 I'm Ross Dawson, a futurist together with my friend Goode Leonard, who is also a futurist. And in a series of conversations today we'll talk a little bit about Nokia as an illustration of the very rapidly changing world of mobile. So where do you see Nokia today, Goode? Nokia? Oh yeah, okay. Well, let's put it this way. I mean, I've tried all Nokia phones for a long time, and I was quite a die-hard Nokia user. But basically what happened at a certain point, I feel like Nokia did not foresee, didn't have the foresight to launch, for example, the touchscreen, which was a huge thing. And also, of course, the software has been a problem with Nokia from day one, really. And those two things have really come back to haunt them now, whereas much better, maybe not better, but easier with BlackBerry and of course Apple iOS. But the other thing is that the touchscreen really was a big step that they didn't foresee. They actually decided not to look at it. So it's a great example of looking in the wrong direction while something else goes on over here. I'm not sure that can be entirely blamed for this in a sense of, I mean, this just happened. So I wouldn't go as far as saying that they were blindsided, but maybe looking too much in one direction. So clearly one of the big things with Nokia today is their shift to the Windows mobile, Windows 7 phone operating system. And it's extraordinary. This massive global company which still has dominant market share in many developing countries around the world, basically dropping its existing platform, which until recently was Symbian dominating operating system across many countries. In fact, it had the largest market share in Australia until just recently. It was beaten by iOS. And I suppose the real question about the future of Nokia can be distilled into can it make this transition to Windows OS? And a couple of points around that. Windows 7 phone is, I think the correct term for it, I like it, I like the interface, but it is more suited to high end whereas Nokia's strengths are being in the current market anyway, certainly in the developing markets, lower end devices. So making that transition to pull it into that higher end devices when its positioning is currently lower is a big transition as well as of clearly all of the extraordinary operational issues of taking this and bringing in a new operating system, phasing out an old one across the universe that is Nokia. Well, I think that clearly the software problem has been Nokia's problem for a long time and been somewhat ignored and somewhat fixed. But if you now travel to the developing countries and you see everyone is like 85-90% of Indonesians using Nokia in India and of course China used to be but also Africa, clearly those people when they graduate to buy a feature film is not going to be in Nokia. And that is going to be a deadly effect on Nokia. This is the primary job I think that they have to do now is to make sure when they're graduating in Africa or Nigeria or India to the next level that they're going to buy one of those phones. If they don't do that then they're toast. And clearly Android is rising rapidly, not least because the Chinese manufacturers who are very efficient like to have a nice free operating system. Android fits the bill and basically the Chinese manufacturers are pulling out some very nice, very low cost phones and going out to global markets. Another point is that in September we're expecting from Apple the announcement of the iPhone 5 and there's much discussion that they will also announce a low-end phone at the same time. And my belief is that whether it's in September or not that Apple absolutely will release a low-end phone. It's almost an obvious thing to do. You can create Apple quality at a lower price point at this time. It may not be the same phone that if you've had an iOS 4 for a couple of years you want today but there's far more who are able to take that up. So creating both Apple at a lower price level and the rise of Android makes it very difficult in those developing markets. As far as Nokia goes I wouldn't be that concerned about Apple because I think Apple, there's room in the market for Apple to have their 10-20% market share. Apple is a brand that is not going to be the choice for everyone because the entire Apple system is proprietary, it's closed, it costs money for everything that you do. So then moving stuff to your computer, you have to buy Dropbox to move files. So I think for a lot of people that's not going to be an option. And so I wouldn't be worried about that. I think the main thing is about Android. And as I was saying earlier, if Nokia can manage to get people in developing countries to buy the next generation feature phone or smartphone from them, then they're going to be good and they have 12 months to do this. If they don't have the next 12 months to do that and to snag those probably 500 million people making that switch right now, then I think Nokia is gone. Well, Nokia's clearly got the history of reinventing itself from originally a forestry company a long time ago. So you would certainly believe it has the capability to reinvent itself again. As you say, it is a very short window to be able to do that. I think a research in motion is also a very highly compressed time frame to be able to reinvent itself effectively. I certainly wouldn't write off Nokia, but these are challenging times. The transition this year we're going to see will tell us the future. Well, one thing about Nokia is that I think that they need to also figure out how to disrupt something because if you look at Apple, they have disrupted the music industry. They have disrupted the whole, you know, the touch screen and mobile phone market. These things are computers, not just phones. I mean, they've done all these things right. So Nokia needs to get a little bit of disruption into their genes and be more aggressive about how they do things and also do their own thing, right? Create something that is so unique that people can't resist. Yeah, and I would hope to see that. The alliance with Microsoft suggests that they might not be taking that disruptive path. We'll see. So for more on mobile and the future of media, you can go to rostorsen.com or my blog. We've got a lot of resources and presentations on mobile and the future of mobile. And I have a mobile app. You know, it doesn't work on Nokia phones. It works on Android and iPhones and it's a futurist. So it's run by a company called Mobile Roadie. So just putting Gert Lingonhardt my name and mobile app and you'll be able to download it and look at my stuff. Or go to mediafuturist.com for more details. Thanks for listening.