Contempt for the iPhone

It must be said that the situation with Steve Jobs did not develop in such a simple and straightforward manner as it seems today when looking back. Nokia initially took the Apple iPhone lightly, as a fad for a small group of fans, but in the end, it wanted to respond to it immediately, because it was audacious that someone outside the company could come up with an innovative, albeit “necessarily unsuccessful concept.”

Steve Jobs presented his iPhone in January 2007, and by August 2007, Nokia was presenting its Ovi services concept, which could be compared to what the iPhone was supposed to offer. It was and wanted to remain ahead of the game.

But this time, Nokia was working under pressure from others for the first time and without its own vision of how to respond. For the first time, it was reacting to what someone else had presented. Moreover, it failed to understand that it was not a matter of piling up and marketing services that it had swept out of the corners of competing departments somewhere in the company, but that it had to be a well-thought-out, interconnected, and, moreover, cleanly designed concept, which its quarreling and competing departments would find difficult to produce.

Nokia was convinced that it had all the components for iPhone’s success and was able to replicate and beat it immediately. It had a smart operating system, browser, email, music and video player. Missing maps? It pulled out eight billion euros and bought map producer Navteq in October 2007. However, it took its time with the last component of the ecosystem. It wasn’t until May 2009 that it introduced the Ovi Store, a store where users could buy programs, music, games, and videos (depending on the country).

Caption: Ovi Store in 2010 and the number of downloads in millions per day. This is not what an unsuccessful app store looks like, even though most of the apps were free. There are also many free apps on Android and iOS.

Why did the Ovi Store arrive so late? For a long time, Nokia believed that this part of the market would be best served by operators or competing companies. That the introduction of a “single store” would kill Symbian, destroy competition, and damage relationships with operators who wanted to profit from their own stores. But the era of “ringtones for 99 CZK” was already over, operators lacked both the breath and the knowledge for application stores, and the case of the Apple App Store convinced the company that it had fallen behind and that, on the contrary, offering a unified store would benefit both the platform and the market. The difference is that you can buy Symbian apps anywhere else, not just through the Ovi Store. It may sound surprising, but Nokia’s belief in liberalism and the power of the free market cut off part of its branch. Something that Apple said a clear no to and also broke through with.

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Contempt for the iPhone

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