Slashdot Mirror
Nokia Insider On Why It Failed and Why Apple Could Be Next
An anonymous reader writes "The former chief designer of Nokia explains how the company's success and its corporate culture stopped it from taking risks and left it open to being beaten by Apple. He now sees the same warning signs emerging at Apple. Quoting: 'I look back and I think Nokia was just a very big company that started to maintain its position more than innovate for new opportunities. All of the opportunities were in front of them and Nokia was working on them, but the key word is a sense of urgency. While things were in play there was a real sense of saying "we will get to that eventually."' He worries Apple is now in a similar place: 'Nokia became more of a maintainer, more of an iterator, whereas innovation only comes in re-invention and Nokia waited too long to make the next big bold move ... that is now Apple’s challenge. Apple has arrived at a very safe place, it is responsible for something everybody loves, so it feels it has to keep it going.'"
Oddly enough, this comes alongside news that a different former insider, Thomas Zilliacus (who was Nokia’s former Asia-Pacific CEO), has founded a company called "Newkia" in the wake of Microsoft's acquisition of Nokia. His goal is to take on former Nokia engineers and set them to building phones again — this time, running Android.
Nokia did not need to innovate. They needed to apply their hardware engineers to creating an Android phone, and their software engineers to making a nice Android release for it. Who wouldn't like a hot-shit Android phone with the indestructability of a Nokia?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Microsoft's willingness to buy them out of what appeared to be a pretty hairy situation saved the day for team bean-counter; but I suspect that team engineer is wondering 'How did we go from being fucking Nokia to being eaten by a software company?'
No doubt. Or you could be team engineer at Blackberry wondering "How the fuck did we put ourselves up for sale with no buyers?"
When the foot seeks the place of the head, the line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.
The beginning of the end for Nokia happened around 2004, when UMTS arrived in Europe, and Nokia made an intentional business decision to not support EDGE, and to basically walk away from CDMA as well (even though at that point, probably half the phones sold by Verizon and Sprint were Nokia, as well as the majority of high-end phones sold by AT&T and T-Mobile).
As a result, their phones became useless paperweights in the US as far as anybody who ever used data was concerned. EDGE wasn't exactly "high speed", but compared to GPRS, EDGE is just "annoyingly slow" compared to "uselessly slow". Circa 2005-2008, EDGE was the best that existed in most of the US anyway... T-Mobile hadn't even started deploying HSPA yet, and AT&T's HSPA data existed in maybe two dozen cities.
Nokia presumably wrote off the US market because, in terms of total unit sales, it was roughly equal to Portugal or Switzerland. What they overlooked was the importance of mindshare... half the world's tech blogs and web sites are American, and as far as anyone in America was concerned, by ~2007 Nokia had effectively ceased to exist. At best, they were a company that used to be popular, and now just made throw-away low-end phones sold to people in remote African villages.
Other companies learned their lesson. Today, companies like Sony-Ericsson are working as hard as they can to break their Qualcomm addiction(*), and make a point of getting their phones into the hands of American reviewers who live in cities where T-Mobile has good HSPA+ coverage.
(*) Qualcomm insists on licensing LTE radio firmware to carriers rather than manufacturers, which means it's basically impossible for a manufacturer to sell phones capable of using LTE on AT&T or T-Mobile without the active involvement of AT&T or T-Mobile, and de-facto impossible to sell a phone built with a Qualcomm LTE chipset that's carrier-agnostic and capable of doing LTE on both AT&T and T-Mobile.
It's technically possible to use a separate non-Qualcomm chipset (like Beceem's) for LTE, but the price premium is fairly stiff (about $100, by the time the phone gets to retail stores). That's why companies like Sony-Ericsson (who desperately want to break the stranglehold American carriers have over the American phone market as gatekeepers with economic -- or in the case of Verizon & Sprint, real -- veto power) have eagerly embraced chipsets like the Renesas MP5232 and MP6530, which will enable them to make phones capable of doing LTE on AT&T and T-Mobile, and break the "LTE Lock-In" AT&T in particular has been working overtime to exploit as a way of making their nominally-GSM network into one that's as de-facto proprietary as Verizon's.
Okay, listen. I know it's popular to bang the 'Apple is failing to Innovate' drum, but it's STILL NOT TRUE.
The problem is that people are compressing the last decade of work into a much smaller space than it deserves. Apple doesn't release huge, blockbuster game-changing products every year. Not even every couple of years. It's MANY years between cycles. The time between the iPod and the iPhone was a long time. The iTunes music store was its own special story. Yeah, the iPhone has sort of settled into a pattern, but it's still a very good phone.
People are looking to Apple to change the PHONE industry again, and they probably won't. They changed the music player industry ONCE, and iterated on that until it wasn't relevant anymore. Apple will continue to make a good phone--even a GREAT phone--but they probably won't ever really be the industry leader again.
Apple will find a new market to disrupt. It's easier than trying to disrupt the market you're entrenched in. Is the next thing a watch? Maybe iWatch refers to a TV (that would be a big surprise, wouldn't it--it's the sort of misdirection that I would expect from them). In all likelihood, it's something that people won't be able to predict, just like the iPhone was.
Stop asking Apple to a) really, truly innovate faster than they have before; and b) ask them to innovate in a space that they're already making money in. That's not the way they've ever worked.