
Nokia has as many people for smartphone software as Apple does for all products - shawndumas
http://www.asymco.com/2011/02/04/nokia-employs-as-many-engineers-for-symbian-and-meego-as-apple-does-for-all-its-product-lines/
======
jorgeortiz85
In my mind, this proves how important it is to hire people that can hit the
high notes

    
    
        The Creative Zen team could spend years refining their
        ugly iPod knockoffs and never produce as beautiful,
        satisfying, and elegant a player as the Apple iPod. And
        they're not going to make a dent in Apple's market share
        because the magical design talent is just not there.
        They don't have it.
    
        The mediocre talent just never hits the high notes that
        the top talent hits all the time. The number of divas
        who can hit the f6 in Mozart's Queen of the Night is
        vanishingly small, and you just can't perform The Queen
        of the Night without that famous f6.
    

<http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/HighNotes.html>

~~~
TomOfTTB
I don't disagree but when you say this "proves" that point I'm not sure that's
true. You can just as easily hire people that can "hit the high notes" and
fail because of mismanagement. The best example of this is Apple's Copland
(a.k.a. System 8) Operating System. To quote Wikipedia...

 _At WWDC '96, Apple's new CEO, Gil Amelio, used the keynote to talk almost
exclusively about Copland, now known as System 8. He repeatedly stated that it
was the only focus of Apple engineering and that it would ship to developers
at the end of summer with a full release planned for late fall._

(Source: <http://tinyurl.com/2lrwzd>)

So even with the entirety of Apple's engineering resources devoted to it this
project still collapsed. As far as we know Nokia could be in the same boat
with a bunch of high note hitters being held down by poor management.

~~~
jorgeortiz85
There are 10x managers just like there are 10x engineers.

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ZeroGravitas
Am I the only one that finds Asymco to be transparent and unsubtle pandering?

Nokia's got higher R&D than Apple, but Apple's got higher profits, so Nokia
are stupid and Apple are smart.

If Nokia had lower R&D than Apple, then Apple would still have higher profits,
so Nokia would still be stupid and Apple smart.

So how is this any different from his other 900 posts pointing out that Apple
have high profits? What analysis or insight does it add?

~~~
xenophanes
It tells you something about how the competition is doing, and a particular
area where Apple excels.

Knowing how Apple compares to the competition, and what they do differently,
is interesting.

------
metageek
There's some room for complaining about the "smartphone" classification. Most
Symbian-based phones would not qualify as smartphones in the US. I'm on my
third, and they're _pretty_ smart, but not having touchscreens really puts
them in a separate market segment.

And those phones run Qt, too, which this analysis lumps in with MeeGo. So, if
you counted up just the people Nokia has working on touchscreen phones, you
might find it about matches the iPhone team.

Which, mind you, is still not a ringing endorsement of Nokia's efficiency. My
N86 has some advantages (1) over, say, my wife's Android phone (a Backflip
running 2.1), but Android has a lot more room to improve.

(1) Mostly quality of the phone UI, as opposed to computer UI. For example,
the N86's voice control works with my headset. On Android, voice dialing
requires you pull out the phone and press a button; with Symbian, you can just
push the button on the headset. I now consider that essential; if I had to
drive without a feature like that, I wouldn't be able to make calls.

~~~
Kev
>On Android, voice dialing requires you pull out the phone and press a button

That might be a quirk on your particular model of phone or headset, or maybe
it was fixed with 2.2. The N1 definitely supports the headset button for voice
commands.

~~~
metageek
That's nice to know, since I'm hoping to get an NS One Of These Days.

(I _know_ it's not the headset, since it's the same one I used to use with my
Nokia, and it worked fine. But I could well believe it was a problem with the
phone.)

------
goombastic
No matter what you say about Nokia, I love them. Here is why: \- Easy designs
\- Affordable phones \- user replaceable batteries \- Cheap and fits in with
my upgrade cycles \- the N900.

~~~
randallsquared
The N900 certainly wasn't cheap. In fact, the fact that I'd have to shell out
another few hundred for a replacement smartphone is the only reason I haven't
thrown it against a wall. I have it overclocked, and it's _still_ dog slow. :(

~~~
kiiski
Do you have the latest Maemo version? It made it a lot faster.

~~~
randallsquared
I think I do: 20.2010.36-2.002

A bit of searching didn't tell me what the latest Maemo is supposed to be, but
did imply that it was released last October, so I'm sure it would have popped
up for install by now.

------
cjeane
I was going to submit a comment about how poorly written the article is.
Instead I will just mention that this has always been one of Apple's best
qualities. They have managed to stay lean and capitalize on the inability of
their competitors to do the same.

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vegai
Might be interesting to look at the total salaries instead of just the
headcount. I understand Nokia did quite a lot of cheap outsourcing in the last
decade.

~~~
masklinn
According to Asymco's data, Nokia also spends 10.2% of their phone revenue on
R&D, versus 2.5% for Apple.

~~~
fdghjkh
Except R+D at nokia means anyone not actually bolting phones together.

Having 4 competing operating systems, each with their own layers of management
and their own VPs all fighting each other - counts as R+D spend.

~~~
metageek
Four? I see S40, Symbian, and MeeGo.

Or are you counting the touch-based and non-touch-based Symbians separately?
There'd be some justice in that.

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elvirs
this is like some were saying 'hotmail has as many users as google has for all
of its products' for gmail.

now look where gmail is and where hotmail is.

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sigzero
So? What are we supposed to take away from that? They have more numbers? That
doesn't extrapolate to better products or better anything.

~~~
RyanDScott
>That doesn't extrapolate to better products or better anything.

Agreed. So maybe we should be asking how Apple is growing faster than Nokia
with fewer resources?

~~~
pavlov
Nokia suffers from the mythical man-month. They've only recently discovered
that throwing 6,000 engineers at Symbian didn't make it better.

~~~
fdghjkh
But to be fair - they have now hired another 6000 HR managers to work out why
not

~~~
xenophanes
That's not very fair :-)

~~~
fdghjkh
Don't worry they have set up a series of "Strategy Boutiques" (seriously!) to
get over it

[http://www.slideshare.net/whatidiscover/open-innovation-
in-a...](http://www.slideshare.net/whatidiscover/open-innovation-in-a-large-
enterprise)

------
wallflower
I read in an article that I cannot track down right now that Steve Jobs has
gathered some of the world's leading experts in aluminum, process engineering,
glass - the creative power of Apple lies in its breadth and astonishing depth.

