statement:
Temkin declined to discuss how much of an investment AOL was making in the area, but said: “We are investing and hiring aggressively and trying to up our game, specifically in smartphones and on the iPad.”
‘Smartphones’ of course — as we’ve already seen — means iPhone and Android. Nothing else.
Which becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Obviously there’s next to no decent Nokia phones in the United States for AOL to be focusing on so, the strategy of focusing on iPhone (easy, the senior executives like it) and Android (a growing presence) makes (some) sense since the company is, I imagine, only interested in America’s 200-300m consumers.
There’s no point AOL developing for Nokia.
Nokia is nowhere in America.
So AOL doesn’t think about Nokia.
So when their executives speak, they talk iPhone and they talk Android. (And sometimes RIM).
But they never, ever talk Nokia.
Nokia is laughed out of the room as a genuine irrelevance.
The problem with is is — as we’ve oft commented here at Mobile Industry Review — the rest of the planet generally pays attention to what America thinks and does, especially in the West. And the pervasive view (‘Nokia is haemorrhaging market share against the iPhone’ — entirely false, by the way) becomes the accepted one.
So Nokia is nowhere.
So in the UK, where Nokia has a phenomenal smartphone presence, Nokia is nowhere to be seen in terms of development. Why? Because it’s iPhone and Android man. Even the guy at AOL says so. (Which quickly gets distilled into ‘Everyone says so’ and ‘received wisdom’).
So when you unwrap your new N8, that’s why there will be next to nothing decent available for it.
Anyway, I wanted to document this because it’s a good example for when utterly, utterly stupid Nokia executives tell me otherwise, I can look this post up quickly.
You can check-out AOL’s mobile site here: http://mobile.aol.com/
(Found this via David Wood’s tweet)