Nokia to become an Internet Company.

Ars Tech notes that Nokia has at last seen the light:

During Nokia's annual shareholder meeting yesterday, CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo seemed to change the direction of the entire company. "Our goal is to act less like a traditional manufacturer, and more like an internet company," Kallasvuo told his shareholders. "Companies such as Apple, Google, and Microsoft are not our traditional competitors, but they are major forces that must be reckoned with. Make no mistake: We are taking on these challenges seriously and aggressively."

Well, that is a very good start, people outside Planet Mobile have known the game is up for several years, but better late than never...so, the billion dollar question - how will they execute?

Nokia has reorganized into two reportable segments: devices and services, which is the sum of three divisions under the previous system (mobile phones, multimedia, and enterprise solutions) and an unchanged Nokia Siemens networks segment, also known as infrastructure. The pending acquisition of GPS specialist Navteq promises to take Nokia into new markets

Devices...ah. These are hopefully not the guys who let Blackberry, iPod and iPhone steal markets that should by rights have been theirs. I hope they have grokked (to grok here = to re-structure skills, organisation, culture, incentives etc rather than just rearrange the bods in chairs) that the Apple or Microsoft device is just the part the punter sees of an integrated end to end delivery service system ?

Its hard to give advice on Nokia devices that doesn't seem trite, but my overall feeling - as a 'Nethead - about Nokia devices is that they are built by people within Planet Mobile for what they want a mobile internet user to be, whereas Apple built the iPhone for what mobile internet users *are*. I think that is simply because Apple has been closer to internet users, and Nokia needs to let the 'Net culture dominate internal culture.