Two interesting developments for the company were the closure of the device plant in Bochum and the move to acquire rights to the Symbian platform. The former is ostensibly down to a row over government subsidy but perhaps it can be interpreted as a sign that Nokia is strategically repositioning itself for in the long term. The Sybian acquisition is evidence of this as it is clear that Nokia is not happy with being the world-leading producer of mobile devices. Perhaps the device market is seen as a difficult market in the future with expensive device development…
That brings us to shades of old battle between IBM and Microsoft; hardware versus platform. Nobody wants to be stuck in the hole that IBM found themselves back in the day. This time however we have a number of candidates vying for that all-important “platform of the masses” status, with MS Windows, Google’s Android, and Symbian as the main players (there others, like Linux variants such as Maemo).
