Last Friday on Nokia’s official corporate blog, the results of a poll asking “What Ovi services do you use the most?” showed that only 5.56% of Ovi users actually use Ovi Music. This begs the question, when will one of Europe’s largest companies return to their core talents, instead of trying to do everything, for everyone, all at the same time? Back in August 2007, when Nokia launched Ovi in London, the enthusiasm in the room was palatable. I can remember talking to people at the event, applauding the Finnish company for understanding the future, that what they’re doing is brilliant, and that everyone else now has to catch up. Here we are three years later and Ovi is the butt of every joke at any mobile industry gathering.
How exactly did that happen? Why did Nokia bother getting into the services space at all? Didn’t they know they would get push back from operators? Didn’t they know that there are dedicated service providers out there who make sure their social network, music streaming, microblogging, or whatever service, works across multiple platforms? Didn’t they know that building software was hard and that buying a bunch of small companies and expecting them to coordinate together on this grand vision of connected contextual data wasn’t going to be the easiest thing to do?
Here are the results, in order from most used to least used: Ovi Maps, Ovi Store, Nokia Messaging, Ovi Mail, Ovi Contacts, Ovi Music, “other”, Nokia Life Tools, Nokia Money. Maps makes sense since the application is built into every device and Nokia wants their investors to think that they didn’t waste $8.1 billion when purchasing NAVTEQ back in October 2007. Ovi Store, again, makes sense since they need to pump up their numbers so the tech press pay attention to the number of downloads per month and the number of fart applications there are available to people. Nokia Messaging is another way to say email retrieval, Ovi Mail is Nokia’s own email service, which they recently outsourced to Yahoo!, Ovi Contacts is for syncing your phone book, and then there’s Nokia Music.
How is it that a company that ships over 100 million devices a quarter can’t get record labels on board, and developers on board, to build the best music experience the market has every seen? Why hasn’t Nokia bothered to buy Spotify, they are after all, Swedish based and a short boat ride away from Helsinki.
I’m not expecting answers to all the questions I’ve posted above, I just want to raise some points, flag some uncomfortable realities, and can hope that Nokia sticks to their core competency of making awesome hardware. They need help with everything else.