Apple vs. Nokia

Corporate battles are always interesting to watch. If they are happening between the best of the big companies with strong personalities , there is no void of fun.

One such battles which seems to be heating up is that between Nokia and Apple. To be precise this is round # 3. Apparently Nokia has some arrangements with 40 odd companies which use Nokia technologies in some form or other and Apple hasnt done so. Leaving the outcome to the on or off the court settlements, is it a right strategic move from Nokia at a time where they are losing money big time?

Though still a leader in the mobile market, Nokia has lost grounds to RIM (blackberry) and to Apple (iPhone) for the last couple of years. The smartphone market is a highend market with higher profitability (Apple made 1+billion in profits last year with iPhone) and Nokia is still struggling to captivate the minds of smartphone users.

Whilst RIM has captured the Exec User segment, Apple has captured the popular user segments. With new entrant of the Android Operating system from Google, this war is going to get even more intense and nasty. The smart phone market is on its way to heat up even more and it could soon reach a point where the price-war starts between the major players, once the features across the phone are more or less similar (iPhone, BB Storm and HTC/Android, Motorola ) .

Nokia with its inability to comeup with something which could capture the market share, has resorted to the game of distracting Apple and making it lose its resources over the legal landmine battle and eventual off-the-court settlement.

In my opinion this is going to take a significant management attention from Nokia (esp if Apple decides to play hardball) and could lead to deadly spiral, unless Nokia uses this as a distraction attempt before it launches its stunner iPhone killer.

Lets keep watching

Domestication of Animalistic behaviours

The title may sound pompous and a bit academic, but the thoughts behind are very simple. Over several thousand years mankind has been getting domesticated after having travelled a long way from the forests of Africa (?) to the grasslands of savannah and further to so many other countries and getting diverged to so many other races.
But the fact is that human beings derive their genetic makeup from the animalistic behaviours which has been dominating their psyche for long. Over the past 6 or 8 thousand years, man has been domesticated and has been left with agriculture , then to trade and then to further manipulations. The strange fact if you look at those famous have always had that animalistic , go for the kill kind of tendencies.
So should we all give up our social niceties and get brutal? Looks like yes

Strategy Game : Apple , Microsoft and Google

For anybody who is interested in corporate strategy these are real feast time. The strategic wars waged by the technology heavy weights is seeming to get intense day by day. MS is really flexing its muscles agaisnt the Google to break its monopoly in the search with the Bing. Though Bing is not a path breaking revolution it neatly aligns to the MS style of adopting to the best working model and perfecting it. Down the line Bing could prove nuisance to Google if not as an outright killer.

Google, while preparing to adapt to Bing's onslaught wanted to drag the war to a different war and announced Chrome OS. While Chrome OS itself is not an ingenious invention (would be based on linux kernal) google is just trying to open up another battle to distract Microsoft. This may force microsoft to release a lite version of either XP or 7 to counter the Chrome Offense (if it really an offence) as MS thrives on it OS dominance.

While the analysts and industry pundits were discussing the Chrome, Bing etc Microsoft has entered into a deal with Yahoo to further intense the onslaught on Google. It is going to be interesting to see how google react and retain its dominance on the search engine (and ultimately ad revenue battle) field with the fight intensifying from different corners of the world , especially from baidu which could eat away a major portion of chinese, japanese and far-eastern market.

When MS, Yahoo and Google are fighting the known battles, Apple is on the verge of releasing its iTablet(?) which is hoped to be another revolutionary breakthrough in the content publishing world (people could buy few chapters of the book, instead of the whole book). If the tablet lives up to its hype , world is pretty sure that it will, then amazon would be dragged to a bigger fight for dominance in distrubution of the content which more or less it dominates now through amazon book store.

Of all the games played by MS and Google , the most interesting game would be that of Apple. Apple creates a market, retains its dominance for a longer time with its own supply chain (iTunes) for distribution and makes another innovation before the current product loses its charm or the space is crowded by copy cats(iPod, iPhone etc) . If Apple adopts a right pricing (very likely) for the iTablet, it could crack open a new avenue for its much awaited growth into the OS domination.

Anyways, we are going to have plenty of actions these days and it is going to be throughly entertaining.

#iranelection , twitterati and emergence of new media

Sunday 14th of June 2009 has been an interesting day for iran, media and twitter and in no particular order.
During sorting out things for the next week, i happened to catch the trend #cnnfail from my twitterfon and found people are very upset that CNN hasnt done much coverage on the emerging Iran trends, this was taken up seriously by CNN and looks like the Iran story is given prominence there. Traditionally the Newspaper and TV media are used to give people what they thought is relevant and which would captivate the attention of mass and advertisers. Looks like this law is being rewritten now. The public could express contempt of the way media behaves and the media has to listen to the public
And the term journalist which used to be static earlier has become more dynamic as the common public could easily express in real-time open media like twitter and post their photos and videos to popular social media sites like youtube and flickr. The common man who happens to be there on the spot who may not have journalistic acumen is ready to pass on the information the analysis which was typically done by the journalist has now been given to the common public.
Though this brings in chaos (most of the tweets are emotional and rumour based) , the relevance in time (i tweeted to couple of blokes in iran to get some opinion) and the flexibility that it offers is next to none.
Probably the traditional media moguls should take a note and be prepared to face the reality.
In the meantime, things are extremely chaotic in iran as per the input streams from twitter (good that twitocalypse was yesterday) and twitter once again is in mainstream headlines by serving as a gateway for various links to opinions, videos and pictures across the web.
I think for most of us it feels like suddenly stepping into the sunlight after having spent years in a dark dungeon cell, facing a flood of informations. But i think we would get used to this and refine our life styles.
Hope iran gets some peace tomorrow, will check my twitter first before checking the static media.

Amsterdam : A Social Experiment

I happened to go on a short tour de europe covering Amsterdam, Zurich and France. With diverse cultures , richness, building, cobbled streets, greeness etc, arguably europe (at least the part that i went to ) is a typical poets dream.

Amsterdam throws many a surprises for those who are typical moral beliefs. Drug (soft drug) is legal, prositution is legal. A coffee shop said "Smoking Permitted, No Tobacco". It is no brainer to understand what they intend to say and i dont understand why cant they be explicit about it. Amsterdam surely is a social experiment in liberalising the key dark wants of the human mind. Apart from drawing the tourists in tons of thousands, the argument says by not restricting these "Anyway happens" thing in the country it experiences a low crime rate etc.

To me it looks like a weak argument, if that being the case this would have been adopted by other countries more successfully and easily. There is some element which is beyond the obviousness of the reasons. Perhaps the dutch being the one of the smartest of the traders in the globe, would have realised that it is an easy way to lure people's attention towards the country if the moral ethics could be relaxed a little. Anyways there is no universally accepted moral ethics in the world, and these are enforced only for the poorer segments which cannot enjoy these benefits. While the poor man is advised to stay put with his wife loyally , the king is rightfully given permission to have a harlem.

Amsterdam is a worthy philosophical debate.