It sounds to me that they are getting ahead of the downturn in Europe and growth in Asia. Europe used to be their strongest market, but now not as much, they want their manufacturing close to customers and customer growth.

A lot of the losses were at Navteq, and while this was an expensive aquisition and a point of difference for Nokia, unfortunately google have devalued mapping to the point where its expected for free. If I were them, I’d probably also be looking to direct my capital to growth businesses, not declining, loss-making ones.

I LOVE the N9, but it should either have stayed a prototype, or they should have committed. In my opinion they have kept it out of their key markets because of fragmentation concerns. The N9 just doesn’t make sense given their strategic directions unless they can transition (via Qt) the symbian ecosystem to meego/maemo/harmattan (or whatever its called) and keep it for the low end. Maybe their new OS will be based on this model, I hope so.

The reality is that this is a business, and businesses are there to server their customers, but unfortunately consumers are fickle … and trends change faster than companies can, so its extremely important for companies to be ahead of trends. Killing Symbian and Meego are smart business decisions, even if its bad for the tech community in general.