Finnish mobile phone maker Nokia faces new questions about its turnaround strategy after its win-some-lose-some performance in the latest quarter. First, the good news: The firm narrowed net losses to 272 million euros ($354 million) from 928 million euros ($1.2 billion) in the same period a year ago. Sales of its Lumia range of smartphones grew 27% to 5.6 million units.

However, the bigger picture eclipses those gains. Once the leading smartphone maker, Nokia is today a tiny player in that market, compared to Apple and Samsung’s combined sales of more than 100 million devices last quarter. Last quarter’s bad news for Nokia included a 20% revenue drop to 5.85 billion euros ($7.6 billion) as sales of its basic mobile phones – its mainstay – dropped by more than a fifth.

How can Nokia build on its strengths to regain lost ground? The firm’s top priority should be to focus on pushing sales of its smartphones in emerging markets, according to Kartik Hosanagar, Wharton professor of operations and information management. “Nokia already enjoys good brand recognition in those markets,” he says. Because low-cost Android phones have eaten into the company’s basic phone sales, it should look to sell lower-cost versions of its Lumia range there, he adds.

Hosanagar notes that Nokia “made a bit of a mistake by overlooking Android” and pegging its entire smartphone fortunes to the Windows 8 operating system. “Given its decision to focus on hardware, it need not have locked itself into one specific software. Having Android would have helped Nokia.” Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS power 90% of the world’s smartphones, followed by BlackBerry (5.9%) and Microsoft’s Windows 8 (3.1%).

Not surprisingly, the Apple and Android operating systems also have the highest number of smartphone applications. “Hardware companies often end up at the bottom of the food chain in a sector like smartphones, where software and an ecosystem of developers and applications are ways that different players set themselves apart,” Wharton management professor Saikat Chaudhuri noted in a Knowledge@Wharton article last August on the shakeout in the smartphone market.

However, Nokia has some untapped potential in its partnership with Microsoft, which is well positioned in the enterprise market made up of business users. “That is a market where Microsoft has continued to remain strong,” Hosanagar notes. “Nokia should look to leverage Microsoft and push enterprise sales some more.”

The Nokia-Microsoft partnership works well for both parties, says Hosanagar. For Microsoft, the deal with Nokia was “a really good one. Microsoft has not been historically strong with hardware, so it didn’t make sense for Microsoft to own both hardware and software the way that Apple does. And given that its old partner, Samsung, had started to go the Android route, Microsoft needed a strong hardware partner and found that in Nokia.”

According to Hosanagar, Nokia and Microsoft have enough incentives to work closely together. “I suspect they [will] leverage each other’s strengths and will get some growth for Lumia,” he says.

In announcing results for its fiscal 2013 second quarter ended March 30, 2013, Apple posted revenue of $43.6 billion and net profit of $9.5 billion ($10.09 a share). These compared to revenues of $39.2 billion and net profit of $11.6 billion ($12.30 a share) in its second quarter 2012.

In other words, profits are down — the first time in a decade — and demand for its products, specifically its iPhones and iPads — was up. (Sales of Macs were slightly below last year’s numbers.)

CEO Tim Cook’s message on Apple’s website is that “our teams are hard at work on some amazing new hardware, software and services and we are very excited about the products in our pipeline.” Yet in a conference call with analysts, he declined to give specific dates for those new-product rollouts, noting only that they will be coming out in the fall and into 2014, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal.

Apple also announced a big increase in the company’s program to return capital to shareholders — $100 billion in cash by the end of 2015, and plans to increase its quarterly dividend by 15%. Meanwhile, its shares have plummeted approximately 40% from their peak last fall.

This set of mixed messages from Apple raises a number of questions about expected performance in the coming year.

Operations and information management professor Kartik Hosanagar says that Apple’s earnings “were more or less what I’d have expected. Strong sales with clear pressure on margins, lower growth and a strong dividend plan. I think these four — strong sales, slowing growth, lower margins, good dividends — are a blueprint of the future for Apple.”

In terms of sales, he says, “there is no doubt that Apple has a strong brand and that its iPhone and iPad lines will continue to sell well. At the same time, one has to acknowledge that the kind of growth Apple saw for the past decade is really hard to sustain for very long for any company. So, we should expect that growth will slow down unless Apple is able to come up with a completely new product line — which it has done consistently in the past,” but which is harder to do now.

As for margins, “Android smartphones are a genuine threat and will place pressure on Apple’s pricing,” Hosanagar notes. “Further, Apple will have to seek growth by partnering with all the carriers around the world that do not currently support iPhones on their network. Apple cannot expect the carriers to subsidize the phone for consumers as U.S carriers have done for Apple.” In addition, “price sensitivity is higher in these markets. And Samsung and HTC will be major competitors in these new markets. So Apple will face pricing pressure as it seeks to expand. I think lower margins are here to stay.”

According to Hosanagar, the question is, “if growth stalls and margins decrease, how does Apple deliver value to shareholders? That’s where the dividends come in, and I think they are here to stay.”

Overall, Hosanagar contends that Apple “has been getting the wrong kind of attention lately. The company has solid sales and is highly profitable. Wall Street should stop looking for growth and margins of 2010′s Apple in the Apple of 2013. The market has changed, as has the company. Apple is highly profitable, and dividends are a great way to return money to shareholders.”

Hosanagar says he would be “happy to see Apple continuing to innovate and producing good products at lower margins even if that means Apple can now be seen as a mature company. Also, I think Apple is currently underpriced by at least 10%-20% relative to other players in the market. The market has over-reacted to recent news.”

Management professor David Hsu suggests that the Apple news “reflects both successful competitor entry into smartphones and tablets as well as Apple’s own slower pace of innovation. Part of the issue is that consumers have been trained to wait for periodic but somewhat predictable product release times. Most of these have been incremental rather than revolutionary advances in its existing product portfolio. Cook is probably right to delay product introduction in new categories, such as smartwatches and TVs, until they are very good, but the competitive landscape in all of these areas is heating up.”

Cook could possibly consider “more unpredictable product introductions, ideally in categories which reinforce Apple’s strength in its established platform — and which enhance the value of its existing product lines,” he says.

Lawrence Hrebiniak, emeritus professor of management, sounds a slightly more cautionary note. “When a giant shows signs of weakness, there should be concern,” he says. “Consider the facts. The company’s year-over-year quarterly earnings declined, the first time in a decade. Profit margins are down significantly. Stock price has fallen. Customers are buying cheaper iPhones that still do a decent job. Competition is heating up, with companies like Samsung and its Galaxy S4 putting pressure on Apple. Higher dividends and stock buy-backs may calm things a bit, but the fact is that Apple indeed is under competitive pressure.”

The necessary strategic thrust for Apple, he suggests, “centers on one word: innovation. Cook has promised that new and exciting hardware and software are on the near horizon. These innovations had better be. Apple’s edge has always been innovation and revolutionary new ideas and products. Investors and customers still demand and expect this. If Apple regresses to the mean and hints at becoming another ‘okay’ company short on innovation, new ideas, and the resultant profits that have always followed, things will surely get worse for the company.”

Meanwhile, “if other companies like Samsung take on the new innovation mantel,” Hrebiniak adds, “Apple will face a tough uphill battle to regain its prior glory and position as leader of the pack. The problem with being a great company is that management must keep proving it. Hopefully, the proof is in the offing.”

Sales of personal computers — including laptops and desktops — are at a record low. According to research firm IDC, global shipments dropped 14% last quarter — nearly double the decline that analysts expected — mainly because of the failure of Microsoft’s Windows 8 to gain traction among consumers and skyrocketing tablet sales.

So is the death of the PC imminent? According to several Wharton faculty informally surveyed by K@W Today about changes in their PC usage, the answer is no. As academics, some — including operations and information management professor Gerard Cachon, accounting professor Karthik Balakrishnan and real estate professor Maisy Wong — indicated that PCs are still the best tool for conducting research or analyzing datasets. “Tablets are useful, but I will ultimately still have to [connect one] to my PC/a server to do data analysis,” Wong says. “I think PCs are the same as servers. So, as long as I need to analyze big datasets, I’ll still need PCs.”

Balakrishnan adds: “For work like mine that involves extensive data analysis with quick speed, user-friendliness and reliability, the PC still dominates. The cloud/network system is good, but connection reliability and portability of data are still an issue. It is unlikely that my work can entirely be done using a mobile device like an iPad because of issues like typing, even if I move to a cloud system for processing and data storage.”

Several others indicated that using smaller keyboards and screens on mobile devices can be problematic. “My own PC usage has not declined at all,” says management professor Sigal Barsade. “The speed, efficiency, versatility and power the PC gives me can’t [be matched by] the other options. In addition, from a physical perspective, the smaller screens and keyboards vastly slow me down.”

“I have an iPad, and I like it, but the laptop is still my primary computer at home, and the desktop at work,” notes legal studies and business ethics professor David Zaring. “For us slow adopters, with predilections for typing and big screens, the PC has a great deal of staying power.”

Although her PC use has declined slightly, legal studies and business ethics professor Amy Sepinwall admits that “I loathe doing any extensive email writing, word processing or power point work on my iPad, and find even web surfing easier on my PC than on a tablet.” She adds, however, that her iPad now takes precedence in one area: travel. “Even though my laptop is a Macbook Air, and so very small and light, it is still bulkier than my iPad. And my iPad has 3G capability, so I am never without Internet access, whereas my laptop allows me access only where wireless is available.”

Others, including operations and information management professor Noah Gans, mentioned their use of mobile devices — such as the iPhone — outside the office, where Gans notes that his PC usage has not declined. Business economics and public policy professor Katja Seim also says that her PC usage has not declined in the office, where she does “heavy computing” involving statistics and programs like Excel. And although she is using her home PC less frequently, she doesn’t think that tablets and smartphones “are currently in a position to compete with PCs for such [computing applications], so at least in the short- to intermediate-run, PCs won’t become irrelevant.”

But for management professor Olivier Chatain, the balance is now tipping in favor of mobile devices. “My use of a PC has definitely declined,” he says. “Activities that do not require multiple or specialized software and a very large screen are more and more done on a tablet. For example: reading, email, note taking. PCs will ultimately become a niche product relative to mobile computing.”

Balakrishnan agrees that beyond the “extensive coding and data analysis” done by academics and other specialists, PCs will continue to lose some ground against mobile devices. For “web-browsing, Internet banking, word processing and presentations, I can see a move towards mobile devices and hence an overall PC sales decline. The decline can be exacerbated if the file storage structure/interface with the cloud in mobile devices improves.”

But will the humble PC ever become obsolete? “Yes, but mostly because ‘ever’ is so vague,” says marketing professor Christophe Van den Bulte. “I am confident that the PC will be irrelevant 1,000 years from now. The more relevant — and much harder — question is: ‘By how much by what time?’ Of course, that’s the kind of question that pundits make sure to avoid.”