“Dark Star”

As a founder of Symbian, I’ve been thinking a lot about last week’s series of missteps from Nokia - the CEO’s letter about burning oil rigs that must have demotivated the entire company, then the announcement of their Microsoft deal that literally had the workforce walking out.

Symbian was Nokia’s hedge against commoditization of the user experience. In the late 90′s, the threat was Microsoft, today it’s Apple and Android. But unlike a strategy that actually dealt with the threat for a decade, Nokia’s strategy of an MS partnership cannot succeed. They are betting on overlaying services on a commodtized OS - but this is the very strategy that they have consistently failed at. No, if it has any market success with MS, it will be MS’s win not Nokia’s - the UI will belong to Redmond, and multiple hardware companies will be able to undermine any lead that Nokia might gain. And that is a best case scenario.

The event that triggered the Symbian strategy was David Potter waving his ticket to Redmond, telling the Psion executives “When a steam roller is heading for you, you get out the fucking way.” Unlike the Nokian executive team, the executive team at Psion didn’t except that lame strategy, and so we fought and won a better option.

Unfortunately, last week, Nokia’s CEO didn’t see any better alternative than jumping from his “burning oil rig.” Nokia went back to the steam roller, which was forgotten and rusting. They painted it and gassed it up - and once it’s engines are warm, it’s going to steam roll over them. Because, underneath it all, MS is still MS.

So what could Nokia have done? They needed an ecosystem, desirable phones and a respected brand. They have the brand, and can make desirable phones - but the ecosystem doesn’t come as a guarantee with MS - not in the handset market. So that’s where the focus had to be and there might have been two better alternatives - neither of them are easy or guaranteed - but might have been better than what they’ve announced:

1. Fund a $1 billion (affordable when looking at the alternatives) Symbian spin out. Armed with new leadership, a commercially motivated mandate and (until last month) the largest platform base in the industry, Symbian should still be viable - (this should have been done 5 years ago - but should have would have doesn’t help us today).

2. Team up with the one other company that also needs a hedge against Apple and/or Android - RIM. A RIM/Nokia alliance would be an able third player in the market and they have a better ecosystem at RIM than MS for phones.

It’s sad, but I suspect Nokia has jumped off the burning oil rig into the burning seas. I hope they have enough time to put out those fires.

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