It’s WAR! - Nokia and Apple

This has been brewing for some time now.

Nokia announced in August that they would be launching a new music download service geared primarily for their music phones (N81 and the other NSeries). I visited the Nokia headquarters in September and was ushered into their demo-area where they were to do a full-on demo of their “Nokia Music Service”. Here is a picture of the released service while they were demoing it in September, and it is clearly a competitor to iTunes.

Here’s a link to the service in the UK (IE6 only??)

I played around with the service for about 20 mins while at Nokia and have used it some more the past couple of days. The selection of music is already quite impressive and their database of artists - which is a pretty neat looking device. a little thinner than the old N95 4GB, although it suffers terribly from the lack of quality software just like its predecessor)

Nokia is flexing it’s muscles and trying to strong arm its way into the music business which Apple owns. In August Nokia announced the launch of 4 new devices and a new web2.0′ish service called Ovi which would be a portal into its gaming and music services. GigaOm covered this back in August and I barely yawned at the announcement. The reason I became interested in it again a couple of months later is because I have actually seen people using the service!. Not in the US but in the UK. Europe has traditionally been a Nokia stronghold and continues to be exactly that. You actually see Nokia-fan-boys (and girls) roaming the streets here and openly professing their love of Nokia. Surprised?

I was.

Apple has changed the game with the iPhone (and people at Nokia agreed as well). Future releases of the iPhone will only make them a go-to company for young folk all over the world who need a converged communications and entertainment device. Nokia however aims to change that by providing the same complete end-to-end service that Apple is providing currently and the launch of Ovi and the new devices which they are unleashing in Europe seems to be their way of sounding the battle-horn.

Recently, Clayton M. Christensen (of Innovator’s Dilemma fame) was interviewed at the Business Innovation Factoy, where among many things he talks about the apparent path of conflict that Apple has placed themselves in due to the fact that they disrupted the market with a cooler/better product and leap-frogged the competition, however, they have now placed themselves in the path of “massive innovative energy” from the likes of Nokia etc. They will now have to sustain themselves whilst at the same time innovate at the rapid pace that their investors expect.

I believe Apple can sustain this pace of innovation and continue to increase market share same time in the mobile space. Do You?

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