Nokia, the world’s largest handset maker who has been struggling in their attempt to launch an attractive set of consumer facing services, has announced that they’re going to shut down Ovi Files on October 1st. Similar to Dropbox, one of the most popular cloud based storage solutions, Ovi Files let you store and access your files on a remote server, freeing you of the responsibility of carrying around and potentially losing a USB key. The Ovi Files service was built from the technology acquired from Avvenu almost 3 years ago and that acquisition, like many of Nokia’s acquisitions in the past, is looking like a mistake and complete waste of money.
With Nokia’s launch of the Ovi brand in the summer of 2007, the Finnish handset manufacturer set a goal to establish a continuous revenue stream from the hundreds of millions of customers that purchased their devices. The logic was deadly simple and goes something like this: “we sell over 100 million devices ever quarter, and if 1% of those customers gave us $1 per month then that would be an additional $3 million per quarter of revenue.” There’s Ovi Music, which has been renamed several times after failing to take off under the “Comes with Music” moniker, Ovi Contacts, Ovi Mail, Ovi Calendar, Ovi Chat, and several more I’m probably missing, but could care less about since the world either uses Google, Microsoft or Yahoo! services.
Nokia’s Q3 2010 results are due to be announced in around 6 weeks and investors have been itching for a management reshuffle. For lack of a better phrase, they want Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo’s head on a silver platter. Since Nokia peaked in the Spring of 2007 with their launch of the then technological marvel known as the N95, there has yet to be any groundbreaking products. The E71 launched in 2008 was the ultimate refinement and best implementation of the Symbian operating system, but after that … nothing.
Absolutely nothing.
[Photo via All About Symbian]