Okay, I explicitly said in the very words from my post that you quote that the U.S. traditionally has not been the most important cell phone market. So I don't know how you come to the conclusion that I'm implicity assuming that the U.S. drives the global cell phone market. I'm just trying to look at the actual situation that has actually come to pass, rather than taking some sort of ideological stance for or against the U.S. (or any place else, for that matter).

Here's what the Business Week article said in full on this point:

It didn't have to be this way. There's no "implicit" or "natural" force driving things to be this way. But by accident of the iPhones massive popularity, which has completely changed the cell phone market (everyone is coming out with large, touch screen driven, more desktop like phones now) and by accident of the equally massive popularity of the Apple app store and the money that can be made from it, developers have gravitated there. The phenomenon exploded in the U.S. and for better or worse, the U.S. has suddenly moved from being one of the less important cell phone markets to the center of stage. The growth of Android, which is supposed to pass Apple in the next couple years, will only further compound this effect.

It seems like every time someone makes an analysis of the market situation and the forces that are driving it, which acknowledges how much influence the U.S. can have on it, people get offended because they assume it's some kind of U.S. cheerleading. I'm not recommending or defending what's happened. I'm just trying to think about the actual dynamics.

The idea that Nokia is somehow more virtuous or a good "global citizen" is deeply naive. When it comes down to it, it's not about number of handsets sold and it's not about population size and it's now about geographic area covered. It's about money. Nokia cares about nothing more than the bottom line, just as much as Apple. If Nokia engages in some sort of project like Nokia Life Tools, in India, to "empower" people in argriculture, that's just pure PR. They're trying to make people so hooked into and used to their products that they become indispensible. This is no different froom Apple giving educational discounts on their products to students at universities. Get to people early and young, get them hooked. Frankly, I think the insidiousness of the PR side of marketing is even more loathsome than straight forward advertising, precisely because people are duped into thinking huge corporations actually care about people. It's perverse.

And in the end even if Nokia wanted to be virtuous, purely out of the goodness of its corporate heart, they would still be effected by the forces that drive the market. Once everyone starts wanting a large touchscreen driven phone, iPhone or not, once everyone is hooked into the app store phenomenon, Nokia has to respond and follow the trends or they'll lose market share to those who do (HTC, Android, iPhone, Palm, whoever) and become irrelevant. So that's why what's happened with the iPhone effects everyone, for better or worse. I'm not endorsing this, I'm just trying to analyze it.