Mike Elgan: Why Nokia is toast
computerworld.com
computerworld.com
Nokia's issue isn't strategic, it's a huge problem with execution. Series-60 succeeded as much as it did in spite of itself. I was personally involved in (as an outside company) several S60 projects that simply failed. The number of manufacturers who took a run at making a S60 phone is a really impressive list. The number who succeeded at it, is far less so.
I've been confident in predicting widespread for success with Android largely because I see the parallels between S60 and what Android is doing. The difference is that Google appears to have the talent to actually execute on the vision. They're pushing a quality product forward with the agility to compete favorably with Apple, RIM, and everyone else.
If Nokia fails it will be a failure of a broken engineering culture. The lack of apps on their platform can be placed firmly at the feet of their development platform. My failed startup involved an attempt to build a S60 app. It took my partner and I 6 months to get the thing built (it wasn't a large or particularly complicated app) thanks to all of the idiosyncrasies of that platform. This despite having spent the previous 5 years working with S60 on a much larger and more complicated project (which was also a nightmare).
To succeed in the mobile space you need a strong platform, with strong UI concepts, and strong developer tools that help them get their job done quickly. Apple and Google both have that, Nokia does not.
The Nokia 1100 [...] is a very simple GSM mobile phone produced by Nokia [...] the world's best selling phone handset as well as the best selling consumer electronics device in the world. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_1100)
IMO the author has a point about the smartphones, but completely misses the mark here.
It's very possible that low-end smartphones will take over the dumphone market soon and/or that cheap Chinese phones will overrun it, but what the author proposes doesn't address that either.
Unlikely. There's a few elephants in the room here, the biggest being battery time. You'd be surprised how many people would give you a blank stare if you told them their next phone needs to re-charged almost every night, in exchange for being able to play angry birds...
Also take a close look at the issues of your (presumably) high-end smartphone. Now, when was the last time you tried to use a low-end smartphone?
Reminds me of portable (laptop) computers.
Weak processors. Awful graphics performance. Heavy. Awful battery life. You'd be nuts to make one of these your sole computer.
Until those problems mostly went away. Today, most computers sold are laptops.
I think it's unwise to assume that the drawbacks of current smartphones are permanent.
Eventually we'll be moving around in flying cars. But not in the next few years.
There's no fundamental reason Android devices won't emerge that have awesome (or at least, way better) battery life. We haven't seen demand for that in western markets simply because the high end phone space is dominated by flashy hardware and high end features. Android is very flexible and scales down to surprisingly low end device specs.
You can't read it in bright sunlight, you can't make calls "blind" because there's no keypad/tactile feedback, and even my high-end android has nasty input-lags - whereas all my old dumbphones respond instantly to any keypress.
Sure, you could cut out the touchscreen and still run android but that's hardly a smartphone then...
However, I'm not so sure that this thinking is any good in the long run for Nokia, everybody says that company X should emulate Apple, it is just the easy thing to suggest because Apple is currently winning.
That's like saying "it's the easy thing to suggest that Johnny will only win the foot race by emulating Jimmy, who is running instead of taking a bath then playing video games." As though there's more nuance to it than that.
Apple is doing what is necessary to win. If someone says a company should emulate Apple, it's a shorthand for saying that Apple has consistently won in the markets they've entered for the last decade and their approach is excellent for selling consumer electronics.
Apple wins through focus. Is there any argument against having focus? What is the benefit of avoiding focus and smearing your efforts around a dozen different projects?
Apple wins through quality. What would be the argument for making shit instead of quality?
Apple wins through integration. What would be the argument for making devices that weren't well integrated, from software/hardware perspective or a user experience/ecosystem perspective?
Want to know who is emulating Apple, proving the value of its example? Look at Amazon and the Kindle. Supreme focus: Maximum of two hardware variations so far. Excellent quality: great hardware, decent software. Incredible integration, with Whispernet allowing you to buy any Amazon content anywhere in the world, tied to your existing Amazon account, which is pre-loaded onto your Kindle when you open it.
Kindle is now Amazon's best-selling product.
If Amazon had a few bad quarters, I could imagine business pundits looking over this list, clicking their tongues, and saying that Amazon’s “lack of focus” was its downfall.
Heh, too true. Just like 10 years ago pundits said that company X should emulate Microsoft.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WxOp5mBY9IY
If you think Nokia is doomed, you might want to re-watch that video. Things didn't turn out quite so bad for Apple.
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft :
Microsoft stated that the merging of Microsoft Windows and Internet Explorer was the result of innovation and competition, that the two were now the same product and were inextricably linked together and that consumers were now getting all the benefits of IE for free.
It doesn't look like much now, but installing IE as the default browser on Mac was a pretty big deal at the time. Microsoft won the 'browser wars' due to this and other key moves.
Today, the 'wars' are in the handheld o/s and default search engines. Microsoft is again making shrewd moves in those battles and their partners are far from guaranteed to die as a result of their alliances.
Somehow, despite their Microsoft partnership, Apple managed to do a bit better than simply scrape by. I'm sure Nokia will see a similar recovery over the next few years.
I don't think that's necessarily true. The browser was an extremely important part of the user experience, but 2 things happened: 1) MS stopped developing IE which allowed Mozilla and Apple to leap frog MS in terms of user experience, and 2) the iPod came along which became a gateway drug to Macs and helped Apple become what it is today.
However the 90's Apple/today's Nokia analogy only fits if Nokia has something outside of phones that it can use to grow it's business. It remains to be seen if that's the case.
There's also the problem that Apple became more insular in terms of developing the whole widget and making sure it wasn't dependent (as much as it could) on ISVs while Nokia seems to be going in the exact opposite direction.
Android isn't a triumph of user choice. Android is a bunch of carriers and manufacturers choosing to use something free instead of licensing or developing software for themselves.
Nerds choose Android. The vast majority of consumers choose their carrier, then take whatever the cheap phone is.
"What do you think of the iPhone?"
then
"What do you think of the Android ecosystem?"
"What do you think about Google?"
http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2009/06/browser-is-search-e...
Much like browsers and search engines, most people don't even know what an operating system is. How Google fits into the picture is extremely murky from that worldview.
Correct.
I personally need something like that. I need a phone that has great connection quality, lightweight, has long battery life and has MP3 player. I do not need touch screen and smart features. Is anybody going to produce such phone for me?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_1100
Light, long long battery life and very robust. :)
(* Am using it in Europe, not sure about if it works on the frequencies in the U.S..)
All that remains to be seen is which way Nokia chooses to go.