

Mike Elgan: Why Nokia is toast - rbanffy
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9209198/Mike_Elgan_Why_Nokia_is_toast

======
enjo
Nokia pioneered (essentially) the strategy that Google is using with Android.
After all, Series 60 sure looks a lot like Android in terms of positioning,
roll out, and ecosystem. It was a winning strategy for Nokia that saw their
Symbian based software on hundreds of devices from many different
manufacturers.

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.

------
senko
> There is huge, unmet demand in the world for a phone that does nothing but
> make calls.

 _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.

~~~
moe
_It's very possible that low-end smartphones will take over the dumphone
market soon_

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?

~~~
zmmmmm
_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_

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.

~~~
moe
Well, there's only so many trade-offs you can make on a cheap phone. A
touchscreen is not only a big cost-factor and battery-drainer but also impairs
usability of the core feature (making calls) significantly.

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...

------
siika2000
The article says pretty much what I've been thinking: too many choices,
consumers have no idea which Nokia phone is any good.

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.

~~~
danilocampos
> 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.

~~~
sethg
But if you look at the whole of Amazon, not just Kindle, the company is all
over the place. It sells an e-book reader! It sells books! It sells other
consumer products! It provides a marketplace where other people can sell
products, _even books_! It sells cloud-computing services!

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.

------
charleso
All of this 'Nokia is doomed because of their Microsoft partnership' talk
reminds me of when Apple announced something similar back in 1997. Anyone
remember this Steve Jobs talk from when Apple was on the financial ropes?

<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.

~~~
gamble
Except Apple didn't put NT on its computers.

~~~
charleso
But Apple did make Microsoft Internet Explorer the default browser on the Mac,
which was Microsoft's battlefield at the time.

~~~
rbanffy
The browser is not part of the core of the operating system. And it was far
less an important part of the user experience at that time.

~~~
charleso
"At that time" Microsoft ruled everything except for the browser. The public
internet was emerging as a surprisingly powerful force against the desktop and
the argument before the courts was that the browser WAS part of the core
operating system and could not be removed.

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.

~~~
rbanffy
Well... At least IE wasn't an integral part of MacOS...

------
JonoW
If offering user choice is a bad idea, why is Android doing so well? I believe
they're out-gunning apple in market-share now, and there are tons of Android
phones to choose between.

~~~
sjs
No single Android phone does as well as the iPhone. You're comparing two
completely different things.

~~~
zmmmmm
He's comparing the only thing that matters any more - ecosystem mindshare.

~~~
danilocampos
Try something with your non-technical family members:

"What do you think of the iPhone?"

then

"What do you think of the Android ecosystem?"

~~~
zmmmmm
What about:

"What do you think about Google?"

~~~
danilocampos
I think, given the below link, it's a bit of a stretch to believe that
Google's brand association is having any sort of halo effect on the idea of
Android (an operating system) or Android phones (the hardware):

[http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2009/06/browser-is-
search-e...](http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2009/06/browser-is-search-
engine.html)

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.

------
sethg
Summary: Nokia is the General Motors of the cellphone industry.

------
dennisgorelik
"There is huge, unmet demand in the world for a phone that does nothing but
make calls."

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?

~~~
siika2000
My current phone is slowly breaking and I've been searching for something
along those lines. Samsung E2370 seems to fit the bill, though even it has
some extraneous features:

<http://www.gsmarena.com/samsung_e2370_xcover-3152.php>

------
meier2
B E S T article about Nokia/Microsoft. And actually, I am quite sure they will
follow the strategy mentioned by Mike Elgan.

------
afshin
I went into this article deeply skeptical because every tech journalist out
there is trying to make their mark on this story. But I think Elgan is exactly
right about what strategies can win the mobile market, what Nokia has done
wrong, what it can do in the future.

All that remains to be seen is which way Nokia chooses to go.

------
rospaya
Oh look, an American talking about Nokia.

