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Product lifecycle

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Bajaj's announcement to stop the production of scooters by the end of this fiscal clearly indicates that the era of scooters has ended. The product category of scooters has reached the decline stage or infact is on the extreme end of decline. While the Bajaj scooter has a long chequered history, it is important to see the transition in culling a product contributing little to revenues. Infact this situation came first in front of Bajaj in the early 90s when Hero Honda had gained significant motorcycle market share. Hero Honda is no:1 in India in the product still in the growth phase. Coming to online social networking, email... this segment has reached the mature phase.

Nokia's ovi service is offering nothing new. Just a package of online services bundled together offering nothing new. It also cannot replicate Apple.I expected a lot more from Nokia considering their development standards to be top class. They entered a segment in the mature phase, offered nothing new, ran a bunch of onlines ads on websites like orkut and the results are here to see. Offering a website supplementing Nokia users (which already exists) would have done the job. Why divert from the core competency ? You end up making a product, which is no match for the biggies existsing and essential create a burden for the organization by making a non-revenue generating (profit eating) unit.

Ovi's public release was august 2008. Their early buzz catapulted by the Nokia brand got a lot of users. But its been a decline since then. The trends since Jan 2009 clearly tell the sorry state of Ovi. There is need to redesign the service offerings by Ovi. In terms of value offerings, Nokia's Ovi is just a me-too kind of service.
The product-lifecycle is an essential step and hence needs to be incorporated in the Idea screening stage in any product development. This will atleast relieve the company of the costs associated with pursuing a bad idea.
Product lifecycle image source[ :http://www.trumpuniversity.com/business-briefings/lib/resources/images/graphs/product_life_cycle.gif]
OVI logo source:Wikipedia

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