End of the year look at Nokia

It's almost been 2 years since Nokia CEO Stephen Elop announced the drastic strategy change in smartphones from Symbian & Meego to Windows Phone. The announcement was done in Feb 11, 2011 - a date well remember by all ex-Nokia employees like me. At the time the strategy change was announced all of us knew that a change is needed. Symbian - once the most widely used  smartphone OS - was losing it's appeal. Symbian's UI was unintuitive, execution was slow, and organization was slow and bloated beyond imagination. Meego was promising, but was taking forever! 

A drastic change was needed, but was the shift to Windows Phone - an unproven smartphone OS from Stephen Elop's former employer - the correct choice? Let's take a look at how Nokia has been performing financially, ever since Stephen Elop took over (third quarter, 2010) to today.

Nokia Revenues Q3 2010 to Q3 2012

The above graph plots Nokia revenue & net profit over Q3 2010 to Q3 2012. In Q3 2010 Nokia earned approximately 10 billion euros in revenue, and only 322 million in profits. Not the best performance for a quarter - earning just a few hundred millions for over ten billion in sales means that something needs to change in the company. That "something" would probably be controlling costs, increasing ASP (Average Selling Price of handsets) by focussing more on smartphones, and getting rid of businesses that were burning cash. 

Smartphone's affinity for open source software

I had been preparing for a presentation on open source software, and I came up with an interesting find. Here's the 2011 market share of smartphone OS'es (numbers from TomiAhonen Almanac 2012), with call-outs indicating open source pedigree.

Open source use in smartphones (Source TomiAhonen 2012 Almanac)

 Android
Everyone knows that Android is an open eco-system, based on the GPL v2 Linux micro-kernel. The rest of the Android stack is also open source, licensed under the Apache license.


iOS
A bit of a surprise, isn't it? Even for a closed eco-system like Apple's the use of open source software is pretty widespread. The kernel of iOS & OSX is based on Darwin, another open source BSD licensed micro-kernel. Wikipedia has a good article on Darwin.
Besides the kernel, iOS also uses a variety of other open source components, for e.g. OpenGL ES, Independent JPEG Group's libjpeg, ANGLE (OpenGL to DirectX mapping), KISS FFT, json, among many others. If you don't believe me, check Settings->General->About->Legal on your iPhone!