Standing by your principles
Moving onto the rather lengthy debate between Ahonen and Scoble on Nokia's smartphone strategy; Ahonen makes the point that Nokia isn't competing with Apple any more than Toyota competes with Porsche.
This is an enticing concept, and not without validity, but not convincing in a market where today's Porsche is tomorrow's Toyota. In other words: the rate of change in the mobile market is such that, in the developed world at least, what is cutting edge right now will be viewed as bog standard in a year's time. That simply isn't the case in the car market, which is why that analogy doesn't work.
But that doesn't mean Ahonen's underlying point - that Nokia has to be able to differentiate itself from the likes of Samsung if it's to retain its market dominance - doesn't ring true. His original piece defends Symbian, which is brave but futile considering the apparently irresistible momentum against it. But it also points out that MeeGo is the future.
It's going to be a while yet before we see out first Nokia MeeGo smartphone, and there's no guarantee it will be any good. In the meantime Nokia is attempting to defend its smartphone position with launches like the N8 which, while a good effort, still fall a bit short in comparison to those with newer OSs.
But what are the alternatives? Only for Nokia to ditch its own OSs in favour of the two its competitors are using: Android and WP7. This would almost certainly arrest the short-term decline in Nokia's smartphone market share but, assuming MeeGo eventually delivers, it's hard to see how this is a long term solution.
In reviewing Android handsets we've concluded that the user experience is defined, not by the handset-maker or mobile operator, but by Google. There's not a ton of things that can be done to the hardware of a phone to differentiate it. All of them tick more or less the same feature boxes and the overall shape, and materials used, are dictated by the single-hand usage model.
So if we accept that smartphones are becoming the norm, and that the main way to differentiate them is through the platform, rather than the hardware, surely the long-term future belongs to those companies that can maintain a large and loyal customer base by offering something different, rather than those who follow the herd.
One final point: which other company has by far the greatest interest in the success of Windows in the tablet market and Nokia in smartphones? That's right - Intel. Despite the imminent launch of AMD's fusion chips, the majority of any Windows tablets will run Intel chips. Meanwhile MeeGo is a joint effort between Nokia and Intel that the chip giant will be hoping will augment its mobile chip offerings.
Three industry giants are all putting their considerable resources into providing an alternative to the Apple/Google/ARM model for mobile devices. Surely it's too early to conclude they will fail.
