Applications developers will be key to Nokia’s ability to compete on the global stage, according to CEO-elect Stephen Elop, who made a surprise appearance at Nokia World 2010 this week.
“We are capable of building great devices,” of taking them to market, of dealing with telecoms operators, and of creating services, Elop said in a short address that closed the two-day London event.
But without developers, “we cannot create the vibrancy and the ecosystem that we need to be successful and to compete around the world,” Elop said. Developers take our technology and our platforms and “do things that we would never have anticipated that you would do,” he said.
During the address, Elop hinted at the influence his former role as head of Microsoft’s business division will have on his leadership at Nokia.
“At Microsoft… Mr Ballmer had a saying,” Elop said. “And that saying was: developers, developers, developers.” Elop, who described himself as “unemployed”, having left Microsoft last week, takes the helm at Nokia on Monday.
His biggest challenge will be to improve Nokia’s position in the high-end smartphone segment of the market. The Finnish vendor still claims a dominant market share – its Symbian operating system took a 41.2% share of all smartphones sold to end users worldwide in Q2, according to Gartner – but it has lost valuable percentage points in recent months; Symbian had a 51% share of sales in the second quarter of 2009.
In a bid to start redressing the balance, Nokia introduced three new high-end devices at Nokia World on Tuesday, which, along with the long-awaited N8 smartphone, will be in the shops in time for Christmas.
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