Great piece on a misguided approach to a Services strategy where, despite the sea change in application interoperability over the past year or so, many are still choosing to limit their potential customer base:
Last week, the company announced Nokia Friend View, “a location and micro-blogging service”. Think Twitter with a map display. Yet again, it’s sort of interesting, but instead of adding functionality on to the slightly popular Twitter service, it’s completely separate. In fact, it’s so walled off that it won’t even import your buddies from Nokia Chat.
But the bigger issue is, again, Nokia seems to assume that owners of its devices are only friends with other Nokia owners. As a friend of mine put it, it’s for viewing your “Nokia friends”, not all your friends. Based on all these experiences, all I can gather from Nokia’s service strategy is that it’s attempting to take the walled garden from operators and replace it with a walled garden from Nokia. But closing off those services — especially social services — to non-Nokia users will ensure they’ll fail.
In a world where everyone’s got an API or a platform to leverage, integration is the name of the game, and that goes double for any social service you want to be successful. By limiting your social app by carrier/handset/etc. you’re basically punting any chance at achieving the interesting network effects that come from truly having critical mass.
Once more, with feeling: closed social services won’t fly. Even when you’ve got 40% market share. If you force users to choose between your closed service and the open service their friends are already using, you’re going to lose.
It reminds me of not so long ago when I had a Sprint cellphone and couldn’t send text messages to non-Sprint users. We’ve managed to get over that ridiculous limitation and hopefully we’ll be able to get over these sooner rather than later.
Read the rest of the piece here.
