

Nokia EVP's blog response to closing of Symbian-Guru.com - pavlov
http://conversations.nokia.com/2010/07/02/the-fightback-starts-now/

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vessenes
Here's what I said back to him:

Thanks for this post! I live in the US, and for a long time bought Nokia
phones, frequently paying for them to be imported to the US. I traveled around
the world for work for years, and the last phone I owned from Nokia was the
E90.

The E90 had some great, great hardware. It was the swiss army knife of radio
devices. It was years ahead of its competitors.

AND, the software was horrible. Truly terrible; so bad, that I frequently
traveled with an iphone as well as a winmo device in case I needed to do
something other than the primary use-case for the E90: rock-solid messaging
all over the world. When I say horrible, I mean that it was clunky, poorly
designed, and just a total pain-in-the ass to use, so much so, that it cut a
lot of my enjoyment. This can’t continue, especially at this point in the
global market for smartphones.

Ovi was totally non-competitive, the last time I looked at it. It’s currently
an also-ran in a world with one awesome app store, and one okay one. On top of
that, mobile developers have become used to a great development environment
with Xcode. At the same time, your average apple app-store app kicks ass all
over a third party Nokia application, in terms of features, coolness,
usability and price. This is not a ‘come back swinging’ situation as much as
it is a ‘total rethink’ situation in my opinion.

Where I’m going with all this is somewhat simple: the software question is
significant for you guys: interface, app environment, customer experience, the
whole nine yards. I have seen nothing from Nokia in the last five years that
makes me think you’ve got a handle on this. The current best mobile UI teams
in the world are:

1) Apple 2) HTC 3) Palm (except, palm’s guy just went to ..) 4) Google

I don’t have solutions for you, because I don’t know what it’s like inside
Nokia right now. Do they feel that Rome is burning? Are they fiddling?

That said, if I were VP, I would personally put in place a small skunkworks
team developing some rapid cycle premium Android devices to test the waters.
If you wanted you could overlay the Ovi store on top of the Android Market in
an effort to try and control the app supply chain better.

I would be stunned if Meego ever surpassed Android; the momentum is far too
great right now. And, your job I would guess, is to ensure dominance,
regardless of how many eggs you break while making the omelet.

Best,

Peter

~~~
pavlov
_On top of that, mobile developers have become used to a great development
environment with Xcode._

Have you tried Nokia's new Qt Creator? I think it's on par with Xcode as a
mobile development IDE.

<http://www.forum.nokia.com/Develop/Qt/>

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allenbrunson
Wow. That's the biggest load of empty corporate-speak I've read in a long
time. If I didn't already believe Nokia is doomed, this would have convinced
me.

~~~
edster
I was just going to comment on that very same thing. The guy is only a day
into the job, so what does he know, but didn't offer anything that would lead
one to conclude they Nokia is changing anything. He didn't address the
problems brought up by symbian-guru at all.

~~~
VMG
I think the headline is misleading - is sais nowhere in the article that this
is a response to symbian-guru

~~~
vessenes
He mentions the well-known defection halfway through the article.

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zokier
So Nseries is not dumping Symbian after all. That's sad. I really think that
Nokia has still a fighting chance, but it really needs to focus. It has now,
what, 5 operating systems (s40, s60v3, s60v5, s^3, maemo) in production and at
least 2 more coming (s^4, meego). And I don't have a clue how many models
Nokia has introduced last year or two, but the number is seriously too large.
One of their larger competitors, Apple, has one current model at a time. And
its a hit.

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robryan
_But what is consistently overlooked is that Symbian still accounts for more
than two-fifths of the global smartphone market._

This is the kind of quote that comes up again and again from companies trying
to defend something they are losing in. Signals to me more than anything else
in that post that the mindset isn't great.

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hvs
So his way of demonstrating that: "I am committed, perhaps even obsessed, with
getting Nokia back to being number one in high-end devices" is basically to
"stay the course"? This read to me like "we need to focus on quality, but
other than that, no changes necessary."

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Indyan
Wow. Nokia actually responded to Symbian Guru's assault! Nice. Nokia
Conversation blog always manages to surprise me with its candor and fresh
attitude (e.g. their response to N8 leak and more recently iPhone 4 signal
issues). Now, only if their phones were as fresh.

