The stated reason for the reductions: An effort to better align the company’s operations with its focused portfolio of future products. Seems Nokia (NOK), which typically spews out 50 or so new phones a year, many of them unremarkable, plans to concentrate on a smaller number of more “iconic” devices going forward.

In other words, Nokia is going to work a little harder to catch up with Apple (AAPL), which has really shown up the company these past few years. As Bengt Nordstrom, chief executive of telecom consultant Northstream, told Reuters earlier this year: “As much as iPhone and App Store is a success for Apple, it’s a humiliating defeat for the rest of the mobile industry. Twenty years of efforts from operators and vendors to create mobile applications that customers like is overtaken in a heartbeat by someone that never done it before.”

Early criticisms point out the store’s paltry selection, slow performance and sign-in errors, disappearing apps and a less-than-intuitive UI. Nokia blamed the store’s unresponsiveness on unusually high traffic and did its best to address the problem, but even those efforts by its own admission resulted in only “intermittent performance improvements.”

Not the sort of grand opening you hope for when your smartphone market share has been tumbling, largely thanks to the growth of the iPhone and BlackBerry and their respective app stores. Obviously, thin selection and unreliable performance are poor foundations for an online bazaar, especially one so late and so long in coming. Certainly, it makes for a poor comparison to Apple’s App Store, which has already shown up an industry of which it wasn’t even a member a few years ago. As Bengt Nordstrom, chief executive of telecom consultant Northstream, said when Ovi was first announced, “As much as iPhone and App Store is a success for Apple, it’s a humiliating defeat for the rest of the mobile industry. Twenty years of efforts from operators and vendors to create mobile applications that customers like is overtaken in a heartbeat by someone that’s never done it before.”

And now this stumbling launch for Nokia (NOK). Growing pains? I suppose. The Ovi store is being made available to an estimated 50 million Nokia devices globally and it’s enhanced with “social location dynamics” to show you relevant applications and those that your friends have bought, so perhaps early missteps like these are to be expected. Don’t seem to recall Apple (AAPL) or RIM (RIMM) suffering from them, though.

Forrester analyst Thomas Husson says that the success of the Ovi Store depends on, among other things, “the quality of the execution…how easily can the content be accessed, how large is the catalogue of content, how simple is the new merchandizing approach?” Sadly for Nokia, the answers to these questions–at least initially–are not the best.

Early criticisms point out the store’s paltry selection, slow performance and sign-in errors, disappearing apps and a less-than-intuitive UI. Nokia blamed the store’s unresponsiveness on unusually high traffic and did its best to address the problem, but even those efforts by its own admission resulted in only “intermittent performance improvements.”

Not the sort of grand opening you hope for when your smartphone market share has been tumbling, largely thanks to the growth of the iPhone and BlackBerry and their respective app stores. Obviously, thin selection and unreliable performance are poor foundations for an online bazaar, especially one so late and so long in coming. Certainly, it makes for a poor comparison to Apple’s App Store, which has already shown up an industry of which it wasn’t even a member a few years ago. As Bengt Nordstrom, chief executive of telecom consultant Northstream, said when Ovi was first announced, “As much as iPhone and App Store is a success for Apple, it’s a humiliating defeat for the rest of the mobile industry. Twenty years of efforts from operators and vendors to create mobile applications that customers like is overtaken in a heartbeat by someone that’s never done it before.”

And now this stumbling launch for Nokia (NOK). Growing pains? I suppose. The Ovi store is being made available to an estimated 50 million Nokia devices globally and it’s enhanced with “social location dynamics” to show you relevant applications and those that your friends have bought, so perhaps early missteps like these are to be expected. Don’t seem to recall Apple (AAPL) or RIM (RIMM) suffering from them, though.

Forrester analyst Thomas Husson says that the success of the Ovi Store depends on, among other things, “the quality of the execution…how easily can the content be accessed, how large is the catalogue of content, how simple is the new merchandizing approach?” Sadly for Nokia, the answers to these questions–at least initially–are not the best.

Nokia, the world’s largest maker of mobile phones, will soon be just a tad smaller. This morning the company said it will sack a further 450 employees in its mobile services business, a division charged with developing and delivering the Ovi-branded Internet services tied to Nokia devices. Seems the still souring economy has undermined Nokia’s (NOK) ambitions in that area, and Apple’s (AAPL) success with the iPhone App Store has inspired it to look to third-party developers to bring new applications to its devices. Said Niklas Savander, Nokia’s executive vice president of services, “The planned changes are aimed at improving and simplifying the user experience of Nokia services, increasing opportunities for third party developers and other partners to create compelling services, and accelerating the development of a common platform for Nokia’s different service offerings.”

In other words, the planned changes are aimed at catching up with Apple. “As much as iPhone and App Store is a success for Apple, it’s a humiliating defeat for the rest of the mobile industry,” Bengt Nordstrom, chief executive of telecom consultant Northstream, told Reuters. “Twenty years of efforts from operators and vendors to create mobile applications that customers like is overtaken in a heartbeat by someone that never done it before.”

Overall, Nokia’s announcement is good news for mobile app developers, bad news for the ones handling them internally at Nokia. It’s not as if we didn’t see this coming, though. The econalypse has been having deleterious effects on Nokia. In January, the company warned that world-wide sales in ’09 are likely to fall 10 percent year-to-year. As CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo put it at the time, “the macro environment is challenging and, we believe, will remain so in 2009.”

Nokia, the world’s largest maker of mobile phones, will soon be just a tad smaller. This morning the company said it will sack a further 450 employees in its mobile services business, a division charged with developing and delivering the Ovi-branded Internet services tied to Nokia devices. Seems the still souring economy has undermined Nokia’s (NOK) ambitions in that area, and Apple’s (AAPL) success with the iPhone App Store has inspired it to look to third-party developers to bring new applications to its devices. Said Niklas Savander, Nokia’s executive vice president of services, “The planned changes are aimed at improving and simplifying the user experience of Nokia services, increasing opportunities for third party developers and other partners to create compelling services, and accelerating the development of a common platform for Nokia’s different service offerings.”

In other words, the planned changes are aimed at catching up with Apple. “As much as iPhone and App Store is a success for Apple, it’s a humiliating defeat for the rest of the mobile industry,” Bengt Nordstrom, chief executive of telecom consultant Northstream, told Reuters. “Twenty years of efforts from operators and vendors to create mobile applications that customers like is overtaken in a heartbeat by someone that never done it before.”

Overall, Nokia’s announcement is good news for mobile app developers, bad news for the ones handling them internally at Nokia. It’s not as if we didn’t see this coming, though. The econalypse has been having deleterious effects on Nokia. In January, the company warned that world-wide sales in ’09 are likely to fall 10 percent year-to-year. As CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo put it at the time, “the macro environment is challenging and, we believe, will remain so in 2009.”