As you are almost certainly aware the app marketplace is the toughest and most competitive that has ever existed. Getting on for a million apps with around a thousand added every day. The barriers to entry are so low that anyone can have a go. This creates an immense problem of visibility, as in how do you get any when all the possible channels are clogged up.

Here at Kwalee we have a published iOS game called Gobang Social, which is intended mainly as a technology demonstrator. However we do need some players, so as to demonstrate and test the technology, but we don’t need a full blooded marketing campaign.

One of our solutions is this competition to give away an iPad3 to the most effective player of the game. In marketing terms this is pretty cheap. And it gives our social marketing some ammunition to use. Hence the video.

But I was looking for a proper business of my own, not just a way of selling my time. The ZX Microfairs were dead by then so I decided to start up a new series of one day events, but for all computers, hence the name All Formats Computer Fairs. This took the novel idea that business and home computers could be sold side by side, the market at that time had split into two parts that were totally separate and I thought that they would come back together again. Lots of people told me that this wouldn’t work and it nearly didn’t. One help was that MGT launched the Sam Coupe at my first fair. Working 100 hour weeks for years, often for negative income, the business eventually thrived. We ended up with events all over Britain, every weekend attracting thousands of people. The business was widely copied and soon there were a vast number of similar events for computing and gaming enthusiasts serving every population centre. This was for me the most financially successful phase of my career and attending the events kept me at the very sharp end of what was happening in both consumer and business computing. I ran the business as what is known as a virtual company with all the staff being hired as and when they were needed. This made it easy to add and remove events according to demand and once the business had stabilised it meant that I didn’t have a great deal to do. Codemasters had asked me back several times so I had a chat with David Darling and pretty soon had a job there in charge of communications, working 3 days a week. A lot had changed in my absence, it was now employing hundreds of people organised in departments churning out console games sold all around the world. So I put in place, developed and ran a press release system designed to produce 2 press releases a week, all supported by assets and released simultaneously in the local languages in every market around the world. This became a very powerful tool that pretty much guaranteed we would reach millions of people with our marketing messages.

At this time the Internet was coming very quickly into prominence. I both loved and hated this. The bad news was that it destroyed the business model of All Formats Computer Fairs. We had existed by providing lots of competing traders under one roof and the internet did this far better. So I gradually closed the business down as each individual fair lost its viability. The good news was at Codemasters it became possible to communicate directly and immediately with customers anywhere in the world. We were developing an MMO at the time called Dragon Empires and they has a community liaison person as part of their team. I took this idea and adapted it to work with boxed console games, creating a social marketing department years before Facebook and Twitter even existed.

But once again game piracy came very close to killing off my employer. The market consisted of the PlayStation and the PC, just 2 platforms. And Codemasters majored on the PlayStation because initially the games were copy proof so it had a better business model. However its copy protection was cracked and suddenly our games only sold on launch weekend, after that they could be bought far more cheaply from the many commercial pirates who had banks of disk duplication machines in their homes. Our income collapsed and we had to make 20% of the workforce redundant. To keep the company going we published a series of PC games: Prisoner of War, Insane, IGI2, Severence etc. But it was another one that was the saviour of the company: Operation Flashpoint. We had very little money for advertising so we worked like crazy at public relations and internet marketing. So it was immensely gratifying when we launched the game and it went to number one in nearly every country with a chart around the world. It is an utter travesty that this game was not developed into a gaming mega brand and that the space that it occupied in the market was given over to other publishers.

Eventually the Darlings decided to reduce their stake in the company and introduced a venture capital company to the business. These people parachuted in their own management team and I left. As did other key talent over the next year or two. I decided to spend some of my time using the internet so I set up the Artfotrums.co.uk online community and started writing the Bruce on Games blog, both of which were very successful. The blog has over 900 articles covering many areas of the business of making games and is one of the largest bodies of work by a game industry insider. Alongside this I also went back to game marketing consultancy and did work for a number of different companies around the world. One simple change made to one company website increased new business for them by 30%. But this sort of work is not satisfying because it lacks the emotional engagement of actually being employed by a company, of being a part of the team. So when David Darling told me he was setting up Kwalee I was quick to offer my services and very happy when they were accepted.

A huge problem in the app marketplace is gaining visibility. Many hundreds of new apps are released every day, all vying for the attention of journalists and the public. It is immensely difficult to get your app noticed at all. If you go to the forums where the indie developers hang out you can see that this is their biggest problem. As Oscar Wilde said, there is only one thing worse than being talked about and that is not being talked about.

There are two ways out of this that are commonly used, one is to throw money at the problem, to buy visibility. We don’t really want to do this at Kwalee if we can help it. The other is to cross promote between a catalog of existing apps on the app store.  But Kwalee only has one app out there, Gobang Social.

Gobang Social is a great fun game to play with your Facebook friends. We developed it as a technology demonstrator, to prove that we could do many different things that are involved in developing and publishing an app. Also as the testbed to create our turn based server technology. This simple, fun game was ideal for the task and enabled us to climb all sorts of learning curves.

However we do need to have players using the game in order to test and develop what we are doing. So we need to do some marketing to attract these people. And as we already know, this is difficult in an extremely crowded marketplace.

Our solution was to create a really wacky video and to incorporate a competition. In marketing terms this was very inexpensive indeed. And it has worked, it has done exactly the job it was intended to do. Not only that, the staff had a great fun day out. And we continued to build our brand image as a company that doesn’t take itself too seriously and which has a laugh.

And just for good measure, here is the product video for Gobang Social, so you can see what our game looks like:

Imagine Software was very profitable to begin with, the cassettes cost us well under 50 pence to manufacture and sold to distributors for between two and three pounds. We built up turnover during 1983 to a million pounds a month. So although the directors had nice cars the hire purchase payments on these used up very little of our cash flow.

Then in 1984 sales hit a brick wall and we suddenly had no income. It was as if someone had turned a switch. We employed quite a few Youth Opportunity Programme people and they told us that all their friends had stopped buying games, they were tape-to-tape copying instead. To double the problem, a number of illicit duplicators now had manufacturing equipment to counterfeit product to sell cheaply in markets.

One of our largest customers was the newsagent chain W H Smith. One day a truck filled with literally tons of our games appeared from them which Smiths told us were all faulty and they refused to pay our bill. We tested the games and they were all perfect, the kids were buying them, copying them and then returning them as faulty.

To try and prevent people copying instead of buying we tried many things, including writing a letter to all of the magazines, which some of them published. We wanted to bring the retail price of our games down but our big customers (W H Smiths, Bootsetc) wouldn’t let us. The “megagames” (Psyclapse and Bandersnatch) were an attempt to make our games copy proof by incorporating a “dongle” that plugged into the back of every customer’s computer. But we ran out of money before they could be completed and we went bust. Lots of other game publishers also went bust. We were particularly vulnerable because our development process was drastically under managed, so lots of staff created very little product which resulted in us being one of the first to go.

After Imagine, I went to see Barry Muncaster, the managing director of Oric and he offered me the job of managing director at their software house, Tansoft. He wanted to inject more excitement into the market for his computer. There were rumours that they had financial problems so I asked Barry if the job would be safe, he said that they couldn’t go bust because they were a subsidiary of a public company. Unfortunately I believed him and my new job did’t last very long. Working in Cambridge was very interesting because there were so many technology companies staffed by exceedingly bright people, but it was a desert for marketing. If we added some marketing competence to Cambridge we would have a British Silicon Valley.

At Tansoft I had met Bill Richardson of Oxford Computer Publishing, based in Chalfont, who published serious software for the Spectrum. Bo Jangeborg from Sweden was writing a graphics programme and Bill employed me to market it. But he sold it toTelecomsoft who published it as The Artist and I was looking for something to do again. Luckily one of his friends, Vic Cedar of Citadel Products, had a spare desk for me and I set up a company called Abbot to buy and sell computer related stuff using my contacts in the industry. Working at Citadel was fascinating because it was an early PC clone manufacturer and the workshops were always full of the very latest technology so I learned a lot about what made the IBM PC tick. At this time I started exhibiting at the ZX Microfairs held at the Royal Horticultural Halls in London, which were incredibly busy.

Then one day I saw a cheeky advert in CTW for a new game company in Banbury, set up by the Darling family, called Codemasters. I went up to see them and they asked me to work for them a couple of days a week. Within a month I was full time, in charge of marketing and I sold Abbot off. Back then Codemasters consisted of David and Richard Darling mostly managing product but also massively involved in the business side of things, their father Jim Darling (who today is the chairman at Kwalee) applying his vast business experience, sister Abigail running the office and Anne Pinkham ringing round the industry to generate sales.

Codemasters’ business model was to combat piracy by selling games at the lowest possible price. This meant that they were not worth copying and became impulse purchases at places like petrol filling stations. We came up with a very effective marketing strategy of telling the world that our games were full price quality at a budget price. This was very effective against the competition. Why buy a full price game when you can buy something of comparable quality for a fraction of the price? And why buy from one of the other budget publishers when you could buy a higher quality game from Codemasters? The £1.99 price point meant that we had to sell enormous quantities of games and that there was not much money to spend on marketing. So we concentrated our efforts and spend on marketing to the trade, with advertising campaigns in the trade newspaper CTW. To reach consumers we used public relations and went to the Lynne Franks agency (which the Absolutely Fabuloussitcom is based on). They got David and Richard on to lots of the weekend morning kids TV shows and into most of the weekend newspaper colour supplements. Within the first year of trading we had 27% of the total UK market by sales volume according to the Gallup charts, but in reality we were selling much more because we were selling vast quantities of games through outlets that Gallup didn’t monitor.

A lot of marketing effort went into trying to recruit other developers whose work we could publish. Andrew and Philip Oliver were the most prolific, churning out game after game, all to a very high quality. Most famously they developed the Dizzy series of games and today they run a large development company in Leamington Spa calledBlitz. Gavin Raeburn was another excellent game developer who is now development director at Playground Games in Leamington. Peter Williamson came from Scotland and created many titles. He is now Managing Director of Supersonic Software in Leamington. And so it went on, a panoply of young talent who went on to have a major impact on the game industry in Britain.

Kwalee CMO, Bruce Everiss, talks about his experiences in the UK games industry. Starting at the very beginning.

In the early 1970s I trained as an accountant in Liverpool, because of wanting to be a businessman. There wasn’t the plethora of business degrees then so serving articles for the Institute of Chartered Accountants seemed to be the best way of gaining a broad business-based knowledge. After this I became a Managing Director, running a computerised book-keeing company called Datapool Services, which is still going! In those days the only computers were vast and enormously expensive machines owned by government, universities and big business. So our book-keeping was done on time rented from a big bank computer.

During this time I started reading the two computer industry newspapers, Computer Weekly and Computing. Occasionally they carried articles about the amazing idea that an individual person could own a computer and have it at home, using a kit of electronic parts centred around the only recently available microprocessors. Then came news of people actually setting up retail stores to look after the people who were interested in these products. I knew that this would explode in popularity and decided to do the same. I begged, borrowed and stole the money to set up Microdigital in Liverpool in 1978, one of the first computer stores in Europe. Most British people couldn’t afford the expensive American home computers, but luckily we had a home grown device called the Nascom 1, which cost £200. This was a kit with 1,200 solder joints and which gave users a massive 1K of RAM to play with. We created a very successful business fixing kits that people had built but which had failed to work.

For rich people we sold the Apple 2, which had 16K of RAM for £1,200. This was a fortune in those days and used a cassette interface to input and output content. Eventually Apple brought out a disk drive that cost £425 and which had a capacity of 113K. Everybody thought that this was incredible.

Over the years we sold many other machines: the Commodore Pet, the Science of Cambridge MK14 (from Uncle Clive), Exidy Sorcerer, Hewlett Packard HP-85, Sharp MZ 80K and more.

Getting hold of stock to sell was problematic, as the demand was so much greater than the industry could possibly keep up with. It was not unusual for our turnover to double month on month. Our bread and butter was selling books, which we imported from America, to satisfy the thirst for knowledge. We set up a mail order department and pretty soon we were shipping stuff all over the world. We also set up our own monthly computer hobbyist magazine called Liverpool Software Gazette and used our extensive contacts to fill it with excellent articles.

During this time I went to America a lot, they were well ahead of us and were the place where the products and ideas were coming from. On one visit to Apple in Cupertino, California, I was offered their UK distributorship but turned it down because I knew we just couldn’t handle it. On these trips I also visited the early computer stores, such asComputer Components of Orange County. I noticed they had some polythene bags attached to a noticeboard containing a cassette (or disk) and a sheet of photocopied paper in each one. These were the very first commercially available home computer video games that people had written and duplicated at home to sell on the noticeboard. I bought loads of them and brought them back to use as demonstration software in the shop.

Eventually I sold Microdigital out to a large chain of Hi Fi retailers called Laskys for them to use us as a template to put computer stores within their shops all over the country. Then there was a phase of consulting. I did the business plan for a home computer industry magazine for Felix Dennis at Dennis Publishing, this becameMicroscope. I did a pile of stuff for an office equipment company in Liverpool calledDAMS and I did some work for Bug Byte. This was fascinating, one of the very first home computer game publishers in Britain. I managed to convince them to upgrade their cassette inlay cards from crude mono sheets, sometimes photocopied, that were the industry standard, to professional four colour printed cards with an airbrush image to represent the game.

Then, in 1982, one of my former Microdigital Employees who worked at Bug Byte, Mark Butler, told me he was setting up his own company with a programmer he worked with called David Lawson. I joined them as Operations Director at Imagine Software and took over marketing, amongst other things. Then Eugene Evans joined us who had been a Saturday boy in the Microdigital shop before working for Bug Byte. Eugene is now VP, Studio GM, Bioware Mythic, at Electronic Arts. Back then there was no proper video game industry. Most people who wrote games ran their business from home (often part time) and sold directly to customers by mail order. We decided to do it differently with a proper company with departments and offices. Our first problem was getting sales. I remember sitting with everyone else on the carpets, packaging up games to go in the mail and then filling rows of mailbags up. This was no way to go. So I recruited a couple of tele-sales staff from DAMS (something that was then new and which I had learned there). They were given every Yellow Pages for the UK and they rang retailers telling them to stock our games. This was the foundation of video games as an industry in the UK. They would ring every newsagent, then every electronics shop, then every photographic retailer, doubling turnover every month. Obviously once a retailer started selling games they would look for more to sell and would contact our competitors. So the industry moved from a mail order hobbyist footing to professionally run companies selling their products at retail.

After a while I recruited two more tele-sales staff. One who spoke French and German fluently and one who spoke Spanish and Italian fluently. Then we sold our stuff like crazy all across Europe. This was the beginning of the dominance of the British video game publishers in Europe. At the same time we developed our inlay cards adding more and more folds and on these we put development credits, company profile, sales material for our other games and translations for our overseas customers.

Games originally were written by one person using assembler software and writing on the target machine. The first improvement was when John Gibson was having difficulty getting the clouds to look realistic in Zzoom. We dragged an artist in and using a piece of graph paper he represented pixels and created realistic clouds. David Lawson seized on this and soon we were employing artists, then he extended the concept and we were employing musicians. Then we looked at getting away from using the target machines and bought very powerful 68000 based professional computers running Z80 assemblers. Then we started to move over to the C programming language.

So throughout the life of Imagine software we continued to lead and innovate in many ways. What we did was very widely copied. The reason we had to be creative was because nothing existed before us, we were the pioneers in many ways.

I thought it would be a good time, now the company has been going about 6 months, to give you an update on how everything at Kwalee is coming along.

Brilliantly is the answer, in as far as it can be without launching a product. Everything is moving along as planned. Overall the big thing has been climbing lots of learning curves. The development and marketing of mobile apps is a lot different to making and marketing boxed console games.

Initially the app market seems to have a low barrier to entry. Many apps have been written in less than a day and it costs $95 to become an Apple App Store publisher. However when you try to market and sell your product you discover what the true barrier to entry is. Basically the App Store is the most competitive market that has ever existed on planet earth. There are around three quarters of a million apps with over 600 new ones being added every day. How do you get noticed amongst that without spending a fortune?  What has happened is that marketing has become more important than at any time previously in the history of the video game industry. Marketing is the key strategic differentiator between apps. It is the golden age for the application of the full range of marketing skills.

The first thing we had to do at Kwalee was recruit our staff. You can see what we have done in the people section of the Kwalee website. David Darling was immensely, incredibly fussy about who he took on. And the result is an utterly fantastic team. But then if you have the right people you can get everything else.

The games we are developing have a number of distinctive features. Some of these have been used previously by other games, but they are not common. Also we are working around the freemium business model. As in many things we do we are on steep learning curves and it has been interesting developing our own technology to perform the features. Our first game (code named Vegemite), which will incorporate this, is still about two months away. Whilst it is an excellent game it has also served as our technology development mule and has given us a whole pile of skills that will go into future games.

From a marketing perspective the website is very important as we build our brand and communicate with the world. We started with a placeholder but now there is an excellent Kwalee website. We are putting a lot of content on it to try and keep it fresh and interesting. We are following a policy of being as open as possible and of showing people as much of the workings of the company as we can. Also we view marketing very much as a two way street and are very keen indeed to receive any feedback.

To do all the marketing work we have taken on some very keen and bright young staff who bring a whole pile of skills to the company. Lizzie Stabler is Brand Evangelist and her work involves dealing with the press as well as applying her special skill at making videos, something the website is already benefiting from. Joe Barron  is Community Evangelist and his work is to deal more directly with people by using social media and all the other tools available to him on the internet. He has a game journalist background which helps a lot when he tries to relate what we are doing.

Even with nothing launched yet we are very busy indeed, with a backlog of two month’s worth of weekly press releases and another backlog of videos that need making for the website. We are determined to do everything we can so that we have a polished marketing ecosystem in place when Vegemite is launched.

Industry veteran marketeer joins smartphone app startup Kwalee

From opening one of the world’s first computer stores in 1978 to writing hundreds of articles for his popular Bruce on Games blog Bruce Everiss has spent most of his lifetime looking after the needs of consumers at the very sharp end of home entertainment technology, with many great success stories along the way.

Now Bruce has joined smartphone app startup Kwalee ( http://kwalee.com/ ) in Leamington Spa. With company founder and CEO David Darling he is helping to form the core strategic management team of the business. As Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) he will be responsible for all of Kwalee’s marketing functions and has already had considerable input into defining the brand and the strategic direction of the business.

David Darling is delighted to have Bruce on board: “I have worked with Bruce extensively over many years and we have had a lot of great successes together. Bruce is an original thinker with a long history of achievement. His strategic input is based on unmatched experience and understanding, yet he is equally happy to roll his sleeves up and apply himself to the hands on graft that a start up like Kwalee entails.”

Bruce is ready for the challenge: “This must be the best job in the world for someone with my skillset, the opportunities afforded by the app market and Kwalee’s approach to it are boundless. We are seeking to positively differentiate the company and its products so as to bring our customers very special experiences. Over the coming months I look forward to like minded people joining the team, exciting times lie ahead.”

Bruce’s appointment fills just one of many key positions available as the company grows rapidly to become an interesting and exciting player in the app market.

ends

How many complaints have you heard about Apple destroying the video game industry? Competition is so high, prices went so down, no publisher can pay the development of a high quality video game selling at 99 cents….

But a few publishers, mainly newcomers, are making good money –which means it is possible. Here we are going to analyse market data to understand which variables make a successful application.

Application stores like App Store, Android Market or OVI have increased competition, shrunk margins, and up to a certain level cannibalised the console market. But on the other hand they have also introduced positive novelties for publishers:

* Zero distribution cost
* Huge market size
* New technologies
* More than everything: data. Publishers can monitor almost on real time the effect of price changes or, for instance, on-line ads.

Let’s then take the available data, and see how we can build a relatively simple model to forecast the success of a mobile game.

First question: when will a game appeal to customers?

1. If it’s good quality
2. If it has good visibility.

At In Numero, we monitor the Customer Satisfaction and the Web Visibility for about 4,000 applications. Let’s then plot the following chart: on the horizontal axis a number which ranks Customer Satisfaction and Web Visibility of Top Grossing games, i.e. it is “1″ for the application with highest quality and highest visibility, and on the vertical axis the Top Grossing ranking. Ideally, applications on top of the Customer Satisfaction and Web Visibility ranking should be the stars on the Top Grossing ranking. Below is the chart.
Although there is a certain correlation between the two variables, the result is not satisfactory. We could hardly predict grossing levels from this chart. But if we have a look at the table below (the five most visible iPhone applications, all with excellent customer Satisfaction) we see something strange: The price factor The two games with the lowest price, Angry Birds and Tiny Wings at $0.99, are grossing much more than the ones with higher price. We should not rush to the conclusion that publishers should always price their games at 99c, but we can plot a similar chart as above, where the index on the horizontal axis has a new factor, which “penalises” applications with a too high price: The linear fit (the straight line) in the chart above can predict better when a game with a certain “index” is going to generate revenues or not. It makes sense: between two games, both with the same visibility and quality, customers are going to buy the cheaper one. When my nine-year old nephew saw FIFA 11 priced at $5, decided to invest his little money in a $30 console version. If the iPhone was $1, he told me he would have bought both –one for the boring holiday trips, one for home.

Dynamic Pricing

The particular day (2 March 2011) data are referring to, no game was very close to launch. But we know that, for instance, Dead Space was a superstar in January, when In Numero was not yet scraping iTunes data. And still its price was well above 99c. Why did not last? Because fans of the console version, with a bigger budget than my nephew, bought the game during the first two-three weeks after the launch. After that period, the game is considered for purchase mainly by the occasional customer, who wants a simple game to play during a boring lecture, or during commuting. And this customer would just download the best and cheapest game in the top most popular games.

We then introduce a new factor, which penalises products far from launch, depending from the price. Or: if a publisher launches a fantastic game at $9.99, it would sell well during the first weeks, but then revenues would go down unless the price is reduced. (For a better understanding, try this simulation). Here is the chart: It is hardly visible by eye, but the average error on prediction has been reduced by more than 15%. After launch, prices have to go down. Not in the same way on all platform: where a game on the iPhone must approach $0.99 after a while, a game on the iPad can be priced higher, because customers recognise a higher value to the product.

Conclusions

The model can be developed further, considering the relative size of the market for each particular game, the distribution of the value given by customers to that game, and the distribution of prices for a certain segment –being the most expensive in a group of very similar games is not the best recipe for high revenues. But what should be clear, is that no “right price” exists –only a series of right prices. On the fast digital market, prices must be dynamic and value based.

As predicted here smartphones have grown exponentially in usage so that they are now the dominant internet device for large swathes of the world’s population. Certainly their arrival has acted as the mechanism that has facilitated the uprisings in the Arab world. And of course mobile phones are the most used video gaming devices on earth by a substantial margin.

Many many years ago (in 1978) I opened one of the first computer stores in the world, Microdigital in Liverpool. I sold Apple computers and even visited the then rather small Apple facility in Cupertino, California where I was offered the UK distributorship. So I have been a follower of Apple since most people didn’t even know that they existed. And I saw them grow to become the dominant supplier of personal computers in the world, until Bill Gates came along and destroyed their party, relegating Apple to the role of bit player.

Apple’s weakness then was that they designed and made the computer and they also designed and made the operating system. They lived inside a patent and copyright protected walled garden. Then Microsoft came along with an operating system (which was not as good as the Apple one) that any manufacturer could use on their computers. So suddenly Apple were competing against lots of hardware companies, each of whom was also competing against the others. And Apple lost, principally because they were vastly too expensive compared to the Microsoft based computers which had prices honed in the furnace of competition.

And now we see history repeating itself. But this time they are being destroyed by Brin and Page. Once again Apple has created a walled garden with their iPhone and iPad devices, once again they came to dominate the market and once again competition between lots of manufacturers using an operating system from a third party is destroying their business model. Currently the iPhone is the sixth best selling smartphone in the UK, the top five all use the Android operating system. But the reason they are beating Apple is not because Android is better, it is because Android phones are cheaper, honed in the furnace of competition.

Apple aren’t going to die just yet, the upcoming iPad 2 and the next iPhone will sell well off pure momentum. But the writing is on the wall, unless they radically change their business model Apple will soon fall back to become, at best, a niche player. Exactly as they did with personal computers.

Which brings us neatly to Nokia. Throughout the short history of the mobile phone they have been the number one dominant supplier of handsets by giving the customer what the customer wanted. But when it came to smartphones they lost their way completely. They too went for a walled garden with two different proprietory operating systems (Symbian and Maemo). And they thought that smartphones were for “business” and not for people. So their market share collapsed.

Now they are in crisis mode and with new management in place have made one of the most stupid strategic decisions I have ever seen. Quite simply they have chosen Microsoft as strategic partner for their smartphone operating system. Now I am not saying that there is anything wrong with Windows Phone 7, it is just that it is extremely strange for a hardware manufacturer to lock their future into that of a piece of software from another company. Nokia would be far better off being operating system agnostic. They should offer their customers a choice of operating system, then they would be back at what they used to be good at, giving the customer what the customer wants.

So I can’t see Nokia competing with the likes of HTC, who do as I suggest and back all the main horses, which means they are guaranteed to win. With the Microsoft alliance Nokia are pretty much removing their ability to compete on level terms with other hardware manufacturers. It does not look good.