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.”

Last week, Google announced plans to buy the Frommer’s line of travel guides from publisher John Wiley & Sons. While many experts agree that the move is a smart one for Google, the deal raises some concerns about antitrust — similar to those that surfaced regarding the search giant’s purchase of restaurant review guide Zagat nearly one year ago.

Last September, Google paid $151 million to acquire Zagat in attempt to offer improved local listings on its search engine — a deal that drew fire from regulators and review services like Yelp, which claimed that Google was giving preference to Zagat information in its searches. The Frommer’s deal — the terms of which were not disclosed — would give Google access to the travel guide publisher’s extensive reviews of hotels, restaurants and sightseeing attractions in more than 4,000 locations around the globe, according to Reuters.

“Clearly, Google is showing interest in content with its acquisition of Zagat and now Frommer’s,” says Wharton operations and information management professor Kartik Hosanagar. “Part of that is due to the opportunity to monetize content and leverage its brand and search dominance [in] the content space. [Also,] Google wants to show local reviews on its various websites [such as Google Maps] and faced some flak for taking content from other sites like Yelp and displaying it…. It responded to that criticism by acquiring Zagat, and now Frommer’s.”

Hosanagar notes, however, that the deal is likely to face scrutiny because — just as with Zagat — Google will have the ability “to give preference to results from Frommer’s over TripAdvisor and other [travel] sites.”

According to Anindya Ghose, a professor of information, operations and management sciences at New York University’s Stern School of Business, the move “would make Google a huge player in the online travel business, primarily because of the trustworthy reviews from Frommer’s.” However, like Hosanagar, he predicts that regulators will pay careful attention. “Google is now both a search and content provider, and there is an uneasy duality — some may even call it a fundamental conflict — between the two goals. Recently, The Fairsearch.org group, which includes TripAdvisor, Expedia and Kayak among its members, asked government officials to look closely at Google’s ability to use its dominance in search and search advertising to steer users away from competitors.” Ghose adds that last year, Yelp complained before a Senate judiciary committee that Google has abused its dominance in search, and earlier this year, the CEO of price-comparison site Nextag called for more transparency in Google’s search ranking process.

Such issues aside, Google’s latest effort to amass new content could be a boon to consumers looking for concise travel information. “It would make consumers’ lives a lot easier when it comes to local and travel planning,” Ghose says. “It [would enable them] to get personalized answers to their questions from an authoritative source. The future of online search is increasingly going to be about getting personalized answers and getting them quickly, on the fly. When one is traveling and they want to find a good restaurant nearby, they want an authoritative source to provide a descriptive paragraph that tells them in a personalized manner where to go. They don’t want to be scrolling down a list of multiple choices and doing the hard work of figuring out the ideal venue themselves, especially given the abundance of information on the web. The future of travel, restaurant and local search is going to more and more on mobile devices.”

What does that mean for the old-fashioned, printed travel guide? Will the format die out? The search company has not said what it will do with Frommer’s printed editions, but Stephen J. Kobrin, publisher and executive director of Wharton Digital Press, says that he “cannot imagine that Google is interested in Frommer’s print business. Given the ubiquity of smartphones and tablet devices, electronic travel guides make more sense than print. It is easier to customize for a given trip and easier to carry with you when you are out and about. Do you really want to lug the entire guide for Italy if you are only going to Tuscany?”

The rapid growth in mobile phone use worldwide is good news for marketers and service providers, but challenges persist in monetizing that penetration.

Despite the fact that mobile users now make up 10% of all online traffic, ad spend in the U.S. on mobile was only 1% of the total, compared with 22% on the Internet, according to a report released last month by Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB). Desktop Internet access scored over mobile phones in terms of average revenue per user (ARPU), the report noted: Last year, the ARPU from desktop Internet users was an estimated $49, while it ranged from below $4 to about $18 for mobile advertising at companies like Pandora, Zynga and others.

But advertisers have found desktop Internet advertising more expensive than mobile. The effective cost per thousand views in traditional online advertising is $3.50, compared with 75 cents on mobile devices, according to the report.

Kartik Hosanagar, a Wharton professor of information and operations management, says it makes sense that the ARPU is lower in mobile than on the traditional web. Mobile devices have limited screen space, and that makes it difficult to implement advertising efficiently, he points out. The nature of mobile usage presents another obstacle. “Most people access [data] on-the-go and are looking to pull information,” he says of mobile users. “Therefore, they are unlikely to linger around to consume other information/content that is pushed to them.”

However, Hosanagar finds significant untapped potential for other forms of monetization in the mobile space. “A key difference is that while most content on the web is offered for free, paid content and apps are very much thriving on the mobile side.” The monetization model on mobile will be based less on advertising and more on paid content than the traditional Internet, he says.

The KPCB report also noted that the global Internet user population (including both desktop and mobile access) grew 8% in 2011 to 2.3 billion, led by China (513 million users) and followed by the U.S. (245 million users). A Cisco report, also released in May, put the number of Internet connections worldwide at 10.3 billion at the end of 2011, and projected that the number will grow to 18.9 billion by 2016. Driving that trend will be smartphones, tablets and other handheld devices. India will see Internet traffic grow the fastest, followed by Brazil and South Africa, according to a Bloomberg report.

As all that growth plays out, Hosanagar sees “a big opportunity” ahead for Internet service providers, but he notes that there are obstacles. “Their worry, of course, is that they might end up as dumb pipes carrying bits. If so, their services will become commoditized and have lower margins.” However, he doesn’t see service providers facing difficulties in monetizing their investments in infrastructure with continued traffic growth in the medium term, especially with the increasing popularity of online video.

And while there has been tremendous progress in network speeds in recent years, the world has only harnessed a fraction of the Internet’s potential so far. “We are still having the same conversation we had 15 years ago, before the broadband revolution,” Kevin Werbach, a Wharton professor of legal studies and business ethics, said in a recent Knowledge@Wharton article. His comments came after a conference on broadband trends in April at Wharton’s San Francisco campus, organized by the school’s Mack Center on Technological Innovation and the Palo Alto-based Institute for the Future.

“We’re clearly at a fork in the road, but it’s not really clear yet what the branches are,” Werbach said about the evolution of Internet technology. “The most interesting questions are usually the hardest ones to answer.”