Data plans were the killer
I remember having a conference in London around 2000 where I was pleading with Nokia to sell data plans with the phones like Apple was. For a reason that was not clearly expained at the time (I think it was something about cannibalising operator revenue) they would not do it so the Ovi story ended up very weak as people were too price conscious to include data plans with their phones.
Of course their relationship with the network operators did not help either in that the operators did not want to cannibalise sales of ringtones etc and their biggest fear was becoming dumb pipes where they could not get a slice of the app sales or be able to push new services they could control. Nokia was afraid of annoying the network operators so were caught between the apple ecosystem and the blackberry BES with nothing to offer aside from good but lacklustre hardware.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
