Via AllThingsD:
It was a difficult quarter, tough enough to shake the confidence of anyone who has bought into Nokia’s comeback story. But CEO Stephen Elop remains undaunted. He believes Nokia’s fortunes are about to change, and that change will be expedited by carriers’ need for a third smartphone ecosystem apart from Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS.
“There’s a dynamic that we’re seeing and hearing about … and that is increasing concern amongst operators about the concentration of power that is landing with two particular ecosystems that are obviously quite strong out there today,” Elop said during a Thursday earnings call. “I think you’re going to see a trend where operators, starting in the West, begin to say, ‘We need a third ecosystem to really begin to happen. We really need to double down on it. We need to cause it to happen.’”
Nokia’s next flagship device, the Lumia 920, is exclusive to AT&T in the U.S. and Rogers in Canada to start. Even if Elop’s assertion that carriers are longing for a third ecosystem is true, it will be hard for Windows Phone to gain much traction if its best device is only on one carrier.
Consumers don’t care about how many ecosystems are available to them. People do not go into the store and say “I’d really like to buy an iPhone, but I think I’ll buy a Windows Phone so that there remains a viable third option in the market.” And it’s people who ultimately buy the smartphones, not mobile carriers.
Nokia’s in an incredibly tough place, one it put itself in through five years of bad decision. If Windows Phone does take off, and Lumias start to fly off the shelves, what will stop Microsoft, the Black Widow of the tech world, from releasing a surface phone and taking the profit for itself?
