Until recently, Nokia did not pay attention to its competitors, or rather, simply did not consider it necessary to be afraid of them. And it's not surprising, because the global smartphone market is still divided in favor of the Finns (45% of the market), despite the fact that Apple already owns 13.3% (compared to 5.2% last year). Apple with its iPhone is not the only competitor to Nokia, there are also devices such as BlackBerry Curve and Palm Pre. In general, as a manufacturer of mobile phones, Nokia retains 38% of the entire market. And its positions were more or less stable, while competing firms appeared and disappeared. However, with the advent of the iPhone, a lot has changed: Apple's phone turned out to be really innovative, and cases when its customers were disappointed are rare.
And having failed to provide an interesting alternative to the iPhone, Nokia moved the fight to the legal field: the company recently sued Apple, accusing the Steve Jobs team of infringing patents on technologies, including security, encoding of speech signals, cryptographic protection and wireless data transmission technology. Nokia CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo believes that Nokia is entitled to a share of the sales of 34 million iPhones released since 2007. We can talk about one billion dollars if the court sides with the Finns.
However, patent licensing is not Nokia's only problem. The British Times writes that the company should worry more about competition. Smartphones, following Moore's law, will be even cheaper and more productive, and Nokia's attempts to catch up with Apple in terms of the release of communicators were unsuccessful – the N97 did not impress consumers.
What can save Nokia? The company needs to launch one truly "breakthrough" device that would become the company's business card (like Apple's iPhone). But Nokia doesn't have that at the moment. After all, neither the unpretentious smartphones 5800 and 5230, nor the music service Comes With Music struck the imagination of consumers. It was not easy to compete with Apple and all the innovations created by this company.
Updated: interesting opinion of Dmitry Honest:
Nokia killed/will kill excessive segmentation of the product line If Nokia produced toilets, they would have 118 models: from a rustic hole to completely gold toilets. At the same time, it would be possible to shit only in 48 models, and to flush in 7.
