State of Nokia
Posted by Aki | Filed under Mobile
ArcticStartup had Heikki Mäkelä as a guest blogger, who wrote an article Nokia, Please Try! on the downfall of Nokia. The article mirrored my thoughts for the past year or two regarding Nokia. So I thought that I would try to write down my thoughts. Nokia has been hit hard in the news by Apple’s arrival to the smartphone marketplace. But it isn’t Apple’s arrival that has caused the downfall. I used to work for Nokia in the E-Series product programs. The stagnation of design and innovation that happened inside the company was increasing every year. The conveyor belt -like design and manufacturing mentality was crippling the company and producing almost identical smartphone models, which caused duplicate work across the company. The focus was on saturating the markets with new models instead of innovating. The S60 platform stayed UX wise the same year after year. See Rui Carmo’s post on five things Nokia needs to address to beat the iPhone for examples.
Now that Nokia has shifted its strategy to become a service company with it’s Ovi service suitreminds me of day, when Ovi was announced. Opening the browser and typing www.ovi.com in exciment just to see what awesomeness is waiting there. And there was a flash page filled with empty marketing words, a placeholder, which stayed up for the next following months. You have one shot, and one shot only, to announce a new product or a service. Nokia blew that shot away big time. Now that Ovi is facing hardships, the executives at Nokia are using their trump card, when talking to the media. They are introducing the next generation of Ovi, available in near future. Hiding behind the “next generation” won’t make the problems existing today go away.
All is not completely lost with Nokia though. Nokia announced that they are cutting downtheir smartphone models by half in 2010, resulting hopefully in less cloned phone models and more focused models with clear different use cases. Personally I cannot at this time even consider letting go of my iPhone and switching back to a Nokia’s or other manufacturersSymbian based smartphones. Android phones seem to follow the same path of fragmentation as S60 based phones and if they do, even Google and it’s army of PhDs cannot save it.
But for the sake of competition and Finlands economy, I would like to see Nokia’s comeback. I just hope it won’t take too long, because the competitors aren’t waiting for Nokia to get their act together.
This is my weblog, Abode of Aki Hänninen. I generally cover topics such as mobile, web development and photography, all of them being special interests for me.