Nokia Exec: Young People Fed Up With iPhone and Android

jfruhlinger writes "Nokia's Windows Phones haven't hit the U.S., but at least one company executive thinks they'll be a slam dunk, since young people have soured on the iPhone and find Android baffling. Of course, much of the Internet commentariat found his remarks even more baffling. Is he right, is he delusional, or is he just trying to build buzz for his company's products the best he can?"

Comments

Not sure what he's thinking...

[Scoth]

I don't think I've ever met someone who wasn't a hacker/tweaker sort who didn't like their iPhones. Regardless of your beliefs about their business practices, Walled Garden, etc, by and large the iPhone works and works well. I'm not sure exactly who he talked to about being fed up.

I've also not met a lot of people unhappy with their Android phones, though they may not be using them to their full customization potential.

Re:State Of Mind

[MozeeToby]

He's paid to be delusional. What's he supposed to say? "iPhone outsells every other phone by an order of magnitude and Android devices in general are rapidly cornering the lion's share of the market and now we've made this commitment to Windows Phone 7 that we can't just drop for a number of reasons" Yeah, I'm sure the shareholders will love that.

I'm not young, but...

[GodfatherofSoul]

...I've soured on the Android (performance and privacy issues) and the iPhone looks expensive (based on the iPhone tax it looks like service providers charge). But, I also had about 2 years of development experience on the inferior Windows Mobile platform when Microsoft pissed on the developer base, then shoved us out the door.

I'd say he's right there's room for another competitor, but his ain't it.

Nobody does that because everyone does that

[Toe, The]

He employs some great logic. Here is a direct quote:

"What we see is that youth are pretty much fed up with iPhones. Everyone has the iPhone," he said.

If everyone wants something, then nobody could possibly want it... right?

Re:Nobody does that because everyone does that

[Anonymous Coward]

He's right though. It's a wise point of insight. iPhone and Android are ripe for played-out cultural saturation, just like Facebook.

Maybe if Nokia doesn't drop the ball, they can parlay this natural social rhythm into success, unlike SOME people (I'm looking at YOU BlackBerry). ...hate to imagine any Microsoft involvement though. I wish they and their shitty Windows Phone would just die.

Re:Nobody does that because everyone does that

[somersault]

I don't think we dislike things directly because they're popular and we want to be hipsters. IMO it's probably more to do with our experience with Microsoft and Intel over the last couple of decades. We often will root for the underdog even when there isn't much of a difference to the end user simply because we don't want any one company getting too far ahead of the rest and crushing innovation.

Then you also have to consider that we simply are more aware of the alternatives in many situations and will choose the option that is best for us, which won't very often be the most popular choice. It's when geeks start acting like what's best for them is best for everyone when the problems start. Usually it takes the world a few years to be ready for what we are happy to use straight from the bleeding edge. Having said that, I think Android is a decent balance of customisability vs usability. You could probably say the same for the iPhone - as long as you jailbreak it first..

Re:Nobody does that because everyone does that

[The Man]

He's right though. It's a wise point of insight. iPhone and Android are ripe for played-out cultural saturation, just like Facebook.

Maybe if Nokia doesn't drop the ball, they can parlay this natural social rhythm into success, unlike SOME people (I'm looking at YOU BlackBerry). ...hate to imagine any Microsoft involvement though. I wish they and their shitty Windows Phone would just die.

And this for me really highlights how Microsoft especially but also its partners have really dropped the ball. If you can't be the saturation player (Apple), and you can't directly challenge the saturation player (Google and its partners), then you have to offer a compelling niche product. That approach can succeed, especially for smaller companies for whom even a niche product produces meaningful revenue. But there are two big problems here: First, neither Nokia nor Microsoft is a small company; Nokia needs to be a major challenger for its business model to work, and Microsoft is investing a lot of money in mobile and needs more than just one or two partners with niche products to generate a return. Second, the Windows brand has plenty of value, but is a handicap to anyone trying this approach in developing a new niche product. Windows is hardly the brand people associate with innovative, hip new products or being off the beaten path; many if not most people interact with it every day and for them it is background noise, the default, the standard, something that is so bland and ordinary as not to even occasion comment. Is that really the brand that Nokia, or Microsoft for that matter, thinks will excite people who are tired of iOS or Android, or people looking for a less-common status symbol?

If Microsoft were smarter they would have recognised this and invested the time and energy into coming up with an alternative brand for their mobile products, perhaps leveraging the successful Xbox brand. But in a sense that would also have been an acknowledgement up front that their approach was unlikely to pay off big; a new brand might generate a niche following, but only the Windows brand is likely to be able to take on Apple and Google... most likely by eating RIM's lunch in the corporate space. In other words, either Microsoft has badly misjudged the cachet of Windows among ordinary individuals or its intent all along was to sell Windows Mobile into places where corporate IT makes the decisions rather than end users. That strategy looked decent a few years ago, but we have really seen a lot of changes recently in how employers handle supporting their employees' personal mobile devices. Recognising that it's cheaper to support their existing iOS and Android devices than to issue their own fleet of business-only devices, and that most people prefer to have at most only one phone and one tablet anyway, almost no one is still handing out a single device and refusing to support anything else. In the absence of products that are compelling on their own, RIM is finding that the decay of the corporate mobile device mandate is very bad for business. Microsoft, and therefore their partners as well, seem to be in the same spot.

It looks like the niche player, whatever it ends up being, will be built around WebOS. It has open source cachet, underdog cachet ("back from the dead"), and it's not a terrible technology. With two dominant players duking it out for the mass market and a potential family of niche alternatives brewing, where does this leave Microsoft? With a lacklustre brand, tiny market share, an apparently outdated strategy, and no compelling products on the market, it's hard to imagine Windows Mobile going anywhere. Too late to market to be where Android is today, and too stodgy a brand to be what Nokia wishes it were (not that a niche business is what Microsoft wants anyway), Windows Mobile looks like a dead end. If anyone knows the value of getting in early, it should be Microsoft; the entire company exists today solely because of its first mover advantage all those years ago. Nokia was happy to get a backer, but it appears to have picked the wrong one. They could be doomed as well.

Re:Nobody does that because everyone does that

[gstoddart]

My mom has an iPhone. They sell iPhones for Dummies books. Those two criteria right there are reason enough to never buy an iPhone.

What, because it works, is easy to use, and you can get documentation for it that an actual consumer can understand?

So any technology your mom can use is bad? I take it you have eschewed all forms of technology she can operate like TVs, plumbing, and toasters? Or is it just phones?

Oh, you can also get Linux for Dummies, Windows for Dummies, and a whole raft of things ... so if the presence of a Dummies book is your criteria, you should stop using anything listed here ... they even have your beloved SQL.

Seriously man, I consider any technology my mother can operate to be fairly well implemented; because she's in her 70's and for her to decide she needed a GPS, laptop, scanner, digital camera, digital picture frame, a USB drive for backups, and a PVR ... well, that was quite a series of leaps for someone who isn't all that interested in that kind of stuff.

Why should technology be something that your mother couldn't possibly use?

Re:Nobody does that because everyone does that

[s73v3r]

There's a huge difference between just choosing something that may not be popular, and bitching about something simply because it is popular. A lot of the latter is what happens here on /.

I think Nokia missed the boat

[Anonymous Coward]

What's really missing the marketplace is a Linux console phone. All this graphics nonsense is just slowing people down. And what could be better than the feeling of compiling a kernel in your pocket?

The carriers.

[characterZer0]

They are fed up with the carriers, not the phones.

It's called denial

[eclectro]

the first of the five stages of grief.