Google's “Interesting” Week
Let's start gingerly, with Nokia. You'll recall the indignation when Nokia threw Symbian under the Windows Phone 7 bus and osborned its existing product line. Nokia dead-ended Symbian handsets, causing sales to plunge while everyone waited for the new MicroNokia smartphones.
Context & Ripple Effects
The arc here runs back to 2007, when Symbian publicly dismissed Android as a threat — a stance that aged badly as Google's platform took the low end Nokia once owned. By February 2011, reports of a Nokia–Microsoft partnership around Windows Phone 7 had crystallized into the confirmed strategy shift this piece reacts to.
Monday Note frames the cost of that pivot: by dead-ending Symbian handsets ahead of any shipping 'MicroNokia' device, Nokia triggered a textbook Osborne effect on its own line, with sales plunging while customers wait. The piece lands amid broader questions about which mobile phone brands survive the smartphone transition — and why the week was 'interesting' for Google is that its rival's self-inflicted wound arrives just as Android consolidates.
First-order effects
- Nokia's current-quarter handset revenue takes the direct hit: confirmed Symbian sales are plunging because the company told buyers its own phones are a dead end before replacements exist.
Second-order effects
- Carriers and developers allocating shelf space and engineering time between platforms now treat Symbian as write-off inventory, accelerating migration toward Android and Windows Phone 7 and leaving Nokia dependent on Microsoft delivering competitive hardware.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the smartphone market structurally consolidates around two software ecosystems — Android and Windows Phone 7 — with former platform owners like Nokia reduced to hardware licensees, validating the brand-mortality thesis asymco raised in August.
The trend: Mobile is consolidating into a two-platform ecosystem race in which incumbent OS owners who announce their own obsolescence early surrender their installed base to Android.