Platform sunk (cost): What is the value of a quarter billion Symbian users?

The number of Symbian users means absolutely nothing, because they're not worth anything as they're not buying into an ecosystem.

The Symbian devices sold are basically 'done' -- they'll never improve, and the person using them is basically never going to buy a single app or a piece of content for them. A much better comparison would be total revenue of the Ovi Store against all the other stores. That means something.

I'll make this analogy:

I own an electronic door bell. It's made by a large multinational company who probably have sold way more than 200M of these -- but they just make widgets, and who gives a shit? That doesn't make it a viable platform.

The vast majority of Nokia phones running Symbian are just a door bell. They make calls and do the job, but that's about it.

I asked a few people around office who had stylish-looking Nokias and asked what they were doing with them. Turns out no one is looking to buy apps. All they wanted was a solid phone for phone calls. A quarter billion Symbians users who bring nothing, create nothing and buy nothing in the ecosystem is worth zilch, I'm afraid.

Nokia plans to ship 150 million Symbian devices still and updates and support continue for a couple of years, so it's not going anywhere in a while. With that user base I'd believe it's still a viable platform to develop for.

The value of them is less than 1 million WinMo phone users, when those quarter billion people replace their phones if Nokia doesn't have a compelling offer they will lose them to competitors. The article looks to the past rather than the future. We are on the brink of a revolution in computing, it's 1984 out there. Looking to the past will not give you answers as to the future right now. Nokia was once a tire company and before that a pulp mill (Nokian still makes the best winter tires), if anyone has the courage and conviction to reinvent themselves it's Nokia.

Symbian is sold on low margins. If Nokia was doing so well on Symbian why did they replace their CEO?

Symbian may have been a smart phone platform in 2005, but it is no longer. I haven't seen anything impressive on Symbian, and of the features that Symbian does have that others don't I don't see anything compelling enough to give up the App Store. iOS / Android / WinPhone 7 have mind share, and Blackberry has the corporate market which is kind of like IE, you'd like to ignore it but there are simply too damn many people willing to fork over cash to do it.