Why Nokia needs to jumpstart Ovi before it's all over

Nokia needs to take Ovi a lot more seriously.

At the launch of the Nokia N97 in London earlier this week, I had a long chat to a senior Nokia executive about the company's plans for Ovi. I was a little underwhelmed.

In a nutshell, his attitude was that Nokia was so big, developers would be mad not to go out of their way to make applications for it. If they don't, it's their loss, he said.

To me, this smacks of arrogance and foolish inaction. If I were a senior executive in Nokia, I would be making the case that the Ovi Store should be one of the company's top two priorities over the next 12 months. Quite frankly, this is where a huge section of the mobile phone market is heading.

What is happening with Apple's App Store now is a similar phenomenon to what happened with iTunes in the early part of this decade. Apple has stolen a march and is consolidating its position. In the blink of an eye, it could corner the market. Mighty Nokia, which once so dominated the mobile market (and which is still by far the largest handset manufacturer), will be left wondering why they didn't move more swiftly.

So here is what Nokia needs to do, in my view: it needs to pull out all of the stops to get developers making applications for Nokia handsets. It needs a massive campaign to make mobile-users -- and especially smartphone users -- aware of what the Ovi Store is and how it can enhance your handset. And it needs to do this right now.

Most people I know have little awareness of Ovi. That's not their problem: it's Nokia's.

Comments

[dahamsta]

Palm is having the same problem with their app store, albeit for different reasons. Palm's app store should be a hive of activity, because the platform is essentially a webserver running on a Linux OS, hosting apps written in HTML and Javascript. Unfortunately the reality isn't reflecting that. Whether holdups with the SDK or simple developer greed - apps are currently free - is the problem I don't know, but the apps store needs to bulk up soon if the platform is going to succeed; and it's the platform that'll make or break Palm.

adam