Yesterday I was in a taxi going to a meeting alongside a girl who was directing the taxi driver with her smartphone. When my phone rang it was Murad Ahmed from The Times asking for an 'instant comment' about TomTom’s warning as they reported a 19% fall in sales in Q3 and news of a 10% cut in their workforce.
My instant quote – See SatNav devices on the road to nowhere - was “I really don’t see much hope for stand-alone sat-nav devices. In five years’ time, I don’t think we will even talk about them. They will be as dead as the fax machine.”
Maybe I was wrong. I doubt it will take 5 years. Our own TomTom, bought 5 years ago, sits unused on the shelf. Our cars have satnav screens built into the dashboards. And, of course, everything mobile is on your smartphone. Where does that leave the once mighty TomTom and the others? Well, like every hardware manufacturer before them, they see their salvation in services. In TomTom’s case in providing the traffic information services to the very App on your smartphone that is causing them so much pain. But, as the SITS sector knows only too painfully, making that transition is fraught with danger, takes a long time and rarely succeeds.