Who are the biggest players in mobile phones? In pure sales I mean. People like: Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Apple, Samsung.

The leader, is Nokia. And a thought occured to me. Nokia have not brought out a Windows Mobile or Android phone. Whilst the rest of the industry is going mad for it. Why? The answer lies in some serious, daring and challenging business ethos.

In reading "The Purple Cow" by Seth Godin, he speaks about being different to stay in the game and that playing it safe is the new risky. Now, Nokia clearly understand this. Despite ridicule and repeated bad reviews concerning Symbian, they went and bought Symbian, the company and software. And with continued ridicule, they continued to build phones with Symbian. Which Seth Godin notes to be the hallmarks of a good entrepreneur, that success is always riddled with accusers and bad reviews.

More recently, with all the rage being Android (which really is a great OS by the way), Nokia develops the N900, which has an operating system called Maemo. Never heard of it? Neither had I. Maemo only works in landscape mode and has an array of functional ommissions. So why would they use a bad operating system?

Vision...

Nokia know that Maemo will develop a cult following. A group of people who will be so set on Maemo, that they will do all the marketing for Nokia, by raving about it to their friends and colleagues. This will be highly effective marketing as the "sneazers" (as Seth puts it), are clued up and passionate about what they're saying. In business terms this will save them time and money. But more importantly, it will elevate their product to legend status. A ground breaker, a trend setter. And if not, they'll just do it again with something else until it works.

This same theory goes for the other manufacturers I mentioned, except for Samsung. Samsung have gone from making ground breakers like the D900, to developing cheap copycat (taking high end phone concepts and making them cheap) phones to keep sales up. No ground breakers like the D900 of old. Even their Android phone, looks like an iPhone with Android. So watch this space, if Samsung don't bring out something exciting soon they will start fading into the space of people like LG. Making money, but no longer market leaders. C'mon Samsung...

The moral of my little rant is to follow your passion and not settle for the status quo. Do something different, something worth telling others about.