
Platform sunk (cost): What is the value of a quarter billion Symbian users? - atularora
http://www.asymco.com/2011/02/21/platform-sunk-costs/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Asymco+%28asymco%29
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foobarbazetc
The number of Symbian users means absolutely nothing, because they're not
worth anything as they're not buying into an ecosystem.

The Symbian devices sold are basically 'done' -- they'll never improve, and
the person using them is basically never going to buy a single app or a piece
of content for them. A much better comparison would be total revenue of the
Ovi Store against all the other stores. That means something.

I'll make this analogy:

I own an electronic door bell. It's made by a large multinational company who
probably have sold way more than 200M of these -- but they just make widgets,
and who gives a shit? That doesn't make it a viable platform.

The vast majority of Nokia phones running Symbian are just a door bell. They
make calls and do the job, but that's about it.

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uytghjhgf
A phone that makes phone calls - how ridiculous

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foobarbazetc
If that's all your phone does and that's your objective then great.
Congratulations: you've won. But you're also stuck in 2007.

If your objective is to make boatloads of money on a mobile ecosystem, that's
not going to help.

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teyc
I asked a few people around office who had stylish-looking Nokias and asked
what they were doing with them. Turns out no one is looking to buy apps. All
they wanted was a solid phone for phone calls. A quarter billion Symbians
users who bring nothing, create nothing and buy nothing in the ecosystem is
worth zilch, I'm afraid.

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Geee
Nokia plans to ship 150 million Symbian devices still and updates and support
continue for a couple of years, so it's not going anywhere in a while. With
that user base I'd believe it's still a viable platform to develop for.

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fleitz
The value of them is less than 1 million WinMo phone users, when those quarter
billion people replace their phones if Nokia doesn't have a compelling offer
they will lose them to competitors. The article looks to the past rather than
the future. We are on the brink of a revolution in computing, it's 1984 out
there. Looking to the past will not give you answers as to the future right
now. Nokia was once a tire company and before that a pulp mill (Nokian still
makes the best winter tires), if anyone has the courage and conviction to
reinvent themselves it's Nokia.

Symbian is sold on low margins. If Nokia was doing so well on Symbian why did
they replace their CEO?

Symbian may have been a smart phone platform in 2005, but it is no longer. I
haven't seen anything impressive on Symbian, and of the features that Symbian
does have that others don't I don't see anything compelling enough to give up
the App Store. iOS / Android / WinPhone 7 have mind share, and Blackberry has
the corporate market which is kind of like IE, you'd like to ignore it but
there are simply too damn many people willing to fork over cash to do it.

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tygorius
Yep, brand name recognition and usage is not at all the same thing as brand
name loyalty. As mentioned in a previous thread, Nokia's market share has been
dropping at the same time as the absolute size of the market has been growing.
Somehow I doubt there are a lot of Nokia users who look at an iPhone and
think, "Too bad. If only it ran Symbian OS ..."

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fleitz
That's one of the really interesting things about the Android market, when I
talk to most normal people they describe their phone as Android rather than
the Motorola, HTC, etc.

