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Nokia Paying $10M For Symbian Software Devs
colordev writes "Yesterday Nokia and AT&T announced a mobile software coding contest worth $10 million in prize money. The move is intended to help Symbian compete with Android and iOS. The day before this announcement, Sony Ericsson said it would not be making any new Symbian devices and is instead focusing on Android. That left Nokia pretty much alone with Symbian, and now it wants to find new coding 'friends' to keep the platform alive. Natural selection seems to be slowly eroding Symbian's future. Is this contest too late?"
So, one of the "prizes" is 1.0M in marketing for you app, and premium placement in the app store. Don't forget YOU are responsible for ALL taxes. What would the tax be on the 1 million dollars of advertising?
But Symbian, does anyone outside of tech circles even know what Symbian is? People know the iPhone, people have seen the commercial for the Droid, they know the BlackBerry, they recognize the Palm name but Symbian? Does the average person even know where to get a Symbian phone? Is there even a "flagship" phone? People can recognize the iPhone, a Droid, a BlackBerry some can even recognize a Pre, but what is the "must have" Symbian phone? No one knows that.
Outside US? We just call it "Nokia". It's that text on the phone that every other person in line has.
This is something that US-centric sites like slashdot and their users really don't seem to get. Nokia has near-zero market penetration in the States because it didn't bow to pressure from operators, who in US are gods of the market. They made their phones for the end users instead, often screwing the operator in the process by refusing to allow a permanent lock-in. US operators refused to stock such phones, and sales were crap from get go.
But result from having such phones in countries that have people actually buy their own phones in stores rather then operators? They have almost 50% of entire market outside US. People KNOW them. People were willing to buy essentially crappy, unfinished platform like n97 in droves, because it had "nokia" written on it. They're still buying them in fact. And that was a really shitty first attempt at making symbian touchscreen compatible. Nokia is a household name, something that everyone knows instantly, in line with brand names.
One other thing. Nokia's speciality has never been revolutionising. It has been evolving and out-competing on a price point. Apple, which never got any real traction outside US with their iphone is actually losing market outside US already, mostly to android. And that is because nokia is once again evolving the existing concept of touchphone into something they can make well, and then press the price low enough to kill the competition using their (on corporate level) legendary logistics. It's how they utterly butchered competition several times over during their existence in both cheap and expensive phones.
It's something they're fairly likely to pull off yet again.