Nokia Ovi

» see ovi.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

ovi was nokia's late attempt at being a services brand. the announcement was 29 august 2007 at the go play event in london, two months after the iphone went on sale in the us. the bet was that nokia could keep selling the most handsets in the world and also own the services layer that sat on top of them, the way apple was about to do with itunes-on-iphone.

in turkey nokia hardware was the default phone shape from about 2002 through 2010. every dolmuş driver had a 3310 or a 6230, every university friend had an n70 or an n95, and msn lived on the symbian client through s60v3 (close enough). ovi was the layer above that, a name we mostly encountered as a logo on the menu screen or a website we never logged into. ovi maps was the part i actually used, mostly because nokia made it free for navigation in january 2010 to compete with google maps. the rest of the suite was familiar as a logo, ovi store and ovi mail and the comes-with-music phones, but i never put a credit card behind any of it.

on 16 may 2011 nokia announced the ovi brand was being retired. by then stephen elop had already published the burning platform memo and the alliance with microsoft was public, and ovi as a separate brand from nokia did not survive the brand-clarity push. ovi store became nokia store, ovi maps became nokia maps. the rebrand started in july 2011 and finished by the end of 2012. then microsoft bought the devices unit in 2014, retired most of the underlying services across 2014 and 2015, and the door that ovi was named for closed.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what it was supposed to be ~

ovi was the answer to the question "what does nokia own above the handset". the company already had a 40 percent global handset share when ovi launched, and the bet was that the services brand could become a recurring-revenue layer that did not depend on the next phone cycle. ovi store would compete with the still-new apple app store. ovi maps was the part of the suite that actually got there, because nokia owned navteq and could make navigation free in january 2010 in a way google maps could not match on a feature phone.

~ the iphone problem ~

the awkward thing about ovi was the timing. august 2007 was two months after the iphone went on sale and three months before android was first announced. nokia was building a services umbrella for a handset model the world was about to stop wanting. comes with music, the ovi music bundle that gave you a year of unlimited downloads with the price of a nokia phone, launched in late 2008 and then quietly closed in country after country through 2011 because the labels would not renew the licensing terms. by the time ovi was at its operational best in 2010, the consumer story had already moved to ios and android.

~ what it left behind ~

ovi maps survived the rebrand. nokia sold the location services unit to a consortium of german carmakers in 2015 and the maps lived on as here maps. the rest of the suite died slower. store apps were redownloadable for a short window after the january 2015 nokia store shutdown, then the storefront closed. ovi mail accounts were migrated to yahoo, which was its own kind of grave. the brand died in 2011 but the underlying products kept retiring one at a time for the next four years, the way symbian itself did.

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