Why a 7" Nook Windows 8 device is irrelevant and not the way to hit the 7" market

Posted by Axi0m on September 14, 2012 09:14 pm 14

I hope to god Microsoft does not solely rely on a largely US oriented book seller "Barnes and Noble" to cover the 7" market with a Nook branded device.

They are non existent on an international level, or largely irrelevant wherever they are present. Cannon fodder in light of Amazon's and Google's onslaught.

Microsoft badly needs to cover the 7" inch tablet market segment and it should be a hero Samsung/Asus/Nokia manufactured device that is "Surface" branded and is distributed throughout the world. They should most certainly not rely on some brainwashed Nook device.

One thing a lot of people don't realize and even some CEO's don't take into account is brand culture/perception and with Nokia they have a real problem on their hands! Whilst Nokia always made quality devices it unfortunately is incredibly strongly associated with times past, "original" style feature/mobile phones and overcomplicated, dry and outdated Symbian OS.

Whilst we tech-nerds know that Nokia has long moved on to bigger and better things this unfortunately is not the case for the average consumer. Hence the new and fresh Microsoft surface brand should be the only thing relied upon at the current time to get the ecosystem going and sales up, after which the mind-share would have spread and Nokia would be in the clear, rejuvenated image-wise you can say. Otherwise relying solely on Nokia at the moment to launch some kind of hero device would be a disaster ! No matter how good the device will be. Even with Mobile phones Microsoft needs a lot more than Nokia, a Nokia made but Surface branded Windows Phone device could be good though.

When I ask random people how they perceive Nokia today I typically get something like below:

:Nokia, oh they made all those old mobiles before the iPhone. They were big then.

:Nokia they did release some touch screen phone (N8) but it sucked compared to the iPhone so everyone forgot them.

:They got that hard to use OS, everything’s small and just hard to use.

:Are they still around ?

:They made some very good phone back then. Don’t know what happened to them now. Probably the iPhone killed them.

:They made good mobiles, but you couldn't use the Internet on them properly, now its all iPhones.