News out of Nokia yesterday was that HERE CEO, Michael Halbherr would be leaving to pursue “entrepreneurial activities”.  It is sad that the official press release is usually the least credible.  A more likely explanation is that Halbherr left due to disagreement with new Nokia chief Rajeev Suri over the direction of HERE. Specifically, it sounds like Michael wanted to push HERE into new consumer markets while Suri wanted to retrench and focus on traditional NAVTEQ markets, especially automotive.

Given HERE’s lack of profitability and the uncertainty of a consumer market dominated by Google Maps, Suri’s position sounds reasonable. HERE can focus on what they know, sell to a market they dominate and differentiate by pushing into high accuracy maps that will be needed for ADAS and self-driving cars. The other path involves competing with a mapping behemoth with amazing capabilities and the rather unpleasant habit of giving all the resulting maps away for free. Good move, right?

Wrong. If that’s the plan, Nokia is driving into a dead end alley.  When they get to the high accuracy automotive mapping nirvana they hope will save them, they’ll find that Google is already there with better data and a better business model.  What do you think all those StreetView cars are collecting? They won’t have the business model to compete there.  Their automotive customers are slowly bowing to the inevitable loss of control of the driver experience and HERE will see customers move away and margins drop.  And they won’t be able to move anywhere else. Open mapping sources will have taken the consumer business and be closing the gap in auto as well.

HERE will look better in the short term (focus, profits) but will die in the longer term. The least they could do is to change the name back to NAVTEQ 2.0 so we don’t have to call it by the awful HERE name.

Maps aren’t just about accurate descriptions of physical space. Not anymore. Maps are just a template for displaying data and increasingly for collecting information about those places and how people move through them. I thought that was where HERE was going with recent acquisitions of Medio and Desti. Their reach though Yahoo!, Amazon, Microsoft and others gives them hundreds of millions of users with data to feed that engine.