A lot of us can remember how sometime ago, Nokia jumped off the burning plaform, and onto Microsoft’s waiting life raft. Or that must have been what it looked like, through the blinding smoke of the surrounding conflagration. The smoke has since cleared, and it’s now obvious that Nokia didn’t jump onto a life raft. They plunged right into the belly of a monstrous whale.
After almost two years of swimming around in Microsoft’s intestinal metro juices, Nokia is only barely recognisable. With each day that passes, it gets harder and harder to tell the two brands apart. Of course Microsoft’s brand is doing quite well by any standards. Nokia on the other hand is getting the short end of the identity stick.
How? It’s easy to see how this happens when you look at a Nokia device running Windows Phone. What comes to your mind when you see a Lumia device? Do you think “oh, that’s a Nokia”? Or do you think “oh, that’s a Windows Phone”?
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m guessing it’s the latter.
Slowly but surely, Microsoft’s Windows Phone brand is assimilating the distinctive brand that Nokia once represented, till we can’t say where Windows Phone ends and Nokia begins. If for some reason, the Finnish company decided to axe the Asha and Belle lines, we suddenly wouldn’t have Nokia phones any more. Just Windows Phones.
The argument that Nokia was right to choose Windows Phone over Android so they wouldn’t become “just another Android OEM” and get locked into a race to the bottom for relevance with the likes of Samsung and HTC now seems a little shortsighted in retrospect, because the very identity it sought to keep, it’s losing from getting hitched to Microsoft. Yeah, Nokia gets some sort of preference in the Windows Phone ecosystem, but that preference has come at the cost of its individuality. The same Android party that Nokia refused to join is now in full bangin’ swing, gobbling up 75 percent of the world’s mobile OS action in Q3 2012. The same Asian OEMs that they didn’t want to get jiggy with are busy carving up the next billion mobile subscribers they’ve always had their eyes on, with an avalanche of budget droids. By the way, where is Windows Phone on the mobile OS map? 2 percent. Two whole percent.
On the other hand, the speculations that Elop is a mole planted by Microsoft to facilitate a silent Nokia takeover are beginning to look more and more plausible. Not that I believe it to be so, but it’s hard not to consider it, given the alarming spate of misfortune after misfortune that the company has suffered since his arrival on the scene, so much so that it’s been famously dubbed the “Elop Effect”. For all we know, this might have just been some really elaborate Elop plan to “elope” with Nokia’s smartphone business. Don’t be surprised if the next thing to come out of Espoo is an acquisition announcement. Microsoft has always wanted to buy Nokia’s smartphone division to consolidate their mobile strategy. They’ve just been biding their time till they could buy it for chump change.
Nokia might have escaped certain death in the Symbian-pocalype. But it did so only to finally suffer it in a more subtle way that might have been considered merciful if it were not so insidious. The deal with Microsoft for a second chance at life has turned out to be a Faustian bargain that has cost the once mighty company its identity, its individuality…its soul.
How does this end? I didn’t want Nokia to end up like Kodak, but this is definitely not the way I would have wanted them to go out either.
Might there still be salvation for Nokia yet? Some light at the end of this very dark tunnel? A way out of the belly of the Microsoft beast? If you think so, or otherwise, please say so in the comments.
{Image via Flickr/Karyn Christner]
