In my comm 101 classes, we have discussed several times about the cellular phone market. We discussed about the current of strategy of Apple, and Samsung, its main competitor in the market. These two brands currently dominate the industry. But it got me thinking, what happened to the other phone companies, especially Nokia, a brand of phones that was extremely popular in my country when I was a child.

I researched about this and found an article entitled Crash of the Mobile titans: What happened to Palm, Blackberry, Nokia, and HTC. The article says that there are many reasons for this, and they include failed leadership, stubbornness to adapt, poor marketing, and success from competitors. I was able to relate this to my class in Comm 101 about Product Positioning. In the case of Nokia, as recent as 2007, Nokia still had 63 percent of the phone market. But, like what we discussed about the Positioning of the Leader, a leader needs to be willing to embrace change. New technology continually develops and that creates new markets that render older ones obsolete. When Steve Jobs first walked out with the iPhone (and together with it a new Operating system), he created a new market that quickly made conventional phones obsolete. Nokia reacted too late to this and by the time they began making their own smartphones to compete, Apple had already captured the market.

And this in a nutshell is why the old Mobile Titans, particularly Nokia, are now basically nonexistent.

Sources:

Miller, Mathew. “Crash of the mobile titans: What happened to Palm, BlackBerry, Nokia, and HTC?”. ZDNet. N.p., 26 Sept 2013. Web. 3 Oct 2013. <http://www.zdnet.com/crash-of-the-mobile-titans-what-happened-to-palm-blackberry-nokia-and-htc-7000021189/>.

“Product Positioning.” QuickMBA. N.p.. Web. 3 Oct 2013. <http://www.quickmba.com/marketing/ries-trout/positioning/>.