Tom-Tom came into the satnav market fairly early on and established it's brand well, through a quality product and effective marketing. But technolgy moves fast and the company should always have been planning it's stratey once the market became saturated and alternative technologies such as smart phones became available. Collaborating with car manufacturers was the natural & logical progression but may not be a long term growth area for the company as I expect cost reduction will come before value-added by the Tom-Tom brand for car manufacturers.

Diversifying into sports watches together with Nike is an innovative move but I imagine is quite a niche market unless the technology can be made available at an accessible price.

I'm surprised that Tom-Tom hasn't approached smart phone manufacturers with the idea of integrated software pre-loaded onto the phone. If Tom-Tom don't keep up with fast-moving market trends and new technologies they can expect their sales to continue heading in the same direction.

 Here is an article I found where are Tom-Tom are defending the stand-alone satnav device. It's from June 2010 and I can think of counter arguments for the majority of points they come up with http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/tomtom-why-smartphones-wont-destroy-our-bu...

Very interesting blog, must admit that my initial thoughts were that Tom Tom don't have a bright future. Smart phones seem to be a very strong substitute, and they'll only get cheaper/more widely available whereas the Sat Nav systems seem to have stayed at around the same price (and they then try and sell you 'extras' on top).

But then I read the article DaVe L linked to and I'm not so sure, they do seem to have a very strong selling point in the quality of the information they can provide. I think of the time I've spent getting annoyed at my iPhone & now HTC not getting signal in the car or being generally pathetic and the argument he makes does seem to make sense.

Then I remember back a few years ago when I'd bought a Tom Tom and within days of buying it I was coming back from Portsmouth up to Sunderland and (after it'd already unsuccessfully tried to direct me to various places I was trying to get to) then decided to have me driving around a retail park literally in circles when my fuel light was on and I'd hit the button to take me to the nearest petrol station!!

So part of me thinks the executive might be painting a rosier picture than is reality. Perhaps they're underestimating the ability of google to catch them up too...if one of their competitive advantages is that they have information programmed in from users, surely google could easier replicate this very quickly...and for a lot less money.

I think one of the main problems they'll have is, beyond developing a product that continues to be ahead of the market, is communicating this to people while convincing them to shell out nearly £100 on a device when they most likely will have a device in their pocket that does an equally good job, as Steve rightly pointed out.

Finally, the Nike watch definitely seems more of a gimmick than anything else...a pretty cool gimmick though, wonder if it could tell me how much ground I cover in 5-a-side games!!