Let’s set the scene: June 23, 2007, the first generation iPhone has been out for less than a month, Nokia issues a press release announcing that they’re going to blow an undisclosed amount of money (rumored to be $97 million) on a web service no one has ever heard of: Twango. See, Nokia isn’t a dumb company. They have brilliant ideas. The problem is executing those ideas. Back then the Finnish handset maker was arrogant enough to think that they could just buy a bunch of small companies, lump their services under a single brand umbrella called “Ovi”, and then compete with Facebook, Flickr, and Google. Oh how wrong they were. The Ovi brand was officially terminated in May 2011, and shortly thereafter the services that used to make up Ovi have been executed one by one. The latest to be taken behind the barn and shot in the head is Ovi Share, which used to be called Share on Ovi, which used to be called Twango. It’s going to be shut down in May. If you have any images or movies in there, you best back them up right now.
So what’s Nokia’s services strategy now? Simple really, just latch onto the strong brands that Microsoft has already established … wait a minute, Microsoft has hugely popular web services? There’s Bing, no one uses that. There’s SkyDrive, but everyone uses Dropbox. There’s Skype, which is genuinely interesting, though it’s not going to be fully baked into Windows Phone until Apollo lands in late 2012. Can you think of a service that Microsoft invented that’s widely used besides the now ancient Microsoft Messanger? Because we can’t.
Anyway, expect to hear more and more about Nokia shutting off services they once tried to get off the ground. We’re actually looking forward to hearing about how Microsoft plans to become more friendly with services that already exist, because every time you hit the search button on a Windows Phone and Bing pops up, God kills a kitten.