“The company desperately needs a worthy super-smartphone contender (it’s clearly not the N900 or N97) or it will end up reducing forecasts for market share and profitability in perpetuity,” Paczkowski reports. “So what should Nokia do? Wedge Partners analyst Brian Blair has a suggestion.”
Paczkowski reports, “Nokia should buy Palm–for its webOS operating system and for the guy who quarterbacked its development, CEO Jon Rubinstein. And then the company should abandon its Symbian and Maemo operating systems–Blair dismisses them as ‘inferior’ and ‘lacking polish and smoothness’–and build just a handful of smartphones, all based on Palm’s webOS.”
MacDailyNews Take: Somewhere Palm-backer Roger McNamee is drooling with anticipation. Our take from January 21, 2009: “Palm’s Pre dog and pony show is nothing more than takeover bait. They simply do not have the resources necessary to create another mobile platform, especially one that is superfluous. If Palm’s Pre is not a ruse, then those responsible are kidding themselves.”
Paczkowski continues, “‘You need each other,’ Blair explains in an open letter to Nokia’s leadership. ‘You have the manufacturing and distribution capabilities and global carrier relationships and Palm has the second best operating system behind the iPhone. Alone, it will be difficult for Palm to ramp globally and compete with the top players largely because it takes meaningful marketing dollars to ramp units across global carriers especially while you remain focused on R&D efforts. You, by yourself, will cede market share to your competitors each quarter as smartphones become a larger part of global handset sales and you fail to offer a compelling offering in that category.’ Continuing his evaluation, Blair says, ‘I know you said you expect flat market share in 2010 but that isn’t going to happen if you don’t act. I think you could lose 10% of your share by the end of 2010 to your competition, taking your global share under 30%.'”
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: We don’t know if Blair owns Palm shares or not, but it was the very first thing that popped into our minds when reading this – especially since the Palm Pre and WebOS, despite metric tons of hype, have utterly failed to set the world on fire. If Nokia ever decides to eschew their own dog food, they’d do better to use Google’s free Android OS than waste their money on the mess that is beleaguered Palm.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Fred Mertz” for the heads up.]