Tag: smartphones

  • Nokia, Apple and Sudden Extinction Events

    Nokia, Apple and Sudden Extinction Events

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    Every day brings fresh gloom for Nokia – and the criticisms are now so familiar I won’t elaborate on them. But I was struck by a recent observation likening Nokia’s plight now to Apple’s in the mid-1990s. It seems absurd, at first – Nokia is still turning a profit in the billions, while Apple’s annual…

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  • Rescuing Palm

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    You know you’re in trouble when your revenue is $1bn less than you’d expected for the year. But a few companies might envy being in Palm’s position. It has an excellent product it can’t sell, and in webOS an asset that wealthy rivals – Nokia, Samsung or Microsoft – would pick up in a snap.……

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  • Google to mobile phone industry: ‘Fuck you very much!’

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    "It’s Google’s autistic approach to relationships," one senior phone exec told me this week. "They don’t know what hurt they’re doing, and they don’t care." It’s nothing personal, guys. Today, some of the biggest tech companies in the world, who thought they were Google’s closest partners, will begin to understand how, say, copyright holders have…

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  • Rescuing Nokia’s Ovi: a plan

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    It must be frustrating to sketch out a long-term technology roadmap in great depth, and see it come to fruition… only to goof on your own execution. But to do so repeatedly – as Nokia has – points to something seriously wrong. Nokia spent more than a decade preparing for Tuesday this week, when it…

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  • Apple and the Gentlemen from the Networks (or, why it pays to turn up Really, Really Late)

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    This week Apple threw the kitchen sink at its iPhone/Touch software stack, removing most of the most irritating nuisances at a stroke. It’s a stunning achievement. So Apple now finds itself where everyone else in the mobile handset business wanted to be 15 years ago. Large companies full of clever people devoted years of planning…

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  • Farewell then, Symbian

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    Ten years ago to the day, I attended the surprise foundation of Symbian. I was in Norway and sorry to miss the event today that closed the chapter – and probably the book – on the great adventure. I find it exquisitely ironic that the philosophy behind the decision to end Symbian’s independent existence as…

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