Nokia announced yesterday a relaunch of their Club Nokia online portal, now to be called Ovi, is on its way later this year. It’s designed to sell content and services and of course create a community for Nokia phone owners... declaring that "selling devices isn't enough any more".
Ok well you learn something new every day... Ovi means "door" in Finnish. Let’s think about what else we've learned, particularly from the walled garden approach to content.
AOL did it very successfully for many, many years. In fact it is still successful to this day with the walled garden approach , although that may be more likely due to the fact that its nearly impossible to cancel the damn thing... but that’s a different story.
I think things will be significantly different this time around with mobile, while on the surface the mobile internet may look a lot like the tethered internet of 1994, don't expect a mobile walled garden approach to succeed for very long, here is why...
Online life outside the AOL compound in 1994 WAS a little scary, connections were unreliable and slow, finding sites was more difficult you had to truly "surf" from link to link to find stuff and frankly there wasn't nearly as much quality stuff out there.
Fast forward to 2007, well let’s summarize it like this... you can attend college, meet your husband/wife, buy groceries, watch TV, get a mortgage and do pretty much anything else online. In other words the Internet has developed from the simple and scary unknown, to just an extension of many people's life, with tens if not hundreds of thousands of online companies developing new products and innovations every day.
Ok so back to Ovi... so I understand why Nokia would want to build Ovi. Digital content is a lucrative business and there are obvious reasons to try to strengthen and extend the relationships they have with their customers and make some extra money at the same time. It's also promising that the press release mentions enabling customers to "access their existing social networks" ... but let’s hope that opening this closet "door" to the Nokia walled garden doesn't mean closing the front door for Nokia users.
Ok well you learn something new every day... Ovi means "door" in Finnish. Let’s think about what else we've learned, particularly from the walled garden approach to content.
AOL did it very successfully for many, many years. In fact it is still successful to this day with the walled garden approach , although that may be more likely due to the fact that its nearly impossible to cancel the damn thing... but that’s a different story.
I think things will be significantly different this time around with mobile, while on the surface the mobile internet may look a lot like the tethered internet of 1994, don't expect a mobile walled garden approach to succeed for very long, here is why...
Online life outside the AOL compound in 1994 WAS a little scary, connections were unreliable and slow, finding sites was more difficult you had to truly "surf" from link to link to find stuff and frankly there wasn't nearly as much quality stuff out there.
Fast forward to 2007, well let’s summarize it like this... you can attend college, meet your husband/wife, buy groceries, watch TV, get a mortgage and do pretty much anything else online. In other words the Internet has developed from the simple and scary unknown, to just an extension of many people's life, with tens if not hundreds of thousands of online companies developing new products and innovations every day.
Ok so back to Ovi... so I understand why Nokia would want to build Ovi. Digital content is a lucrative business and there are obvious reasons to try to strengthen and extend the relationships they have with their customers and make some extra money at the same time. It's also promising that the press release mentions enabling customers to "access their existing social networks" ... but let’s hope that opening this closet "door" to the Nokia walled garden doesn't mean closing the front door for Nokia users.
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1 comments:
I see this coming when Nokia announced that they will be providing AGPS service through their SUPL server. This is a smart move for Nokia and may be beneficial to some small network providers especially in Asia and Europe. But, how would the bigger guys like Vodafone, Orange or AT&T reacts to Nokia since these providers already have build similar services on their network?
- E
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