By Mark Halper
Time Magazine
time.comIf Apple encroached on Nokia's turf when it introduced its much-heralded iPhone, Nokia is striking back by taking aim at Apple's dominance in the digital music biz. On Wednesday Aug. 29, in a gala event in London, Nokia CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo announced that his company will soon fire up its long-anticipated music downloading service.
The Nokia Music Store will go live later this year as a crucial component of a new Nokia website called Ovi. Competing against downloading sites like Apple's iTunes, it will let consumers download millions of songs directly onto their PCs and Macs or, unlike iTunes, straight onto their phones via mobile airwaves.
But if Apple CEO Steve Jobs found Nokia's announcement interesting, there's little doubt that executives at the world's mobile phone networks found it positively riveting. Nokia's download site marks a radical departure from the traditional way of doing things in which handset makers like Nokia have to sell their phones to mobile operators like Vodafone, Orange, T-Mobile and 02.
And those companies, in turn, sell services — not just voice calls but increasingly things like ring tones, music and other forms of entertainment — to consumers. In listening to Kallasvuo on Wednesday though, it was clear that Nokia is messing with the status quo. "This world does not work the way the old world worked," he said, explaining that Nokia is now an Internet company. "We have begun expanding our business beyond hardware to include services and software."
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