

Five Reasons to be cheerful about Nokia-Microsoft - Garbage
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/02/17/nokia_microsoft_positives/

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sambeau
"There is a philosophy called Contextual Design, every designer at Nokia has
been trained in it by the guru Karen Holtzblatt. Everybody has attended her
courses and got her very expensive book signed. The idea is that you ask the
users what they are doing, then design something. If you think about Apple,
they don’t ask anybody. The idea of users as designers is a catastrophe."

I agree. As does this man:

"You can't just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to
them. By the time you get it built, they'll want something new." – Steve Jobs

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dagw
Asking customers "what they want" and "what they are doing" are two distinctly
different questions.

Also Nokia and Apple have historically had different goals. Nokia wanted to
dominate the total world mobile phone market, Apple want to carve out a small,
super profitable, niche, and doesn't care about global market shares.
Different goals require different approaches to design.

