Nokia Insider On Why It Failed and Why Apple Could Be Next 420
An anonymous reader writes "The former chief designer of Nokia explains how the company's success and its corporate culture stopped it from taking risks and left it open to being beaten by Apple. He now sees the same warning signs emerging at Apple. Quoting: 'I look back and I think Nokia was just a very big company that started to maintain its position more than innovate for new opportunities. All of the opportunities were in front of them and Nokia was working on them, but the key word is a sense of urgency. While things were in play there was a real sense of saying "we will get to that eventually."' He worries Apple is now in a similar place: 'Nokia became more of a maintainer, more of an iterator, whereas innovation only comes in re-invention and Nokia waited too long to make the next big bold move ... that is now Apple’s challenge. Apple has arrived at a very safe place, it is responsible for something everybody loves, so it feels it has to keep it going.'"
Oddly enough, this comes alongside news that a different former insider, Thomas Zilliacus (who was Nokia’s former Asia-Pacific CEO), has founded a company called "Newkia" in the wake of Microsoft's acquisition of Nokia. His goal is to take on former Nokia engineers and set them to building phones again — this time, running Android.
Re:Innovation? (Score:3, Informative)
Really? In 2002 my Nokia 7650 had a colour screen, a camera, installable applications and games, MMS support, mobile web browser. This was a full 5 years before the iPhone even came out.
Nokia was a key player in most things we take for granted on modern phones.
Re:Link Baiting This? (Score:2, Informative)
Apple's phones have persistent drawbacks that they have maintained over 5 generations now:
1. To charge an iPhone, you take an iPhone charging cable and plug it into any old USB charger. Fits into a Samsung USB charger without any problems.
2. iPhone does cloud backup and syncing without any problems. No need for any computer with iTunes anywhere near it.
3. Contacts and calendar syncing with commonly used products (Contacts and calendar on the Mac) works great.
4. Control of what applications can be put on your phone is counted as a positive by the majority of users.
5. I haven't seen any users calling the iOS user interface "clumsy", and "not much customisability" is seen as a positive by the majority of users.
Re:$245 Billion becoming $7 Billion (Score:4, Informative)
Stocks are like trading cards, once they are out there they are generally only worth what other collectors will pay for them.
Re:Fail (Score:2, Informative)
The real problem.
My last Nokia phone was the N80 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N80 [wikipedia.org]
Immediately after that, I had a t-moble G1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-Mobile_G1 [wikipedia.org]
There were a handful of apps in the android market.
The G1 was really a ton of bricks crashing down on Nokia who didn't seem to notice.
The Nexus one cemented android's place in the market.
Nokia's response? the N8 running a symbian operating system.
Even then, they didn't get it. Working for a year to release the N9 on meego.
Fail after fail for nokia. It was a slow death. I'm surprised they held on this long.
and the kicker, after all their fail, they still released symbian phones this year.
Re:Fail (Score:5, Informative)
Agree with your sentiment, but Guinness is part of Diageo, one of the world's largest spirits companies.
Also, luxury chocolate and wine/champagne are examples of Veblen goods. This probably won't happen in any significant portion of the smart phone market.
Krispy Kreme is barely profitable.
Apple doesn't need to make shitty free phones, but they also can't let their market share slip to Blackberry levels, lest they lose developers. Right now developers still target Apple first, and they probably need to keep it that way. If the ad-supported model ever becomes wildly profitable, then Apple should probably worry - but for now, people who penny-pinch on their phone probably aren't going to buy many apps.
Re:Link Baiting This? (Score:4, Informative)
The Microsoft deal was a done deal right from the start when they floated the idea to the board. Did it occur that you that every other phone manufacturer making WP7 phones were also making Android phones? Nothing stopped Nokia from licensing WP7 while making Meego or Android phones.. Well nothing apart from those platform support payments and the fact that a Microsoft executive was at the helm..
Re:Fail (Score:5, Informative)
suicide by thousand cuts.
by thousand cuts of managers bleeding money from nokia - and at the same time blocking innovation - in their games between each other.
fyi, nokia maybe had thousands of coders on their payroll but 80%(or more) of actual work(even things like handling weekly/monthly builds of their operating systems) was done by subcontractors - then they had layers that tried to hide that from other subcontractors(poorly, how the fuck do you hide it when they go to same fucking bar..). it made no fucking sense at all unless you saw movement of management to said companies some of who were given stupid amounts of money by intentionally stupid business decisions done by people who at the time worked at nokia(and later at.. well you guess where).
what was the benefit of their foreign r&d centers? fucking nothing, just another way for managers to get more money into their own pocket(the germany unit that did maps excluded, but iirc that was bought into the firm and was just another money pump).
conflicts of interests blocked innovation and delayed development and the stupid organizational structure made sure that designers were 3 degrees separated from actual guys churning code, because this worked out to the leeches benefit, so for every 3 coders, artists, designers or whatever there were at least 9 useless people with an agenda to keep themselves "necessary" for the process, mainly by introducing blocks - and think about the fun when all those 3 people, designer, artist and coder are actually on different contractors at different locations. the constant reorgs were a battle against this, but they never fucking got it right.
there were not just 1 or 2 companies but more in the finnish stock exchange that went up and down and worked as money pumps from investors - while their business was just pumping money from nokia and subject to change on moments notice.
who's fault was this? well the top 10 guys in the company of course - they were not doing their jobs. they were so bad at their jobs that one wonders if the secrecy agreements and finnish secret service checks for working at nokia were just to protect them from prosecution(for failing shareholders on purpose).
fyi nokia had an online software store for sw a fucking decade ago(subcontracted execution, of course) - then they redid it every few years but NEVER PROPERLY, it was always more important to decide who's company makes most money from it rather than deciding what would actually have been an usable store with decent license management(deciding who got to do that stuff was another big block and a biiiiig money dump for nokia with some of their sw choices. entering a deal where nokia paid money to give out free licenses? pure genius, right? yes, if you weren't nokia)...
money money money. the people in nokia treated nokia like a government organization to bleed money out of in a bad way, and in a sense in Finland it was not just a company it was an institution. ridiculously nokia also was for years the biggest beneficiary of government originated r&d benefits money - even when they had 10 billion in the fucking bank!
and every year this shit went to even crazier and crazier proportions. putting Elop in "charge" was the final nail in the coffin since he had no fucking idea what was being done where and why and what was possible or not - though he didn't need to since his agenda wasn't fixing the problems inside the company... just to crash the price enough so he could get back to USA.
Re:Link Baiting This? (Score:2, Informative)
I don't know what you're talking about - Nokia's early foray into what we now consider smartphones was with stuff like the n880 and n890. They didn't even *have* phone capacity. It wasn't until the n900 that they added phone capacity into what had been, up until then, basically glorified PDAs.