When Nokia unveiled the Lumia 1020 and its 41-megapixel camera earlier this month, it was a clear sign that the company was committed to giving consumers something that no other smartphone could offer. Now it seems that Nokia wants Microsoft to put the same kind of effort into getting the Windows Phone platform up to speed with iOS and Android. In an interview with The International Business Times, Nokia vice president Byran Biniak said that Nokia was trying to “evolve the cultural thinking [at Microsoft] to say ‘time is of the essence.’ Waiting until the end of your fiscal year when you need to close your targets, doesn’t do us any good when I have phones to sell today.”
To that end, Biniak said that Microsoft absolutely needed to do more to bring popular apps such as Snapchat and Instagram to the Windows Phone platform. If Windows Phone devices can’t get those apps, he argued, then it doesn’t matter how good Nokia’s devices are.
“We are releasing new devices frequently and for every new device, if there is an app that somebody cares about that’s not there that’s a missed opportunity of a sale,” he explained. “People rely on applications for their day-to-day life and if you don’t have something which I use in my day-to-day life I’m not going to switch… It’s not just about the hardware, it’s about the tools that are on the hardware. You can’t sell a phone without the apps, you just can’t.”
Biniak is optimistic that the companies will succeed in getting all the most important apps to the platform, of course, but he says that Nokia has to work to compete for Microsoft’s attention when it’s putting a lot of resources into Windows 8, Windows RT and the Xbox One as well.
“I don’t think there will be any [major app developers] we don’t have commercial agreements with [by the end of 2013],” he said. “And so maybe it’s not published by the end of the year but it will be published before the end of [March 2014].”
