Simple business rules. When you spend money, you expect to get more than you spend back. The difference is profit and you want to have as many projects on your books that have this mysterious 'profit' thing as possible. Conversely you want to have as few projects as possible where the expenditure is greater than the income. That's not profit, that's loss.
I wanted to remind people of the fundamentals, because when you boil down announcements, projects, long term plans and even individual releases of games or hardware, it comes down to “follow the money.” So the announcement from games publishers Electronic Arts (EA) that they are establishing the mobile games studio 8lb Gorilla to create titles for the smartphone market should be of interest to all. Especially as it is focussed on just one platform. The iPhone.
For all the opportunities that Nokia can offer, from the eco-system of the N-Gage to the many tens of millions of addressable phones that can be addressed by the Ovi Store, EA have decided that they can make more money with iPhone apps rather than S60 apps.
Now I know that, logically, just because they are making a studio for A (the iPhone) that doesn't imply that B (S60) is a loss maker, but if you 'follow the money' then it's a fair conclusion that A can earn more money than B. Given that EA have a number of software titles in all the relevant markets (the iPhone App Store, the N-Gage catalogue and the Ovi Store), I can assume that they have hard data to base their judgement on.
And it appears that they've found Nokia wanting.
It is not enough to provide the tools in some “build an app store and they will come” mode, Nokia need to be both actively courting developers and indie publishers, but also seen to be doing this by the media and by the public at large. While dedicated smartphone watchers despair of all the “I just wrote this in my bedroom and now I'm earning a regular income” 'success' stories around small iPhone developers, it does keep that eco-system in view of the public, and drip-drip-drips the idea that there is money there to follow, irrespective of the true nature of the long tail in the app stores.
If building it is not enough, then you need to get interest going by other ways. Sony are taking this approach with their digital store for the PSP. While it was first launched with a physical game card (the UMD), it's been surrounded by the air of piracy (unlike the Nintendo DS, which probably has even more piracy thanks to the ease of access to the device software, but it's just not talked about). Sony have the Playstation network and are slowly (re)working game releases to an all digital format, and as part of that have been dropping the price of the SDK and toolkits, reducing the time required for apps to go through quality assurance and dropping a commitment to pre-confirm concepts of games.
Sony has kept a very tight hold of their eco-system in the past but are starting to let go now and both open up the system, tell people about it, and, according to reports, this has seen 50 indie developers sign up for the PSP, including some of the big names from (you guessed it) the Apple platform, as well as pushing for more applications that aren't just games.
This is what Nokia has to be doing. And because they're going to be playing from the back foot (ha - a cricket reference! - very topical! - Ed), and appearing to catch up with the rest of the platforms (and note that it's not just smartphone platforms now), the Finns will have to play faster, harder and stronger than everyone else just to get to parity. This is not an area that Nokia, or Symbian, or even Psion, were ever any good at (someone please come up with a few counter examples – we're struggling to think of any here at All About Symbian).
Nokia have built a nice big electronic warehouse in the Ovi Store. It's not perfect, and I'm sure that an American reality TV show could rip it down and build something better, but as with classic British Sci-fi and special effects, with good fantasy novels of faraway places, it's not about the construction and the bells and whistles. It's about the story.
And I don't see Nokia telling a compelling story about mobile applications that makes developers want to listen to.
-- Ewan Spence, July 2009.