
Nokia in Trouble? How Fast Can a Mobile Device Giant React? - blasdel
http://meownewsletter.com/2009/07/24/nokia-in-trouble-how-fast-can-a-mobile-device-giant-react/
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delayclose
TFA's main point is that it takes companies like Nokia a very long time to
ship a new product. Fair enough, but the time frame and the value judgements
therein are just ridiculous FUD, even if you consider that this type of
prediction is always goign to have errors. A few points, off the top of my
head:

1) Nokia had a touch screen phone (in addition to the tablets) years before
iPhone, and released another in 2008 (5800 XpressMusic) and a third this year
(N97, which the article mentions but which somehow seems not to count). TFA
says first Nokia touch screen phones "with crude, unusable software" are due
in 2011.

2) TFA claims that first devices comparable to the first iPhone would ship in
2014, and makes a snide remark about how competetive such a device would be
then. This is, of course, a completely ignorant premise: Nokia's top models
are, and always have been, technically ahead of the iPhone. If Nokia gets
iPhone's usability in 2014, why would that come at the cost of losing their
edge in tech?

~~~
felipe
As a former Nokia software engineer, I can tell you the difference is that
Nokia has a bigger focus on hardware at the expense of software and usability.
Basically, Nokia produces software the same way it produces hardware, using an
internal methodology that follows a waterfall approach. For example, Agile
practices are simply not taken seriously because most managers believe they
won't fit in the grand scheme of things.

Also, differently than Apple, Nokia releases a huge number of models every
year, worldwide. Apple has the wisdom (and the balls) to focus all its
energies on very few products per year.

I also have a 5800, which is a huge improvement over previous Nokia phones.
However, it's so far behind the iPhone that I don't even know how to begin
describing it.

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nobody_nowhere
Nokia knows quite well that its biggest challenge is adapting and reacting
quickly. But they're shipping something like million units a day from an
organization that probably numbers 100,000 people. That's 10x the volume of
iPods rolling off the line, nevermind iPhones. Good luck steering a ship that
big! It's a fucking miracle to do this at all, and they do it with a 3.5%
dividend on their share price and great margins.

You can see steps they've taken to address most of the problems listed in the
article going back over a year, but they've just done a shitty executing them
at every step of the way. Unlike some of their competition. It's going to take
losing 15-20% of their market share to get back on track, if they're not slain
completely by Apple, Rim, Google, SE, LG, etc...

~~~
fauigerzigerk
Why is the speed of developing new products inversely related to the number of
old product units shipped? I'm not saying it's not related, I just wonder why.

Maybe the answer is that huge numbers of the old product shipping means that
any new product promises only a relatively small change in revenue and
earnings. And that may be particularly true if the new product is perceived to
be a niche product.

~~~
nobody_nowhere
It's a network effect, and not the good kind. The new products/existing
products relationship doesn't have to be inverse -- but the organization size
required for these unit volumes creates staggering complexity and inertia.

So if it ever turns out there's something about the organization itself or its
structure (hypothetically speaking, of course) that's impairing your ability
to put out new, different or more competitive products, you might have a very,
very hard time changing it.

It's like rebuilding a car while you're driving down the road. The faster
you're driving, the riskier and/or more expensive the proposition gets.

And if, for example, you build up a corporate culture which is focused around
protecting those earnings and margins at all costs (again, completely
hypothetical) and put in place financial incentives which reward people for
doing so, you're making it even more difficult to enact large-scale change.

------
andrewf
I don't think they're sitting on their hands. They bought Trolltech, and if
you follow the work they're doing[1], there's lots of emphasis on small device
functionality like multi-touch support, optimizing for small devices with
embedded graphics processors, and rich declarative UI stuff that smells like
CoreAnimation.

[1] <http://labs.trolltech.com/blogs/>

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rosser
True as all that may be, Nokia _has_ had time to understand and adapt to
Linux, resulting in Maemo. If they're only smart enough to realize it, they
may be able to make up much of the ground they'll have missed by leveraging
what's going on in there, because with or without Nokia's encouragement, or
likely even cognizance, my bet is that some of the Maemo folks _are_ learning
from the iPhone.

Will it be enough? I don't know. If only for sake of the number of players in
the market, I do hope so, though.

~~~
kasunh
Yep Maemo is the way forward for Nokia. Symbian is a OS in the previous
decade.

But the problem is I don't think Nokia's top management has understood this at
all. They are still favoring Symbian over Maemo and Maemo is only shipped with
their internet tablets as of now.

What they need to do is to make Maemo something like Android where any
manufacture can contribute and use the OS and then design their smart phones
for Maemo. Otherwise they will fail miserably in the smart phone race.

~~~
daeken
If Maemo is the way forward, there's a serious problem.

At my previous company, we developed an 'applet' (one of the little widgets on
the desktop) for the Nokia 770 and N800 tablets. I worked closely with the
tablet team (all great people, for the record) and yet it was one of the most
painful development processes I've ever experienced.

Applets run in the context of the desktop app, so if there's a crash, the
entire device reboots, period. The desktop toolchain worked well enough once
set up, but it didn't have access to the wireless APIs so we were unable to
use it. I eventually wrote an app for the device that loaded and ran our
applet inside it, which made debugging with gdb possible, but even with this
it was horrid.

I'll be a Nokia fan for life after working with those guys, but I can't help
but see Maemo in itself as one step forward, two steps back.

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pyre
Saying that Microsoft and Google can't deliver an 'integrated' product is far
from the truth. Apple doesn't have anything on the iPhone that can't be
described in a generic sense and then the work of functionality left to
drivers. At that point it's up to the hardware manufacturers to do some good
industrial design and make sure they don't skimp on hardware features.

You _can_ provide and Apple-like experience on a generic device, so long as it
has the requisite hardware functionality. This can be a different story when
it comes to things like computers and laptops, but the iPhone 'package' itself
doesn't have much but the touchscreen.

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tybris
Reminds me of <http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=iphone>

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lacker
Good article in general but I disagree with the assumption that creating a
hardware+software integrated experience is the only way to compete with Apple.
That's not how Apple lost the PC wars to Microsoft.

You try to integrate hardware and software to build a better iPhone, you're
playing Apple's game.

