America: The Not-So-Grim Truth

A relative e-mailed me a link to this blog post by Lance Freeman: America: The Grim Truth.

I take issue with several of the author's assertions. As examples, many developed countries don't have single-payer healthcare systems, and, while a lot of tax dollars go to the Pentagon, it's not 70% of them. The factual mistakes make it harder to take the author seriously. Also, people simply have different preferences. If you love musical theater, or skiing, or recreational aviation, or somebody of the same gender, you aren't going to choose, say, Singapore if you have a choice. Different countries have different attributes. The United States isn't everybody's favorite, but nor is Switzerland.

That said, I agree with the author in one narrow respect: the United States (and its government) are generally headed in the wrong direction. In the U.S. there's growing inequality, decreasing financial security, and increasing threats to civil liberties. Those disturbing trends tend to make the United States relatively less attractive as a place to live, work, and vacation, if you have other choices and other things being equal.

I'm an optimist, and I wouldn't bet against the United States yet. The world's oldest democracy has shown an amazing ability to correct its course.

R.I.P. Nokia

My first mobile phone more than 15 years ago was a Nokia. So was my second. And I've had some other Nokias along the way. I preferred Nokias. Most recently I had a Nokia E55, but it couldn't handle Japanese. So I switched to an iPhone 4 which could.

Nokia has now announced a new partnership with Microsoft. Nokia's new smartphones will run Windows Phone. Since the entire mobile phone market is moving to smartphones — today's smartphones are tomorrow's dumbphones — that really means Nokia is betting the company on Windows Phone. Unfortunately Nokia won't have any Windows Phone products available until the end of this year, and also unfortunately Windows Phone has completely failed to ignite any interest in the market. Google's Android, RIM's Blackberry, Apple's iPhone, and even HP/Palm's webOS and Samsung's Bada platforms are all doing better than Windows Phone.

Nokia's stock took a big hit immediately after the announcement, and the stock market is correct. It's hard to see how the affiliation with Microsoft will rescue Nokia. What has to be scary for Nokia is that Microsoft has been trying to crack the mobile software market for more than a decade, and Microsoft has literally been stuck in reverse. Microsoft's earlier efforts had higher marketshares than today's Windows Phone.

The trends are even more ominous for Nokia. According to IDC, and looking at the entire mobile phone handset market (including smartphones), Nokia's unit share fell from 37.2% in 4Q2009 to 30.8% in 4Q2010. More importantly, Nokia's revenue and profit shares fell even faster. Apple, with only about 4% unit share, collects about half the industry's profits. ZTE (who?), a Chinese manufacturer, came out of nowhere, primarily at Nokia's expense, and shipped 4.2% of all handsets in 4Q2010.

Another problem Nokia has is that its developer community is, understandably, incensed. Nokia is abandoning its own Qt, a cross-platform application environment which is widely popular with developers. Now developers who might want to create applications for Nokia's new handsets will have to learn a completely new development environment for Windows Phone, and the applications they've already created won't be portable. If developers have to re-learn and re-program their applications, why wouldn't they just move to Apple's iOS and/or Google's Android? It appears that's exactly what they are doing.

Nokia had to do something to change course. But if this partnership is Nokia's best remaining hope, Nokia is in big trouble.