STRETCHING
This BBC News piece on Nokia, titled "Nokia morphs itself from within", got me going this morning, primarily due to this sub-headline:
"Nokia is the world's largest mobile phone maker and with more than one billion handsets shipped is by extension the world's largest computing platform."
The author goes on to buttress this statement with Nokia impressive standing in the handset vendor world:
"Every day Nokia sources 329 million parts and builds a million phones in 100 plus handset models and distributes these phones in 70 different languages to 150 countries.
But as phones become less about making calls and more an extension of our connected lives, Nokia is transforming itself from a hardware company into something more converged. It's not the parts that matter but what use those parts are put to."
It even generously lets a Nokia spokesperson explain how this yet unrealized, and idealized "mobile computing platform" may come to be:
"We're not a cell phone company we're a software and services company as well," Anssi Vanjoki, executive vice president at Nokia, told BBC News."
The piece then goes into the various initiatives underway at Nokia facilities around the world, to make this "vision" a reality.
I wouldn't have had any problem with any of this if the sub-headline quoted above simply stated that Nokia "hoped" to become the world's largest computing platform, rather than the assertion that it already is the world's largest computing platform.
Let's state clearly that what they're really hoping to be is the "world's largest mobile computing platform".
This is an arena that a number of other companies like Microsoft, Google, Yahoo!, and Apple amongst others have been toiling away for a while now, and have greater dibs saying they're creating a computing platform than Nokia.
Nokia as impressive as it is, is a very successful global vendor of handsets and other mobile technologies. And it's been a great stock over the last year.
Their products are used across a range of wireles carriers in many countries, but they do not constitute a "computing platform" per se.
The BBC should be more rigorous in it's reporting here.
Comments