The Rise and Downfall of Symbian

Once upon a time in Finland there lived a mighty prince called Nokia. He, with his faithful army chief Symbian, conquered lands far and wide: from the bustling cities in America to rural outbacks in Africa and Asia. But suddenly the proverbial Apple opened up a Pandora’s Box; a challenger called Android started slashing at the prince’s knees.

For now at least, the Finnish mobile handset giant is in big trouble; once the undisputed market leader, Nokia is in the unenviable position of watching their sales take a knockout punch. They have made several changes in the top echelons of the Management, even replacing the Finnish CEO Olli Kallasvuo with a Canadian, Stephen Elop. This seems to be a desperate attempt at stemming the rot that has set in. So what happened to bring them into this mess in the first place?

Nokia pioneered the Smartphone generation with Symbian OS running on ARM processors at its core, eventually acquiring the company in 2008. Company bosses and users alike couldn’t stop gushing over the Symbian interface. In 2010, Symbian platform was made available as open source software.  For 8 years from 2002, Symbian phones recorded sales of over 450 million. Its technical design supported computing and was compatible with an assortment of gadgets from different makers, and apps from third parties.

But after a while, things started going south for Nokia. Apple’s iPhone and the slew of Android Smartphones from Samsung, Motorola and HTC, based on Android, were much superior to the Nokia devices.

Many industry experts feel that Nokia was simply trying too many things in too many places and too hard. This led to lack of focus, and ultra segmentation. They wanted to play the economy section, the corporate sector and the higher end market too. Look at the competition: the high end is almost split down the middle by apple and Samsung, Blackberry RIM is the favored toy of execs and there are Android phones to suit all other budgets.

Then again, their software simply didn’t match up to the snazzy handsets they rolled out.  In the initial days Symbian was proclaimed as a user friendly OS; but somehow the need to stay a step ahead of the competition seems to have slipped the minds of the Nokia bosses. They simply didn’t innovate enough. Low end phones running on Android have also flooded the market, and it seems that now Nokia is simply drowning in competition.  And now, rather like an old dress, Nokia has shed Symbian from their handsets.  They have now tied up with Microsoft for Windows Phone 8. Many experts feel that Nokia was so busy protected their markets (which they had created with much hard work) that they simply were blind to the next big thing in the industry.

In the last quarter of 2011, Symbian devices sold by Nokia were over 18 million. This figure declined by nearly half in the next year. That’s how rapid the fall was. Not even slashing the prices of the handsets could halt the slide. Nokia has announced that they would continue supporting Symbian till 2013; Symbian’s status is rather like a once favorite race horse put to pasture, counting its days till the vet’s lethal injection.

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