How Nokia got bamboozled by Hollywood
daltoncaldwell.com
daltoncaldwell.com
1. I don't believe it's an accurate statement to say Nokia is dead (if even as a stand-alone company). They have several great things going for them today, it's just hard to see if you're not looking beyond the current quarter or two (which I've found is a common symptom of blindness).
2. I don't believe it's an accurate statement to say they flushed every piece of software they have ever built down the toilet. Firstly, they're still releasing non-WP phones. Secondly, a lot of their skills are in innovating within hardware, which they're very much still doing great stuff with.
3. The takeaway from the article is that if you are a tech company, you shouldn't become a media company (or get into media). Firstly, wouldn't Apple, Google, and Microsoft have never entered the media industry if they would've followed this? Secondly, this takeaway is a great example of the innovators dilemma [1]. The two opposing strategies could just as well lead to failure -- a. Following this "takeaway" advice and being too afraid to join new "value markets" (e.g. innovating within media), and so you just keep on running with what works [3a]; and b. Not following this takeaway advice because you realize you can't stay on top forever with your current strategy, and so you make an attempt to enter new disruptive markets even if it means cannibalizing yourself [3b].
[3a] I think this blanket advice has problems -- media may have been a good thing to get into because the media integration could have caused (or did?) a major disruption in the existing market (I believe this was Nokia's belief and a cause for why they did what they did). Thus not trying new things like this could cause failure as well, as new players enter the market and take their marketshare (e.g. Apple with music and media at its core).
[3b] Though Nokia failed at it.
[1] http://www.amazon.com/The-Innovators-Dilemma-Revolutionary-B...
Ehh... While Nokia does still have a significant number of non-WP phones, most of them are "feature phones" (non-smartphones). With the price differential of smartphones plummeting at its current rate, even as the phones become more powerful, I strongly suspect that the "feature phone" market is going to largely evaporate outside developing nations within the next few years.
(The remainder of Nokia's phones are running Symbian OS, which is widely regarded to be an evolutionary dead end. Nokia, unaccountably, still has some phones in the pipeline which will use Symbian, but I doubt there will be many more, nor that they will be very popular.)
As far as hardware innovation goes, as long as Nokia sticks with Windows they're going to be pretty limited in that respect. My understanding is that Microsoft has some pretty strict hardware guidelines for WP7+ devices.
Arguably anything running Symbian is a smartphone, Nokia just put a crippled featurephone user interface on it. They were way ahead of the smartphone curve, unfortunately way ahead of the market too.
I'm also not sure it's true that Nokia were way ahead of the market, as their competitors (such as Ericsson) were producing smart phones every bit as impressive as Nokia's early efforts. They did make a good start, but they were not unchallenged.
I strongly suspect that's going to happen in developing nations as well.
You can get an unlocked 3G Huawei android 2.1 phone for $80 in the US. The cheapest usable unlocked feature phone you can get in the US is $15-$20. (You can occasionally get a $10 2-band GSM phone that has no screen and can't do texts -- I'm ignoring that)
Feature phones are going away. Developing nations will just have less capable smartphones, with lower resolution screens, slower processors and old operating systems. But they'll be almost entirely smartphones.
2. What new apart PureView technology I have in my Nokia 808 I could not get in other phones and still consider innovative in hardware? I really find PureView interesting but overall I'm not satisfied with it - it is not that much better than N8 (http://www.allaboutsymbian.com/features/item/15051_Nokia_N8_...). I really would love to see PureView in DSLR camera but not in smartphone.
I love Nokia phones but let's be fair - Nokia as we know is dead. Future of Windows Phone Nokia is uncertain and personally I as developer don't care about it being successful.
- Happy Nokia PureView 808 owner
The reason I say this is because if the above is true, there's a good possibility Nokia will be the ones selling the vast majority of WP phones, and there's a seriously large market for the range of devices WP can run on.
Concerning 2: Just curious, what's the main thing about PureView that got you interested in it and got you to buy it?
2. I don't bought it I won it in Nokia's PureView competition. I personally wouldn't spend 700$ on this phone - there are better ways to spend such amount of money that I consider big enough for me. I could buy Samsung Galaxy S3 for this amount of money.
It was fricking cool. The same phone as neo. With a feature that they left out of the final cut in the film. ...Aim lower end of phone at someone a few feet away, press button, laugh as target takes a piece of plastic to the face.
That started to happen a few months after we got the phone. So it's pretty obvious why it never 'existed' as a consumer product.
http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/ar...
Other phones came with popular bands.
After reading this article, I understand why they did.