Nokia's struggles suggest consumers are 'content' with iOS and Android duopoly

Posted:
in iPhone edited January 2014
Nokia's failure to gain traction in the smartphone market with Microsoft's Windows Phone platform is seen by one analyst as a sign that consumers are content with the two dominant options currently on the market: Apple's iOS and Google's Android.

iPhone 5


Charlie Wolf of Needham & Company revealed in a note to investors this week that he has downgraded his rating for Nokia stock from a "buy" to a "hold." In particular, he believes Nokia's poor performance in the last quarter is a sign that consumers are "content with just two platforms."

"It appears that the market is reaching the now-or-never moment for the Windows 8/Nokia duo," Wolf wrote. "We expect Microsoft to throw enormous resources behind Windows 8 to prevent its demise. But with a single digit market share, the challenge will be enormous."

According to IDC data from May, Android and iOS had a heady lead against all other competitors. In the first quarter of 2013, Apple and Google?s mobile operating systems combined to take up 92.3 percent of the market, leaving Windows Phone and BlackBerry OS with 3.2 and 2.9 percent, respectively.

Wolf blames a smaller app library, ineffective marketing, and Nokia's original loyalty to the "antiquated" Symbian operating system, for the Finnish handset maker's gradual downfall since the iPhone debuted in 2007. Nokia eventually dumped Symbian as its primary OS in February 2011 in favor of Microsoft's Windows Phone.

But by summer 2011, Nokia was forced to begin laying off 10,000 employees. Since then, Windows Phone has only struggled to gain a larger share of the market and move more Nokia devices, capturing only a three percent share of the market in March.

Nokia announced this week that it shipped 7.4 million units of its flagship Lumia smartphone running Windows Phone. While considerably less than the 37.4 million iPhones Apple shipped last quarter, the Lumia still managed to out-ship BlackBerry's 6.8 million total smartphones in the last quarter, suggesting that Windows Phone may have to settle for a distant third place in the market.

Apple's iPhone outsold BlackBerry devices in Canada for the first time in 2011. Research firm Gartner predicted last March that the newest version of BlackBerry?s operating system, BlackBerry 10, may capture less than five percent of the worldwide smartphone market through 2016.
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Comments

  • Reply 1 of 47
    Who'd want Nokia's, BB's etc's garbage?
  • Reply 2 of 47

    Quote:

    Originally Posted by Lord Amhran View Post



    Who'd want Nokia's, BB's etc's garbage?


    Dumbest quote of the summer.... Please stop....

  • Reply 3 of 47


    instead of partnering with MS, Nokia should have bough Apple in 2008! image imageimageimageimageimageimageimageimageimageimageimageimageimageimageimageimageimageimageimageimageimageimageimageimageimageimageimageimageimageimageimageimageimageimageimageimageimageimageimageimageimageimageimageimageimage

  • Reply 4 of 47
    I did enjoy Microsoft's mock funeral procession for the iPhone. And RIM's paid flash mob outside the Sydney Apple Store.
  • Reply 5 of 47
    abazigalabazigal Posts: 114member
    Or maybe because the alternatives just sucked.

    How many people would actually buy a phone that they didn't enjoy using, just to prove a point?
  • Reply 6 of 47
    MacProMacPro Posts: 19,718member
    "We expect Microsoft to throw enormous resources behind Windows 8 to prevent its demise. But with a single digit market share, the challenge will be enormous."

    Perhaps it's nearly time for Microsoft to give their shareholders their money back and close up shop ...
  • Reply 7 of 47
    hill60hill60 Posts: 6,992member
    Who'd want Nokia's, BB's etc's garbage?

    On rare occasions we get the odd die hard fans who want these things, 99.9% of the time it's iPhones or Samsung with a few wanting HTC or Sony.

    Blackberry are so low in demand we don't even bother stocking them.
  • Reply 8 of 47
    graxspoograxspoo Posts: 162member
    There's plenty of room for more innovation. The problem is the iPhone really knocked it out of the park in 2007 and the entire industry has been trying to catch up ever since. Arguably, they have at this point: squint your eyes and at arms length, an iPhone, a Windows phone and an Android phone are all about the same, especially if you compare them to what passed as a "smart phone" in 2007.

    So now the question is, what's next? Yes, the world does not need another iPhone clone. We've got the iPhone. We've got the iPhone's low-rent cousin. All anyone needs to do to shake the market up is to come out with something new and insanely great that makes the iPhone look like the smart-phones of 2006. Get on it guys.
  • Reply 9 of 47
    sockrolidsockrolid Posts: 2,789member
    Who'd want Nokia's, BB's etc's garbage?

    Maybe Microsoft will snap them up.
    The destroy them like they did with Danger.
  • Reply 10 of 47
    customtbcustomtb Posts: 346member
    graxspoo wrote: »
    There's plenty of room for more innovation. The problem is the iPhone really knocked it out of the park in 2007 and the entire industry has been trying to catch up ever since. Arguably, they have at this point: squint your eyes and at arms length, an iPhone, a Windows phone and an Android phone are all about the same, especially if you compare them to what passed as a "smart phone" in 2007.

    So now the question is, what's next? Yes, the world does not need another iPhone clone. We've got the iPhone. We've got the iPhone's low-rent cousin. All anyone needs to do to shake the market up is to come out with something new and insanely great that makes the iPhone look like the smart-phones of 2006. Get on it guys.

    It would be difficult enough to come up with something insanely great, but it would also have to be something Apple and Google/Samsung couldn't copy quickly. They wouldn't wait years to do so like ms, bb.
  • Reply 11 of 47
    bdkennedy1bdkennedy1 Posts: 1,459member
    It's the ecosystem. People are already invested in their apps, movies, music and photos. There are few people willing to start fresh with Microsofts ecosystem.

    Apple knew what they were doing and it worked.
  • Reply 13 of 47
    gazoobeegazoobee Posts: 3,754member

    Quote:

    Originally Posted by graxspoo View Post



    There's plenty of room for more innovation. ...


     


    I don't think this is true.  


     


    Windows Phone is undoubtedly innovative because it has figured out a purposely different approach to organising the users information and uses a different, but still quite useable and plausible user interface to do it.  Palm OS did the same thing.  While a lot of it's ideas eventually were subsumed by Android and now iOS, at the time it came out it was a viable, different, and innovative platform for smartphones.  Both of these platforms have failed miserably.  What has actually been successful on the other hand, (outside of the leader, iOS), is Android, which is basically a copy of iOS in almost every important aspect.  


     


    I would argue that what people actually want, is iOS or a cheap iOS copy.  They want iPhones, or cheap iPhone copies.  


     


    If you think about it, the exact same thing happened with DOS and the IBM PC, and the same thing happened with Mac/Windows, and the same thing happened with early Windows alternatives.  There were many alternatives to DOS. Some, (many actually) did the job better than DOS, but once DOS was established, that was all people wanted.  No one wanted to learn a new thing.  Once people saw graphical computing on the Mac and used a mouse for the first time, it was an unstoppable wave of change.  Windows "won" because it was a cheap copy of the Mac in the same way as Android is a cheap copy of iOS.  And as Windows established itself in the market, lots of companies "innovated" with alternative, different, GUI interfaces many of which were superior to Windows in many ways, (remember HP New Wave Desktop? OS2?) but they came too late.  The Windows paradigm was already established.  


     


    People jump on a new thing when it comes along and if it's pushed in the right way it quickly gains dominance.  Once that's done, they actually don't seem to want innovative, different things.  They just want the familiar thing or a reasonable copy if it's cheaper.  Once you have dominance (and market share), "better ideas" simply don't matter. 


     


    This is the second time Apple has defined a new paradigm/platform in computing history.  They f*cked it up the first time, but they seem to have got it right this time.  


    I think Apple had it sewn up with the debut of the first iPad, and no amount of innovation from Microsoft is going to make much difference now IMO.  

  • Reply 14 of 47


    "Nokia's failure to gain traction in the smartphone market with Microsoft's Windows Phone platform is seen by one analyst as a sign that consumers are content with the two dominant options currently on the market: Apple's iOS and Google's Android."


     


    This has got to be a joke, every single report for the past couple of weeks has shown that Nokia's Lumia sales have increased by over 20% since last quarter.  Microsoft Windows Phone has gone from 3.7 to 4.6 of the total market share, that is a 24% increase in market share.  Microsoft's market share has been steadily increasing for the past 2-3 years and Nokia's Lumia sales have been increases at an incredible rate year after year since they introduced.

  • Reply 15 of 47
    noliving wrote: »
    <span style="color:rgb(24,24,24);font-family:arial, helvetica, sans-serif;line-height:18.1875px;">"Nokia's failure to gain traction in the smartphone market with Microsoft's Windows Phone platform is seen by one analyst as a sign that consumers are content with the two dominant options currently on the market: Apple's iOS and Google's Android."</span>


    <span style="color:rgb(24,24,24);font-family:arial, helvetica, sans-serif;line-height:18.1875px;">This has got to be a joke, every single report for the past couple of weeks has shown that Nokia's Lumia sales have increased by over 20% since last quarter.  Microsoft Windows Phone has gone from 3.7 to 4.6 of the total market share, that is a 24% increase in market share.  Microsoft's market share has been steadily increasing for the past 2-3 years and Nokia's Lumia sales have been increases at an incredible rate year after year since they introduced.</span>

    You sound just like an Apple user, trying to explain how a Mac is getting as popular as the PC. It's amazing how the tables have turned..
  • Reply 16 of 47
    hmmhmm Posts: 3,405member

    Quote:

    Originally Posted by Suddenly Newton View Post



    I did enjoy Microsoft's mock funeral procession for the iPhone. And RIM's paid flash mob outside the Sydney Apple Store.


    I thought it was funny when the idiots swore it was a ploy from Samsung even after they stated they had nothing to do with it.

  • Reply 17 of 47

    Quote:

    Originally Posted by daveinpublic View Post





    You sound just like an Apple user, trying to explain how a Mac is getting as popular as the PC. It's amazing how the tables have turned..


     


    Yeah what did Ballmer call Mac market share? "Rounding error"??? Would that describe Windows Phone?

  • Reply 18 of 47
    jbelkinjbelkin Posts: 74member


    There is a world class OS with world class hardware called the iPhone which serves the high end of the market (plus the design/fashion portion). Same as the Mac on the personal computer side. 


     


    What is Windows? Windows is the free OS you get with cheap throwaway hardware. It's an acceptable OS but no one really wants it. Or no one actually wants to pay separate for it - either by buying costlier PC's or WIN upgrades. Android is EXACTLY the same.


     


    Android is a fine free OS but when people have to pay for it like an unsubsizdied tablet? 500 android tablets hold about 10% of the tablet market (if you count Kindle separate - if not, then 505 Android tablets hold about 18% of the market) or why Android phones might have about 60% market share for phones but about 25% share of internet use ... it's a fine free copycat OS but that is all it is.


     


    MS' problem is that Android beat them to the cheap end of the market so now, a second option for the low end market is not much of a solution - just as Blackberry is fighting the same fight. 


     


    The bottom line is that BB or Nokia/MS have to come up with the smartphone 3.0 to beat Apple (and Android which copies whatever apple does). They are simply NOT capable. Just look at the Xbox One. With very little innovation in the VG industry, that the best BILLIONS of dollars cold come up with. A $500 Blu Ray player that looks like someone fused a TiVo with a VCR and of course, we don't need to rehash their initial prouncements about leading that industry. 


     


    So, it isn't that people are content, they are content because they know BB & Nokia?MS won't come with anything game changing. BB managed to lead a pathetic industry because they came up with a phone that could read emails and send text. After that, they thought no one ever needed anything else from a phone. So unless Nokia/BB becomes a Tesla or a Dyson or anyone else, they are pretty much done.

  • Reply 19 of 47
    cnocbuicnocbui Posts: 3,613member

    Quote:

    Originally Posted by Lord Amhran View Post



    Who'd want Nokia's, BB's etc's garbage?




    Anyone who want's the best map and camera solutions available on a phone.


     


    Lumia sales are actually increasing, so I think it's a bit early to say it's all over:


     



     


    I am actually looking at getting my son a Lumia as he will soon be off to University and I think needs a better phone.  I am seriously considering getting myself one also, just  for the navigation features and camera.

  • Reply 20 of 47
    cyniccynic Posts: 124member
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