OPK, that is Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, Nokia’s CEO calls his new head of mobile devices, Anssi Vanjoki in his office, hidden inside the company’s research center at 995 Page Mill Road, in Palo Alto, California. On his desk, three devices: a Nokia N900, a Motorola Droid and an iPhone.
‘Anssi, we’re hosed.
I assumed the dumb customer position and bought these three devices all by myself.
For our N900, I had to order on-line, the locals don’t carry our Maemo device. See what happened…’
He turns to his iMac, [this is science fiction, remember], types Nokia in the search window and gets this:
Now, a click on the “sponsored link” gets this:
.
A blank window. [This is not science fiction].
Anssi protests: ‘This must be a problem with Apple’s browser!’ But, no, the bug repeats itself with Chrome, Firefox, even with the Nordic Opera.
OPK continues:
‘We pay for this sponsored link and it gets us to a blank page.
Either Google is after us, or we’re incompetent, or both.
Anyway, I found our on-line store, a bit too complicated for a user like me. So, I saved time and a few dollars buying my own N900 from Amazon, one click, much simpler. By the way, Anssi, what are we doing selling, or trying to sell, or trying to give away a Windows 7 netbook? Don’t answer.
Then I needed to get a SIM for my $459 unlocked N900. I went to the big AT&T store down the road. Boy, these guys make it too complicated and they don’t fully support the N900. Fortunately, things get better on University Avenue, I’ve done all my shopping there. First, the friendly people at T-Mobile got me a SIM, installed it, checked everything, even the micro-SD card I bought.
Next block: Verizon, a little less friendly, a little slower but they got me a Droid under 30 mins. Three blocks down, the Apple store. They were a little surprised I wanted an iPhone as their new device was coming out “Real Soon Now”. The manager came out, a Turkish engineer who recognized my name on the driver’s license, smiled and set me up in less than 15 minutes. You should see their portable sales terminal, all the sales people carry one on their hip, an iPhone with a scanner and a credit card reader.
How come we don’t make one? Don’t answer.
I’ve been using these three devices for two weeks now and I can tell you, Anssi, we’re in big, big trouble. We can’t win against these guys.
We say our Finnish sisu we’ll carry us through difficult times, but I’m afraid we’re harnessing our energies to the wrong strategy. We’re rowing on the sand instead of going with the tide.
Remember Kai Oistamo’s embarrassed explanations for our software strategy: “Symbian is the chosen platform for us for smart phones, MeeGo, combining Intel’s Moblin with our Maemo, is about the next wave, where wireless devices will go next.”
Between us here, how do you get applications developers to believe in such statements?
I used the N900 and I’m embarrassed, the touch screen uses this inferior resistive technology while Moto and Apple use a much nicer capacitive touch screen. As for Maemo, our treasured mobile Linux, it didn’t work for me. When I tried to go to our Ovi store on the N900, I was told to upgrade the OS to Maemo 5. I did, the process was mercifully executive-proof. But, after that, the Ovi link kept telling me to upgrade the OS. I see our marketeers position the N900 as being for the “Technology Enthusiast”; this is a euphemism for “Not For Normal Users”. I know, I know, we always have the next product, I’ve seen the internal demos of the N8, but the opposition is too strong. The new iPhone, the hordes of Android devices will kill us, to say nothing of these tough Canadians at RIM.
Listen to our shareholders, they don’t believe in us any more. We just had to tell them our numbers will disappoint them again. Have you seen our stock price since April?
And since late 2007?
This happened during my watch. I’ve been thinking about this, especially since I’ve also been secretly using an iPad at home. This is no longer a phone game, this is the emergence of a new computing genre. Smartphone is a misleading word, we’re dealing with a new kind of really personal computing. Why do you thing our neighbors up Page Mill, HP, bought Palm’s WebOS instead of sticking to Windows Mobile or Windows Phone 7?
You know how much we hate carriers, especially the US ones, they are the reason why we’re so unsuccessful here. The great news is Google wants to disintermediate the carriers. How do they do that? By working with the Android army of manufacturers and targeting the $89 price point. Once there, carrier subsidies are no longer needed, consumers are free to move from one carrier to another as they get a better deal, or as they buy a new gadget without having to beg for an ETF (Early Termination Fee) exemption.
Apple will keep playing their usual game: profits above market share. We’ll see how successful they’ll continue to be. They keep building the whole user experience stack, from processor to OS to applications to media distribution to retail. It’s not a game we can play.
This leaves us with one choice: Android. I have made the decision and I want you to implement it.’
Anssi Vanjoki is pensive. He knows OPK isn’t reacting in anger and he knows the boss doesn’t brook dissent. Still, he needs to understand:
‘But, Chief, we’ll lose control of our destiny. With Android, we no longer own a key component of our product strategy, we’ll be reduced to competing on price.’
OPK’s sharp reply:
‘Are you telling me you’re the wrong man for the job?’
‘We have to stop kidding ourselves. Doing what we do, more of it, more efficiently, more energetically won’t work. As the Americans like to say: If you can’t beat them, join them. We’ll have a price war anyway as we find ourselves in an inferior position against more attractive devices, this is what we just told Wall Street.
Anssi, take the lead. We know how to make and move huge quantities of devices, 50 million per quarter.
Now, do you remember our 8810?
We once were the kings of sleek design. Now, look at the N900 next and cry. We’re the land Marimekko and Iittala, of Finnish design. All over the world, people pay a premium for elegance, for exclusivity. We’re not doomed to a race to the bottom, we’re destined to a race for quality, for elegance.
And look at the numbers. We spend 13.5% of revenue for R&D while Apple, doing “everything”, spends 3%. If we stop spending this doomed to failure R&D money, we can lower our percentage below Apple’s.
Next, we only do three models: good, better and best. Three price points and we’re done. Simple message, less product managers and other corporate busybodies showing PowerPoint slides to one another over endless meetings across ten time zones.
Anssi, look at me: are you ready for the bloodbath?’
Three days later, in a joint conference with Google’s Eric Schmidt, Nokia makes the following announcement: ‘The world’s largest smartphone maker will base all future models on the Android software platform.’
In spite of substantial restructuring one-time charges associated with the move, Nokia’s shares jump 20% in one day. And Apple shares lose 10%, which brings smiles to Microsoft execs as their company recovers its number one market cap ranking.
End of science fiction.
In a more plodding reality, Nokia is likely to continue on its current course, believing their problem is one of execution, of putting more faith in their sisu.
The king will be deposed, Google and Apple will divide the spoils.
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111 Comments
JLG,
Great post, thanks for putting in writing what many of us (myself included) are thinking.
I have heard similar thoughts from others in silicon valley; adopting Android is what NOK should do, but is unlikely to do anytime soon.
After 25 years with silicon valley technology companies, I can tell you the sub $100 smartphone (w/o carrier contract) is closer to reality than many people think.
Two game changers coming to the mobile market soon;
1. Tiered data plans will convert many ‘feature phone’ users to smartphone users.
2. Availability of subsidy free $100 smartphones will put new stresses on entire mobile value chain.
Anyone basing their mobile strategy w/o awareness of these trends will be marginalized.
Tek
http://twitter.com/TektonikShift
Wow. Is Nokia really so badly managed? At least in the US?
In this instance, I’m glad the US focus because we Americans buy subsidized smartphones and Nokia needs to understand that.
@ Brian S Hall: it’s not that Nokia is badly managed, it’s they have the wrong strategy/direction/goals/culture. They still think they’re in the cell phone business, they should read your blog, The Smartphone Wars at http://brianshall.com/. I feel for them: many of their people _know_ this isn’t going to work, they know it’s (largely) an app game, they know developers go elsewhere, namely GOOG and AAPL, but the top boss, certainly a highly intelligent, hardworking mensch, has the wrong taste buds. JLG
> This is no longer a phone game, this is the emergence of a new computing genre.
Heh.
A call for a developer conference on software input methods for ISO-IEC 10646 Universal Character Set was sent out some time ago. Standard Norge took the lead, and the call was relayed left, right, and centre. No takers. Also not from Apple which privately posted that it did not know enough about Apple architectures.
The Apple I, the Apple II, the Xerox 8010, the Apple Lisa, and the Apple Macintosh were industrial designs for wired connectivity. These industrial designs took the teletype, added local mass storage, Local Area Networking, a digital graphic display, a digital graphic printer, a graphic OS, and a combination of hardware input and pointing input.
The corporate character sets were switched. Icelandic and Faroese were not in the same underlying set as Danish, Norwegian and Finnish, and so on and so forth. To make matters worse, Johs, Kummer and Warnock had agreed on a font model, Adobe Type 1, which broke any and all input methods for the so-called Expert, or FontSpecific, encoding.
Unification of the underlying character set and introduction of supplementary glyph substitution solved some of these problems, but not the problem of a teletype+TV industrial design. In this industrial design, input in the 23 writing systems and 3 world scripts of the European Union is hard because the input method is in hardware.
The industrial design of the computer is a function of the increasing internationalisation of connectivity infrastructure and of the internationalisation of the character set since in abstract archival space, spelling, sorting and searching is based on character codes and not on glyph codes. Wired connectivity is more costly to expand than wireless connectivity which is why in emerging markets the mobile telephone is merging with the computer.
Henrik Holmegaard
would-be technical writer
Loved it, great read. Thanks!
if nokia needs android, they may already done this. i think they hang on symbian
The fact of the matter is that no other company, except for Apple, can create the entire widget. No company outside the U.S. has the programming skills to compete with Apple. Nokia doesn’t. Sony doesn’t. HTC doesn’t. And so on. Thus, to compete in this new world, the hardware developers – outside of Apple – have to find a US developed operating system. The natural one is Android. Secondarily, it is the very late to market Microsoft. WebOS died already.
To use Android, however, means Nokia has to swallow its pride and junk its own work. It has to declare Symbian dead. It has to declare that it is dependent on a 3rd party for a key piece of its business. It has to declare itself a failure. This is difficult for any company to do, other than those who don’t develop their on OS in the first place.
JLG,
Thanks for mentioning my site the smartphone wars! I think you are right: all those smart, hardworking people at Nokia but they are still focused on winning the cellphone business when that’s no longer important. It’s the age of the smartphone wars!
Great article — Nokia is like a slow motion car crash. They swerve from strategy to strategy — but all these corrective actions will make the crash even worse, as they delay a viable strategy, which is to prepare for a crash and brace for impact and airbags (aka Android)
Until they stop living in denial and make a clean break by adopting Android and a simplified product line they will continue to drive towards the cliff.
One more radical thought: if Nokia and Microsoft could form a major partnership it could revitalize both of them. Windows Phone 7 can bring the developers and Nokia the distribution/volume — a virtuous cycle, instead of the vicious cycles that each is currently facing individually today.
Very good read. Carriers EFT and carrier racket will be a “souvenir”.
JLG,
I think your view is very narrow.
Apparently you don’t have visibility what’s going on in carrier channel around Android. Why do you think Sanjay Jha is saying “we may eventually develop our own OS” and Samsung is playing with Bada?
The simple answer is: Android is a level playing field, which will eat away vendor margins. You cannot differentiate, and gross margins will go first to 25%, then below 20% well into feature phone territory. Motoblur & other differentiating layers are difficult to maintain, when you don’t control the OS yourself. Nothing prevents Google making whatever changes to the stack they want, which will in turn make difficult to control differentiating layer such as Motoblur.
I fail to understand why Nokia should suddenly surrender? If they fight, they may win. If they surrender, the sub 10% EBIT margins is there to stay. And look at China. MediaTek will have soon their Android implementation there and will make sure Android playing field is flat and profitless.
I’m convinced that in 5 years time we’ll look back at these Android comments with ridicule.
James Katt said
“No company outside the U.S. has the programming skills to compete with Apple.”
It doesn’t mean those capabilities cannot be developed. I think it’s extremely dangerous and naive to believe so. It is to assume that Nokia or other current mobile phone vendors are genetically inferior and cannot develop skills winning OS or SW overall for that matter.
Like in 1995 or so: Apple doesn’t have a chance against Microsoft ecosystem. They should go to Windows like everybody has. Right?
Nah I don’t need any android or WP7Series on my nokia device. Symbian may have it’s flaws, but my Web2.0 experiance on the E71 with Gravity and Opera Mobile is better than anything that’s delivered by iOS or Android.
I didn’t see any office apps on the other devices better than Quickoffice.
And to top it off, there is a very nice navigation software bundled for free (Ovi Maps) that can use pre-loaded maps.
Other nice-to-haves include a useful Podcather (one of the few useful apps developed by Nokia themselves) and the fairly cheap Joikuspot Wi-Fi tethering app.
So, why on earth would I want Android, iOS or any other OS than Symbian on my Smartphone?
But JS — your starting point is what the phone vendors *wish* could be true, not what actually *is* true… (They wish they could build an ecosystem with their OS at the center [they can't], they wish they could get higher than 10% EBITDA [unlikely], they wish they could differentiate meaningfully and get the smartphone cat back in the bag [nope] )
Apple/Android torpedoed them below the waterline and the ship is sinking — they can either go down with the ship [Nokia] or give up and jump onto a much humbler lifeboat [Motorola]
Sanjay Jha is on crack if he believes he can get critical mass around a MotorolOS. Palm sold several million devices, with a beautiful OS — and they still tanked, with a pitiful app catalog. The barrier to entry is very high — tens of thousands of good apps are table stakes and the bulge bracket players will have millions.
“It doesn’t mean those capabilities can’t be developed”
This is not about capabilities: it is about the gargantuan effort and investment that is required to create an ecosystem. Apple did it through beautiful quality. Google did it through vendor-neutrality.
Nokia has been trying the Apple route for years, with no success. It doesn’t know how to communicate a clear simple vision to developers and give them faith that they will make money. And it doesn’t know how to create simple, beautiful user interfaces.
@MartinM But do you have Evernote or Dropbox or Foursquare or Yelp or an awesome wide selection of Facebook and Twitter apps..?
The problem for Nokia is that innovation is no longer at the device level, it’s at the Web and ecosystem level. All the coolest innovative apps (which mostly emerge from Silicon Valley) will first be on iPhone and then Android, then possible BlackBerry (usually not) but not more devices.
If you stick with Symbian you’re losing most of the coolest tech which is out there — I would never consider a device without all 4 of the apps above, plus a few others, and most consumers do or will soon feel the same way.
Maybe the situation is different in Europe and Asia, but I feel there’s only a short window before people there become app-addicted like in the US — and then it will be too late for Nokia to compete.
as I mentiononed above, the (social) web2.0 is nicely covered by Gravity (twitter, facebook, foursquare that is). I don’t need a plethora of apps if I can have one that makes android users jealous
Dropbox is usless to me as I prefer the more advanced wuala (coming from Zürich, not silicon valley)
I don’t use yelp or evernote, but I certanly will look at those plattforms if I have time for that.
Now what might your all american wonders of the app world be, if you care toenlighten us?
Surprisingly, yelp can’t even be reached… But from what I read it’s USA-focused? Maybe that changes over time….
I certanly hope this whole app craze will soon be over when html5/css3 and JS will enable webapps to perform just like locally installed apps. On any device.
But… This whole sci-fi scenario seems true if you go by US tech blogs, but is Nokia really losing?
Because that’s really not what the numbers are showing. They might have revised their profit predictions, but they’re still predicting profits, not losses. Their market share, after taking a hit a few years back when the newcomers dug themselves a niche, is now holding fast.
Apple is no longer growing global market share and are unlikely to grow any higher unless they change their approach dramatically (targeting more than the highest end of the market).
Android and RIM are credible threats to about half of Nokia’s smartphone business each. At the moment, Nokia’s not losing much marketshare to Android and is slugging it out pretty evenly with RIM in the business and messaging qwerty phone.
The marketshare numbers you see reported for Nokia is not the marketshare on the amount of existing phones; it’s marketshare for sales per quarter. And there are still a lot more Nokia smartphones being bought than any of their competitors.
Just because US-based tech bloggers who insist on reporting and discussing and obsessing solely over the highest of high-end devices are finding that Nokia doesn’t put all their ressources in catering to their small demographic doesn’t mean they’re losing. Nokia’s still the biggest in sales, they’re still winning the war by getting more of their devices in people’s pockets than any other competitor.
@Rurik Bradbury: “Maybe the situation is different in Europe and Asia, but I feel there’s only a short window before people there become app-addicted like in the US — and then it will be too late for Nokia to compete.”
With all due respect, I think you’re seeing this the wrong way around. The US is trailing Europe and parts of Asia in adopting mobile technologies. For the most part, if you want to know what will happen next year in the US mobile industry, look at what was happening 3-4 years ago in Europe and about 7-8 years ago in Japan and Korea. These countries are far past being application addicted; they’re SMS and MMS addicted, and it’s far likelier that the US will keep following trends as it has for a decade of mobile phones.
@martin Again, it’s not about apps, it’s about ecosystems. The process is: cool new Web app comes out of US (Facebook, Twitter etc); developers build a mobile app, first for iPhone, then for Android, then for other platforms (maybe). This is currently the only viable way for mobile developers to make good money. And even Android is a close call (look at the news story today about Angry Birds).
Nokia has maybe 12 months left to build a developer community with a clear roadmap (hint: pick a single platform!) or else it will be steamrolled out of the smartphone market.
@guillaume Apple does not want the lower end mass market, but Android does, and they will get it. Even with their volume, Nokia compete with Google’s software and developer hordes plus the scale of the Chinese/Taiwanese manufacturers. Google can effectively subsidize/offset Android with ad revenues — not an option for Nokia, which blew $8 billion on Navteq, only for Google to come out with totally free GPS and force Nokia’s hand into doing the same.
“Our buggywhips/minicomputers/featurephones/Windows Mobile devices still sell more than your automobiles/personal computers/smartphones/iPhones”
Sure, but Nokia already lost the smartphone market in the US, and the fact that most exciting tech trends come out of the US is great leverage for iPhone and Android to win elsewhere. I think Jean-Louis’ point is that the writing is on the wall.
@Guillame I am European (well, English…) and remember when Gordon Brown was auctioning 3G licenses and Europe was so advanced in mobile tech.
But nowadays, the US is 18-24 months ahead of Europe. It’s not because of ‘apps’ per se (which superceded SMS/MMS by the way, not vice versa — posting replaced messaging, just as Facebook replaced consumer email) It is because of web/mobile integration. Phones became an extension of the web, instead of a self-contained system. And this brought tremendous innovation, most of which happened in the US.
I think that’s one reason Nokia is in such disarray: they were 3-0 up with 5 minutes left to play, then out of nowhere, the opposition scored 4 goals and won the game.
Nokia’s only hope is either Android or HTML5, because mobile = Web and apps. And since HTML5 is many years from matching today’s app stores, they need to jump on Android or die a death of 1000 cuts.
@Jean-Louis Gassée
You say, “it’s not that Nokia is badly managed, it’s they have the wrong strategy/direction/goals/culture.”
That is the definition of poorly managed. Wrong strategy, direction, goals, and culture are driven by management. Well, culture is people, but the tone is set by management. By the classic definition, Nokia’s management sucks.
In smartphones Nokia is still bigger than iPhone, Android and RIM combined.
JLG,
Very nice commentary, but fundamentally I think Android is not the right choice for 2 reasons:
1. As JS mentions Android is one great leveler. With the choice to use Android as its exclusive platform Nokia suddenly puts itself on a level playing field with HTC, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, and a million other low-cost Chinese manufacturers. True, Nokia has done well with its beautiful hardware design in the past, but any one of those companies can hire a handful of clever Finnish designers and suddenly Nokia looks no different from anyone else. Other than coasting on its past laurels (which they have already spent too much time doing) how can they succeed in this even more flattened playing field?
2. Giving a key part of its supply chain to Google is a recipe for long-term disaster. With Ovi, Nokia is hoping to compete head-to-head against Google. Google has already and will again play favorites with manufacturers giving more support and earlier releases of Android to certain blessed parners. With Android as its primary platform, Nokia is fundamentally at Google’s mercy. Sure, Google will be happy to allow Nokia to play in a low-margin commodity hardware business. But once Nokia tries to move into the cloud and go for real profits, Google can easily throw a monkey wrench into Nokia’s Android plans. Since Nokia’s strategy is ultimately to go after the same market as Google, it is not a smart move to give Google the ability to pull the plug on Nokia any time.
@iPhone Developer: Not clear what we mean by smartphones and Nokia’s numbers. NOK is the largest _phone_ maker, huge numbers in developing countries, great numbers in Europe, lousy numbers in US>
What’s clear, however:
1. Nokia “warned” Wall Street last week, their numbers will be lower than expected because of “competition”, see the link: http://bit.ly/NOKwarn
Nokia is sinking, “competition” being mainly RIM and AAPL and, rising fast, Android.
2. This has become an app game and Nokia’s losing it.
JLG
@Jean-Louis Gassée,
I have marveled at your work since you introduced the BeBox. I have always wanted to tell you how much I believe you almost changed everything. It’s a real honor. I wish you very well, Sir.
Alex
@DDZ You raise _the_ important dilemma for NOK. With their current strategy, they’ll lose everything. I know it’s not a popular thought, but look at the vectors. Maemo/Meego is wrong for smartphones, focus mistake. Take a Debian Linux distro, or similar, shoehorn a desktop OS into a smaller form factor and you have a “Mobile Linux” a.k.a Moblin, now “merged” with Maemo to make MeeGo. I’ve been using a N900 running Maemo 5, very troubling.
In other words, I don’t believe in Nokia’s fractured software strategy, I wrote what I wrote because I don’t believe it can be made to work. I’d be thrilled to be proven wrong.
What this amounts to is for Nokia to pick its poison. And Google would _love_ to unleash Nokia against Apple, and would make concessions. Also, Android is open source, you can “take”Android and use it as you wish if a) you don’t license the Android name and, b) you don’t go through the CTS, Compatibility Test Suite. With Nokia’s market might, the company could dictate its terms.
Lastly, Ovi. Not a winner yet and not clear how to make it a winner against current (iTunes) and future (Goggle Music and other services, Amazon) opposition.
Thanks for the opportunity to have the dialog. JLG
Do you realise Symbian’s heritage – the Psion series of computers.
Anyone who used a palm realises that they were ahead of their time in functionality and design.
There was also Palm – again Palm was ahead of it’s time at one point.
Apple should have found it impossible to enter this market, but through the laziness of Palm, Sony Ericsson, and Nokia they have handed it to apple on a plate, or rather the mobile operators have handed it to them on a plate. It was only when these platforms needed to be sold with a cellular contract that things started to stagnate.
Now Apple is in the middle of screwing over the operators. In the UK by selling the iphone sim free (not locked to any network) they have forced the operators to start offering sim only plans on short term contracts (30 days to 12 months) for their customers. This means that networks will have to compete on quality to keep customers, instead of luring them in with a network exclusive mobile then holding onto them for 18 months – 2 years. It also has the effect of keeping users free to change iphone’s according to apple’s schedule, not the renewal date of operators contract !!
Amplifying M. Gassée’s original comment, Nokia needs to reinvent themselves. My impression is that their original business model was making phones for the carriers which also had some nice features for end users.
Apple changed that to one of selling portable devices directly to end users and by the way these devices happened to include a cell phone radio.
I can walk into an Apple store and see a variety of devices all based on OS X which has well over 10 years of development and one of those devices includes a cell phone radio. Apple speaks directly to customers and has done so for ages.
Who is Nokia? A maker of low cost cell phones. In the US, with their low market share, I suspect that many people don’t even know who they are. Last week Apple started taking reservations for their new iPhone. Sight unseen 600,000 people placed orders for the new device because they are totally familiar with Apple’s message and they feel they can trust Apple’s design skills and design sense.
Nokia could come out with a phone with fantastic features but no one would line up to get it because we don’t have an image in our heads as to what Nokia stands for besides low cost cell phones. That is Nokia’s challenge. To reinvent who they are, to figure out _why_ they are in business and then communicate this to customers.
Doesn’t sound like OPK or Anssi to me. It was amusing to read, however.
Your sci-fi went over the top right from the beginning. How the fuck were they talking in Palo Alto of all the places? They sit at Keilalahti, Espoo, Finland and don’t talk – at least with each other. That’s the Nokia office culture.
Btw, Nokia is mostly owned by American pensioners. If Nokia falls: good riddance.
Thats part of the Sci-Fi!
American copyright and patent laws prohibits mobile app development outside of US territory, and since nokia changed to android they are bound to it. It’s just the two don’t know it yet.
I happily stick to symbian, it simply is the best mobile OS since Psion times
To hell with “apps”. The only app I need is a good browser (as on the PC
and symbian ^3 allows to change the default browser *btw*
This article doesn’t sound like Nokia at all. Maybe it sounds like Nokia if you’re sat in the Silicon Valley bubble?
Nokia have a development strategy – it’s Symbian ^3 and ^4 for smartphones with software written with QT, their cross platform framework. Then it’s Meego for tablets like the N900 and larger, also with QT. It’s been about moving to QT for some time as that gives them independence from the OS and rich development environment. QT also runs on desktop OSs inc OSX, Windows and Linux.
They don’t need Android. Android needs QT. QT could unify Androids road crash of a UI. Every single Android phone I’ve used has a different UI and each app then has it’s own idea of a UI too.
Nokia certainly don’t need Windows Phone 7 “for volume” as one comment suggested!
Secondly, they need to sort out their US carriers and get Nokia smartphones in front of US eyes. “Nokia makes cheap phones” is a US perception, not worldwide. Here it’s “Apple makes expensive phones which don’t do as much as Nokia” not that Nokia are cheap. Apple may have an “app for that” which is just as well as their OS is bereft of particular features.
Nokia do have the apps though if you need them.
@Rurik – “Evernote or Dropbox or Foursquare or Yelp or an awesome wide selection of Facebook and Twitter apps”
Evernote for Symbian – http://www.allaboutsymbian.com/news/item/10967_Evernote_for_Symbian_live_and_.php
Dropbox – Not yet officially though there is an unofficial widget for it. However Nokia’s own Ovi Files service is better IME. Less of a resource hog on my Mac and gives you 10GB plus the ability to remotely access your Mac or PC with your phone like Apple’s BackToMyMac service except FREE.
Foursquare – built in to Gravity (Twitter/Facebook/Google Reader client that’s the best on ANY platform). There’s a couple of other apps with Foursquare built in too.
Yelp – I had to look up what it is but you’ve got m.yelp.co.uk and Ovi Maps has a built in local reviews service from Qype. There’s dozens of apps like Yelp in the Ovi store though arguably these shouldn’t be apps anyway.
Facebook and Twitter apps come built in on all Nokias now but if you want the best, buy Gravity. There’s an official Facebook app too though.
So, Rurik, Nokia isn’t missing apps really in the key areas although sometimes going with the US based services isn’t the best. Nobody on a Nokia would honestly say Google Maps for instance is better than Ovi Maps, in Europe.
In riposte, I could ask if there is a multi-tasking VNC app on the iPhone that doesn’t lose a session when I go and look something up on the web? Or SSH? Or why isn’t VoIP built in to the OS? Or why won’t the battery last more than a day? Or why can’t I do push email with normal IMAP? Or why can’t I tether an iPhone for free? Or send files via Bluetooth? Or change the ringtone to anything I want? Or have a home screen with notifications on it? Or use Flash (had Flash for years on Nokia) ? Or print wirelessly to my HP printer? Or edit Word/Excel docs directly (QuickOffice ships on all E Series Nokias free) ? Or use corporate VPNs fully without having to ask the IT dept to cater for my iPhone ?
And Android isn’t much better in that regard and who would want to tie their phone to Google’s advertising platform?
Ugh – sorry if that looks like a stream of rant. It was formatted.
Thank you for your comments JLG.
@JLG: Not clear what we mean by smartphones and Nokia’s numbers. NOK is the largest _phone_ maker, huge numbers in developing countries, great numbers in Europe, lousy numbers in US
This year 1st quarter Symbian had 44% smarphone market share:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smartphone
That they managed to do this with oudated software speaks volumes about their ability to move huge numbers of phones.
@JLG:What’s clear, however:
1. Nokia “warned” Wall Street last week, their numbers will be lower than expected because of “competition”, see the link: http://bit.ly/NOKwarn
Their numbers would have been in line with expectations if the Euro currency had not tanked. When Euro tanked they had to disclose all other reasons in the warning. With a strong Euro there would not have been any warning. Again, with aging software copeting with iPhone and Android that is a huge achievement.
@JLG:Nokia is sinking, “competition” being mainly RIM and AAPL and, rising fast, Android.
Nokia is not sinking, the Euro currency is sinking. Nokia still makes more profits than all Android manufactures combined.
@JLG:2. This has become an app game and Nokia’s losing it.
Yes iPhone is winning the app game at the moment and that is why I develop for iPhone. But I see no reason why Nokia would be doomed with Apps forever.
Anything can happen:
- OPK will retire
- Nokia will hire a professional industrial designer. Currently they have the son of a former Finnish president : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marko_Ahtisaari (This is outdated, he is now Senior Vice President of Design at Nokia, see the Finnish Wikipedia entry or http://ahtisaari.typepad.com/about.html)
- Nokia will hire some Palm talent
Nokia is still doing great considering that their leadership has no technical background and their head designer has not design background. Just imagine what Nokia would/will be able to do once they do make some key changes.
Nokia is right in pursuing control, by trying to control the whole sw/hw stack like Apple does. The problem is, the most out-of-control part of the problem can not be solved by more engineering, only less.
The calls for less models, more concise marketing and actual quality assurance are spot-on. Nokia execs could benefit from a bit of shut-up-and-ship. “You can’t build a reputation on what you are going to do.” as Henry Ford, a rather industrious individual, once remarked.
I guess there is a long term vision of grabbing the marketing from below. Not the $89 price point, but by leveraging the manufacturing expertise and tightly controlled stack to attack at the $29 point, riding on a wave of emerging wealth in developing countries. I’m not quite sure how Nokia will not be seen as the ‘cheap one’ when people actually can afford to upscale, but Nokia’s response will no doubt be an endless array of tacky gold plated ‘economy plus’ Vertus. :p
Unfortunately, Android devices will be approaching from the opposite direction, getting cheaper and more versatile all the time.
This is what happens:
1) Sensible and well-meaning commentators point out the slow-motion car-crash that is Nokia. The confusing messages to consumers. The failure to respond to the iPhone. The bizarre-two horse solution to the mobile OS problem.
2) Nokia go into a huddle.
3) They emerge beaming and with renewed confidence, as they announce a new improved strategy which will bear fruit in 8-12 months time. They drop heavy hints about some amazing new phones coming soon.
4) The hints cause sales of their current products to collapse as consumers decide to wait for these superphones.
5) Finally the new products appear. They are much less impressive than everyone hoped. Sales of the top end devices decline even more.
6) Now, go back to Step 1 and repeat this process every 8 – 12 months.
Nokia ‘s culture is not defined by “Sisu” it is defined by “Mañana”
C.
Nokia make fantastic phones. When my wife wanted to upgrade her old phone after an unfortunate acident with a concrete floor, we went straight to a nokia, just like all of my previous “phones”. The problem is the small pocket computers are much more useful and only twice the price, but they replace PDAs, media players, portable games consoles, pagers, netbooks, e-books
All for much less than the cost of all thos egadgets seperately. There might be some of htem tht are excelent at their role – Kindle for ebooks, Nokia for phones, Sonly for MP3 players and portable game consoles, but iPhone is the best of all of those funtions in one device. Once some good android handsets are built, it will compete well with iPhone/Pad/PodTouch, but it still sint global. The only android phone here in NZ is an HTC running Android 1.something, Windows Mobile is still at v6, and iPhone will get iOS 4 now (downloading as I type) and the next A4 based phone in a month. Here, in NZ. There is no announcement for any Android 2 phone. Blackberry will still sell to the corporates, but noone I know is spending their own money on one.
The perspective in this is all wrong; the US is a mobile phone Galapagos, where only Spanish and English is required and expensive data charges have retarded the development of higher-end services like video calling and gps usage.
To compete in world markets requires additional qualities; low purchase cost, non-latin input support (e.g. chinese touchscreen input), the ability to work in wide temperature ranges, etc. A surprising amount of iPhone and Android apps just don’t have language support or even allow server access outside the US.
Nokia have been successful at reaching this larger market and come from a country with a strong history of OS development, having given us Linux. I wouldn’t invalidate their strategy just yet.
I remember how I used to switch with every Nokia newest gear. I remember how my sony Ericsson, palm and first HTC smartphones made me happy. And then I tried the iphone. I’ve always wondered why is it impossible for Nokia, who manufacture their own hardware and own symbian os, to go ahead and compete with apple for real. You are right, it’s the culture
@John In the US there are some fantastic Android phones and great apps for Android (most major ones get an Android version as well as iPhone) but you are right that it is not very international yet. But it’s just a matter of time before a combo of Google stewardship, nice apps and Asian manufacturing brings a wave of great < $200 devices to world markets. That's what Nokia should be worried about, not the iPhone.
@Carniphage Exactly right. Nokia is like the Titanic after the iceberg hits. Everything seems ok, the music is still playing, the lights are on [ie they still have good share outside the US]. But while they are walking around the deck, assuring each other that the ship can't sink, there is a hole below the waterline. Multiple compartments are punctured: Android is free; the app ecosystem has momentum; the OS has a clear roadmap; the sponsor has a vision for it; and prices are only headed downward, to $300, $200, $100…
Nokia can try to fix the leaking ship — though that has failed for 3+ years now, with Symbian, Symbian Number 3, Symbian :-}4, MeeToo edition, Hobgoblin edition and any other number of reboots which I long ago stopped tracking. Or they can jump ship and partner with a software specialist like Google or MS. The Carpathia is not as grand as the Titanic, but at least it won't be at the bottom of the ocean.
@John
+1
@Shaun
Ugh – sorry but your knowledge of the iPhone’s abilities is as limited as your formatting skills and consumer needs.
Boy, all the pro-Nokia reality denying posts here lead me to think the Nokia is finished. Even people outside the company can’t see the writing on the wall — it is pretty much guaranteed that people inside the company don’t (wish to) see it.
Japan 7-8 years ahead of the US in phones according to Guillaume? Dude, the iPhone has a 70+% share of the smartphone market IN JAPAN. It’s over, long over.
The only thing keeping Nokia afloat are cheap feature phones, mostly in the third world. That is not the road to success.
@Rurik – Nokia ALREADY sells great smartphones for less than $200 unsubsidised. Android isn’t there yet and won’t be for some time – it requires much faster hardware and more RAM.
@fring – The lack of formatting is this blog’s fault, not mine. I’m an Apple registered developer with 3 apps completed already. I’ve also 4 Symbian apps. The iPhone is nice for apps, useless as a phone which is why I carry both an iPhone AND a Nokia. I’d love to get rid of the iPhone though as Apple’s dev policy is not to my taste. Android doesn’t appeal mostly as it’s Java and the market is fragmented with so many different versions of 1.x and 2.x.
@Ted T. Nobody buys smartphones in Japan so it’s easy for Apple to get 70% (it was actually 72%) of that market. For reference, 72% of the smartphone market is 5.5% of the entire market in Japan or 2.3 million iPhones. Also for reference, Symbian (Nokia’s base OS) was shipped on 12 million feature phones in Japan in the same period and it’s not even a big player in Japan. But don’t let reality get in the way of JLG’s nice piece of fiction.
In an amusing aside, a contact of mine tells me that Nokia’s latest brainwave for saving it’s evaporating presence in the smartphone market has been to hire key members of the original Zune development team…
Also, and unsurprisingly, the image painted was of a company with loads of teams of people who don’t communicate with each other, who are hostile to change and who are all jealously guarding their own little silos…
@Shaun — which ones are those? The last Nokia I owned was an E62 — nice in some ways but ultimately a poor imitation of a BlackBerry. And the OS was painful — having to navigate with a 4-directional cursor was absurd. I tried the N97 and N900 at the Nokia store in NYC before they closed it, but the usability was still awful compared to the iPhone.
I would love Nokia to succeed but I just don’t see it happening until they fully reboot with one smartphone OS, one developer community and one message to the world. The issue you mention re: Android hardware and RAM will quickly be solved — Nokia can’t win this game by betting against Moore’s law.
@Rurik. Smartphones like the 5230 are sub $100 now PAYG with SatNav built in. Moores law works for Nokia too. What they lose at the high end, comes up from the low end to meet their hardware. Android can never run on hardware as cheap as a 5230.
The US tech press are so focussed on the high end that they aren’t seeing the revolution happening in the low end where smartphones are becoming increasingly accessible to people with lesser incomes.
Nokia have a high end strategy – it’s QT everywhere.
Nokia who ?
@Ted: As mentionned by Shaun; there are few smartphones in Japan, for the very same reason I mentionned: most of the world is not going “app-crazy”.
Japan doesn’t need smartphones, the services offered by Japanese providers on featurephones are much more evolved than anywhere else in the world.
Seeing most recent comments, with my thanks for an animated discussion:
1. This isn’t about smartphones, it’s about a rising new genre of really personal computers, call it RPC. The -phone ending takes our mind’s eye away from the real thing, the RPC.
How could Apple succeed with such mediocre phone service in the US if it weren’t for the -phone part of smart-phone being secondary to the ubiquitous smaller personal computer?
2. For reasons that go back to Steve Jobs’ bad early experience with getting apps for the newborn Mac — and because iTunes, not designed for the iPhone, proved to be a godsend, an insane stroke of luck, the RPC genre is now about apps and apps store/marketplaces.
3. System software matters, not in “my pull down menu is longer than yours ways”, not in a battle of features that may or may not translate into the experience of a normal human, but in real fitness to the new genre. What I’m getting at is the “mobile” version of a pre-existing desktop platform risk feeling strange, shoehorned. That’s been my experience with the N900, beside the terrible resistive touch-screen in an age where the opposition uses nimbler capacitive-screen technology.
WebOS, soon Window Phone (that word again), iOS, Android, none is a mobile version of something else. Some might contain DNA fragments of Linux, or MacOS, the latter containing a lot of Unix genetic material, but they don’t look/feel like a desktop derivative.
Time and again, I’ve been in this industry 42 years, when a new genre emerges, the incumbents tend to think it’s like the one they know, only smaller: minis, micros soon called PC, and now smart… I mean RPC.
JLG
@Guillaume I think that ‘apps’ are a red herring. It is about the ‘cloud’ (web) and the apps are an extension of that. Sure, Japanese carriers have done well with advanced services — but they can’t outrun the web forever. The web will outmaneuver and outinnovate any carrier — it’s just a matter of time.
Apple dealt a long overdue death blow to carriers in the US, by putting device control in consumers’ hands. And consumers responded by embracing web/mobile blended services like Yelp, Foursquare, Twitter, Facebook etc
This leapfrogged the US in a miraculously short time from dead last place to first place in mobile sophistication — and it set the paradigm which will inevitably spread globally.
I would ask the Nokia supporters here:
- how many of Nokia’s ‘smartphones’ are running 5+ apps that consumers have browsed for and downloaded from teh OVI store?
- how many apps/songs etc total have been downloaded from the OVI store (ie what is consumer engagement)?
- how many dollars total have developers made from the the OVI store?
Great read except for the stock market thing. A 10% market drop for Apple a few days before iPhone 4 sales were in? Not happening. Even if it happened after the iPhone 4 release it would need to happen soon. In another couple of months Apple can loose 10% of it value and retain a market cap lead over Microsoft.
Nokia might get a 20% bump but would loose most of that days later as investors sold to reap short term profits. Then it would be a wait till actual products came out before there was anymore significant movement. Microsoft wouldn’t smile either as the Android Juggernaut would further place smartphone market share out of reach.
@JLG – The ONLY operating system from your list that isn’t based on a desktop OS is Symbian which is Nokia’s primary OS. It only uses the Linux based Maemo and forthcoming Meego on it’s internet tablets. The N900 is an internet tablet with a phone built in and I agree it’s clunky. It’s not Nokia’s primary phone OS.
Arguably, iOS and Android are successful BECAUSE they were based on a more powerful desktop OS.
I’m sure we’ll see a Nokia iPad before the year is out, hopefully not based on Meego 1.0′s Netbook interface! Will it beat the iPad – who cares – it doesn’t matter. It’ll still run QT apps from Nokia’s Symbian phones.
@Rurik – I’ve about 30-40 apps on my Nokia other than those included with it. I’d guess maybe 6 or 7 came from the Ovi store and the rest from Sourceforge, the developers own site or Nokia’s other sites – yes, even some of Nokia’s own apps aren’t in their own store. You don’t have to buy from only one store on a Nokia. You also have to remember that most Nokias already come with Facebook, Twitter, Office apps, Skype, Gizmo, etc. on them already. It’s a bit annoying to be honest – like buying a Dell instead of a Mac. It does however mean that the need to download more apps to fill the gaps in the iPhone is lessened.
@Rurik:
But JS — your starting point is what the phone vendors *wish* could be true, not what actually *is* true… (They wish they could build an ecosystem with their OS at the center [they can't], they wish they could get higher than 10% EBITDA [unlikely], they wish they could differentiate meaningfully and get the smartphone cat back in the bag [nope] )
I don’t understand your point. What are Apple’s margins? They have built “an ecosystem with their OS at the center”. There is always money to be made if you differentiate. Apple IS a HW/SW vendor just like Motorola or Nokia too, but with different focus and competences. Sad to see Motorola give up differentiation game and therefore the upside potential.
Nokia printed money last 10 years and if there’re 5 poorer years, so be it. Root of differentiation are in one’s own asset base and they come only by developing those.
@JSG, I respect your experience in the industry. You also know that after initial fumbling, once an incumbent gets its act together, response can be powerful (Netscape navigator vs. Exlorer) or not (IBM’s own line of PCs). Or are you saying Apple couldn’t survive the fact that they were pushed into niche by Windows? That they should’ve given up their control point and differentiation?
@JLG
I think JLG makes a great point: “This isn’t about smartphones, it’s about a rising new genre of really personal computers, call it RPC.”
I’ve said before, for a smartphone, the phone is a feature. Yet by calling it ‘smartphone’ it probably harms our strategic view of these devices. So far, Apple seems to best understand this. They are making personal devices to access the mobile web.
[With respect to luck...when I first used Amazon, in the mid 1990s, I thought it was an amazing idea and purchased stock. When my friend showed me his 'iPod', one of the very first models, I thought it was a big clunky walkman. Wish I knew then what I know now...]
@Rurik Bradbury:
“none at all” ist he answer to your three questions, and this is why symbian is so great. Any developer can publish to symbian without going through a stupid store validation process.
@Shaun: You’re right, Symbian isn’t a desktop OS, it is a descendant of the noble and worthy Psion OS. I’ve owned a series of Psion devices: at one time they Psions were _the_ PDAs, after starting as a stock-taking handheld data collection devices. I’ve known the Potter brothers very well staring in 1981. On Symbian, the question is how successful it is and, more important, will be against RIM, Android, WebOS, iOS and, perhaps Windows Phone 7.
Look at Google I-O and WWDC 2010 and ask yourself where the developer momentum is. Sad, unfair, marketing BS some say, but momentum in the “wrong”direction nonetheless. JLG
@Shaun You answered different questions than the three I asked. What I was getting at was: are typical consumers engaged with the Nokia platform, are they passionate and evangelizing it? [no]; and are developers making tons of money? [no] In the post-phone RPC world of cloud and apps, those two questions will determine success.
Now that carriers are irrelevant — just dumb pipes — and a phone is only as good as the ecosystem it is part of, it is developers and consumers that decide the outcome.
@JS Apple has the ability to build a fully-integrated stack with vibrant developer ecosystem and pleasurable consumer experience. So far it seems that Nokia does not. Motorola and Samsung would also *like* that ability, but do not have it. It’s not something you can simply buy or build — it springs directly from the company culture and the CEO’s vision + ability to push it through.
@MartinM Are you by any chance a technical person or developer? Consumers *love* the app store. It is awesome, and they don’t care about the hoops developers have to jump through, nor do they care about the edge case apps that Apple bans so capriciously. 250,000 apps got through the hoops, so it must be worth the tradeoff of Apple’s annoying policies.
Nokia copied the app store with Ovi and it knows that’s how it has to be — but it has not had the resolve to keep it simple, nor the leverage over carriers to overrule their own app preferences.
Consumers do not want to deploy apps to their devices manually (remember the pain of WinMo?) — they want an approach as simple as a dishwasher or microwave. Nokia has to provide that, or suffer the death of 1000 cuts by Apple and Android.
Why should anybody trust Google? It is not good for Google if people spend their time with apps instead of searching and using the web. It is not good for Google to make the Android a great app platform.
They pretend to be doing just that, but just to buy time. How else can you explain that only developers in a few countries are allowed to sell apps in the Android marketplace. Everybody will be going to very surprised very soon. Android device manufactures and developers beware.
As the saying goes: One more thing… This one quoting un unnamed developer I know personally:
————–
We’ll set aside the obvious – that their “platforms” are not platforms as
all… because each phone model has a version that is incompatible in subtle
ways. So, there is no choice but to test on every single phone model… and
to guess at how to solve the incompatibilities along the way.
Consider how pathetic their Ovi Store is. There’s literally no developer
opportunity there. The deck is stacked:
1. There’s no DRM. Not at all. So, after one sale, the software becomes
freely distributable.
2. They claim a 30/70 split, but that’s not so clear. Follow this tweet to
an entertaining, Nokia hosted, thread:
http://twitter.com/ugurkaner/status/13374672896
3. If you use the operator billing option in Ovi (highly recommended by
Nokia!) the split is 70/30. Oops.
4. Nokia does all kinds of “pay for placement” in their store. No
meritocracy here.
5. Nokia doesn’t guarantee their sales reporting. Their agreement says that
they can estimate the sales and pay based on that. You have no way to argue
or verify.
There are additional amusing details, but you get the point.
Oh… we should also talk about their “developer support” program. The only
way to ask a technical question is to _buy_ a technical support ticket for
100 EU. For that, you have no guarantee of an answer. In fact, the answer
can just be “that’s impossible.” Apparently the people answering the
questions are evaluated based on how quickly they close out tickets, not
solving problems. All questions are marked as “solved” when they are closed,
even if there’s no solution: there’s no way for their system to track
unsolved problems, and no way for a developer (who paid 100 EU to ask the
question) to challenge why the case was closed. Insane.
There are some good people in Forum Nokia trying to improve things, but they
are fundamentally doomed because the organization doesn’t care. They are
making old fashioned cell phones, not devices for running applications.
Sorry for the rant… wind me up on the topic of Nokia and I can go for a
loooong time.
————
I was incredulous, I checked the $$$ for the Tech Support Ticket. True.
JLG
@Rurik: And I agree that apps are a red-herring, but I don’t think the full desktop web is the answer either.
As such, I think the questions you ask about the OVI Store are fairly irrelevant. Apps are not the opportunity they’re made to be; neither the OVI Store, the Apple App Store or the Android Marketplace. It’s a bubble that’s going to burst sometimes and people will move elsewhere.
And this brings me to the question: by what metric do you feel the US has leapfrogged the rest of the world and how is it measured?
Surely you don’t mean in mobile technology adoption rates! Per the latest numbers from the International Telecommunication Union, the US stands at 91%, about 9 cellphones per 10 person. That ranks behind most of the industrialized world and behind some developing countries.
As for innovation…
Services beyond the ones being currently adopted in the US have been available in other markets for a while. In 2007, Otetsudai Networks opened in Japan, being a location-based mobile service for finding temp work. And the US is barely getting into services like Foursquare and Gowalla, that are so many useless ways of saying “Hey! I’m here!”.
And let’s also mention 3D-Navi, that introduced full 3D mapping in 2006, something Google is still very far from replicating. I’m not talking about pictures like street-view. No, they’ve actually mapped the city in 3D and are able to offer guidance in accordance to this data. For instance, if you want to avoid getting wet when it’s raining, it can maximize the amount of overhang in your route.
So if you were talking about innovation, the US is still behind.
So far, the US is still following trends. SMS and MMS adoption in the US is coming along the same way it was a few years back in Europe and elsewhere. I don’t see any reason to suddenly turn the graphs upside-down. Where do you?
I think the religion of owning the value chain, as done by Apple, is strongly admired at Nokia. (I once worked there, like half of all Finnish tech people). But I don’t see the point. Do the car companies own the value chain? No! There is plenty of room in different tiers of the value chain. Nokia is obviously great in harware manufacturing and distribution. They are good in understanding 3GPP standards UMTS/LTE, which look like strong candidates for much of the future wireless Internet infrastructure, and Nokia also has synergies with Nokia Simens Networks, which makes the networks (and used to be part of Nokia).
They don’t have to do the OS and the GUI to differentiate! They have a proven capacity to make money with sub $100 devices (which 99% of all devices will always be). They can still differentiate with speed, reliability, quality, even design. Note that demand for wireless speed will always be greater than the practical reality gives us. So a good device that gives better connections and better speed with less battery will have a huge differentiating edge.
BTW, it migh also be that Google wants Nokia to adopt Android, badly. The speech about fragmentation may be an overreaction, but as far I can see the Android phone quality is somewhat erratic, and currently it is difficult for a naive customer to pick a reliable, good brand Android model. Nokia + Android would cystallize a very strong alliance of brands. And that could provide enough muscle to keep Apple at bay.
One more thing: who is delusional enough to think that Apple will stay in the high-end only? Look at iPods! Apple can also conquer the middle or even the low end, as soon as they have saturated the high end. And anyway, todays high-end features are easy to implement in a sub $100 model in a few years.
@Guillaume
“The full desktop web”
No, I’m talking about the cloud: services which are available across any device, typically with an AJAX app on the desktop and native app on mobile devices. This is the current ‘state of the art’ web experience and only Apple and Android broadly support it today, because Ovi Market and BlackBerry App World are deserted towns.
“Apps are not the opportunity they are made out to be”
Apple has paid out over $1 billion to developers. It’s an enormous opportunity.
“Apps are a bubble that will burst”
What will replace it — HTML5? It will be 5+ years before that has any impact on smartphone (sorry RPC) innovation. And 5+ years is an eternity in this field.
“by what metric do you feel the US has leapfrogged the rest of the world?”
The US is a very strange country. Parts of it like Alabama and Kentucky are dirt poor, which lowers averages. However, big cities like New York and San Francisco are at the cutting edge of mobile tech. The comparison is especially obvious when I am in London. People there don’t often check in to places with FourSquare, use Yelp to find a good restaurant nearby, use Open Table to book a table etc. Their lives are not as ‘webified’ as in NY or San Fran (like I said above, around 18-24 months behind the curve).
@Rurik – you’re possibly right about web services although all Nokia phones with Ovi Maps built in have Qype built in too. I’ve mentioned it already – it’s the European equivalent of Yelp. See this story on Techcrunch – http://techcrunch.com/2010/02/26/qype-the-yelp-of-europe-gets-a-look-from-google-nokia/
For Open Table, what’s the point – just ring them and ask. I was in Pizza Hut last week and someone had ordered pizza over the web. They’d not got the order. Much simpler just to ring.
FourSquare. I think that’s a privacy thing and a difference in culture. Why would you want to broadcast where you are all the time? Then again, I’m the last to get it I suspect. I still don’t understand why people stick their entire lives on Facebook.
On the other side, Nokia Point & Find is pretty cool too. I tend to use that for location based services. It’s easier than typing.
@Shaun Qype looks nice, though it is still very spartan (it only lists a handful of restaurants near our flat in Farringdon, when there a hundred nearby.) In 18-24 months I’m sure it will be where Yelp is today. Open Table is important (and hugely successful) because competition in Manhattan for tables is fierce — it is sadly impossible just to call them and book.
I enjoyed the discussion here and would add only this: I hope Nokia succeeds and gives us a third great platform, in addition to the two from untrustworthy Apple and untrustworthy Google. But it has a small window, as JLG says, and many major (insurmountable) challenges:
1) it must cultivate developers and offer them $1 billion in revenues, like Apple – not 26 cents on the dollar and a dismal standard of living like today
2) it must give control to consumers, so their devices are both as simple to use and as customizable as Apple’s
3) it must cut its cosy relationship with carriers by placing the consumer’s interests first (just as Apple did to ATT)
It won’t be easy.
Well, I’m at least convinced about Nokia strategy. Eventually they’ll get the execution right, too.
See you at the beach in 5 years. I just bought $1000 worth of Nokia stock and we will see whether I’ll fly Ryanair to Mallorca or take Emirates and a limo to Burj al-Arab.
Regards,
JS
PS. JLG: what are your thoughts about Apple low-end phone? Do you think it’s in the cards? I mean, can they execute it without fragmenting their SW & HW platform too seriously? you said yourself that Qt is not sensible, because HW differentiation will drive delta necessarily.
great post..
like this…
love it..good post
@Rurik: About the 1 Billion to developers: that’s smoke and mirrors. The vast majority of apps don’t make even near to a return on investment. The mobile analyst Tomi Ahonen has it all laid out here: http://bit.ly/awD9h0
As for HTML5; why? It’s not necessary for rich web services. Yelp, though I don’t use it because it barely has anything for my city, has a WAP page and is able to serve the same content through it. Sure, WAP’s not sexy, but it’s able to serve content as well; fancy rolling menus and multitouch is not what’s important, the service is.
I’d say the opportunity is with what’s already there in the majority’s hand: SMS, MMS, WAP. The developers of 225,000 apps on the Apple App Store, including a lot of major brands, split 1 billion app download revenue between themselves; the producers of American Idol made half a billion with SMS votes in 2009. And SMS/MMS popularity is still growing quickly, so the opportunity is not past.
The majority is not as obsessed with tech and smartphones as we are; the real money’s in serving those people.
Brilliant stuff!
> System software matters … not in a battle of features that may or may not translate into the experience of a normal human, but in real fitness to the new genre. What I’m getting at is the “mobile” version of a pre-existing desktop platform risk feeling strange, shoehorned.
Raskin was right that the difference between a computer and a calculator is that the former does text while the latter does not. Raskin was alright right that the computer is inherently collaborative through interchange of character information. The desktop publishing paradigm is about interactive glyph identification, but a paradigm for computer publishing as it currently is would not be one where glyph identification outweights character identification.
No doubt about the importance of applications, but the reason the Apple II is no longer around is that it only supported upper case English; the reason the Mac OS is no longer around is that it only supported non-unified subsets of the writing systems of world scripts; the reason Apple PDD and 800,000 lines of code in QuickDraw GX is no longer around is that the input of character information was not unified (Apple used W3C HTML and Adobe PDF to document Apple PDD, not Apple PDD); and the reason Mac OS X is waning is that Jobs promoted that Adobe character-coded font model for Mac OS and failed to promote the Adobe tagged PDF model for Mac OS X for which reason half of what you compose with Apple, Adobe and Microsoft intelligent fonts can’t be searched. The reason in all cases is not the number of applications, but the strength of the infrastructure services and the soundness of the interfaces through which users interact with such services
.
Henrik
Just a follow up since the US tech press are ignoring this.
Earlier in the week, Nokia released QT SDK 1.0 (full non-beta version), dropped the charge for Symbian Signing entirely, dropped the restrictions on having to be a company, opened the doors in the Ovi store to QT apps, released a smart QT installer and introduced a flat 50 Euro fee to publish on Ovi.
That puts the Ovi store somewhere between Android and Apple for it’s store – freedom like Android but still some cost and signing restrictions (takes about 2 weeks) before your app is in the store.
News all on http://blogs.forum.nokia.com/blog/nokia-developer-news
Secondly, they’ve also announced the N8 is the last N-Series device with Symbian on it. It’ll be Meego from now on, presumably for the N9. Symbian lives on in mid to low end smartphones still and both run QT anyway.
http://www.engadget.com/2010/06/23/nokia-n8-to-be-final-symbian-device-in-n-series-all-meego-from/
I think the big Science Fiction story line here is that the U.S somehow became the center of Mobile innovation.
Americans tend to think that by developing killer software is all it takes. Someone still needs to make the phones that run the OS.
nice info…
I think there is big competition between two of this companies, the system of each phone is different but they all the time think how should they keep the phone in the right level.
Thank you for the link
good news about : Science Fiction: Nokia goes Android
good news about: “Science Fiction: Nokia goes Android”
good news… thanks for info…
since the US-fanboys probably missed it: Annsi Vanjoki himself claryfied on Nokia Conversations that the N8 is the only S^3 device in the N Series but that a Symbian^4 N-series device “is a very high possibility”.
helpful info. tanks
helpful info. thanks
I really don’t understand what Nokia would possibly have to gain from adopting Android, which is a slow, battery-hog Java VM in a phone. I have this strange feeling that most American commentators don’t really even understand the concept of an operating system beyond the user interface, which admittedly in Symbian handsets is more complex than it need be (although I’m perfectly happy with it) — and also does not work great with touchscreens; it’s very button-centric. But that’s about it.
Symbian is, under the hood, a very advanced mobile phone OS especially when it comes to hardware management and integration and power saving… it’s somewhat annoying to code for because of its design, but the Qt integration should help with that. Unfortunately, for the UI improvements that certainly are needed, that stuff may come too late. Which is a huge pity, as the underlying stack in Symbian is great.
@ Eero Nevalainen:
1. Telling “Americans” they’re wrong, while they have Nokia’s money in their pockets, and refuse to part with said money, won’t help matters. The facts are Nokia’s management “dissed” the American market and the Americans responded in kind. Yes, CDMA isn’t pretty; yes, the US carriers are ugly; yes, American customers want things inexpensive, they don’t want to pay for quality, with the notable exception of Apple.
But, when in Rome…
Don’t tell the customer she’s wrong, find a way to make a sale, and many more.
2. This thing about how Symbian is so much better “under the hood” won’t fly. Android is getting better and better much faster than Symbian. And what about RIM? How did they get where they are? Magic tricks or strong products, including their PIM sync with Exchange?
3. Have you taken a look at developers? Do they like the way Nokia treats them? Or do they flock to Android and Apple? Are they idiots or, collectively, smart?
4. What about the confusing messages: Symbian, future or past, Maemo, Moblin, Meego? How does this look like.
5.I got a N900. Who put this on the market? Is this evidence of inferior American thinking or of Nokia’s blind ignorance of market reality, with, among othr shorycomings, a resistive touch screen?
This said, I hope Nokia gets rid of OPK propmptly (and of Jorma Ollila, the chairman after all, he’s responsible too) and gets the individual needed to restore Nokia to its place place in the industry. JLG
1. It’s true that when trying to sell stuff you sometimes have to do things that would not seem sensical from an engineering or some other point of view. I’m just pointing out some facts regarding the Nokia-dissing, in particular the issue that the concept of “operating system” seems to be restricted to what meets the eye in the minds of a lot of people who have opinions on the matter.
2. Why won’t it fly? How is it getting better, on what metrics? I actually suspect that Android is from an architectural POV pretty hard to build into a more hardware-hugging OS (seen how the battery life is on most Android phones?), and I’m not sure about its enterprise features… which in Symbian are btw *absolutely* superior to RIM’s; it’s just that for some reason the idea of reading email remotely was sold to people by RIM and not Nokia in the US market… another fuck-up in the marketing, not the tech department. Over here I’ve never seen a RIM corporate phone, they’re all Nokias…
3. I’m fully aware that Symbian has been annoying to code for (after all, it’s genuine embedded development; much more demanding than hacking up some Javascript into a browser), and the app store concept (which Nokia had going first, but did not understand the meaning of — yes, they do have issues “selling”, being too much of an engineering firm) pulls in developers, naturally.
You have to understand that Nokia has been providing multitasking, application-running phones on top of Symbian for like the past *decade*. It’s only natural that the OS is a native platform; it’s much easier to just throw any crap on top of any hardware these days and call it a smartphone. It’s not so much that Symbian is “old”, I guess you could say that in modern times, you actually get by with less.
I deeply hope that Nokia gets the Qt stack running well on top of Symbian *fast*, because from a technical perspective (I’m a software developer), it’s a great, great idea. Symbian’s asynchronous programming model combined with Qt’s signalling… very nice and gets rid of the biggest issue in Symbian programming.
4. Well, the strategy is pretty clear; they’ll have Symbian and a Linux based OS. Both will run Qt-based applications. If only Nokia had this going yesterday.
5. I’ve heard a lot of positive stuff about the N900, although never owned one despite the urge… but I’ll get the next model in that line. The resistive/capacitive touchscreen stuff is just another superficial cultish thing… a bit like insisting on calling just touchscreen phones “smartphones”.
OPK screwed up years ago, but I have a feeling that if their current strategy ends up working — as soon as they actually manage to deliver — the new CEO ends up reaping the benefits of what is being done today. Just dumping everything they have from their decades of experience doing mobiles and joining the “let’s run generic Java on any hardware” crowd does not sound like such a smart move.
Re #2 Comparing apples to Apples, Symbian devices do not offer a great battery advantage (not enough that consumers would notice). In performance terms, the iPhone 4 and Samsung Galaxy feel noticeably snappier than Nokia smartphones. This ‘underhood’ advantage will not get traction with users – and it’s irrelevant anyway because you are betting against Moore’s law, which is a guaranteed loser.
Re: RIM, they won out due to their server (BES) and network integration with the device plus MS Exchange. Nokia has no equivalent of the BlackBerry Enterprise Server, I believe. RIM’s capture of this market share is not simply marketing. It’s about a simple coherent vision on which they executed well. Nokia has not had a coherent guiding vision for several years now — apart from ‘pile em high, sell em cheap’ that is.
Re #3 If Nokia has been running apps for a decade, how come it has nothing to show for it? No developer passion or revenues; and no prospects for a ‘virtuous circle’ of buzz like iOS and Android have.
Re #5 This underscores Nokia’s problem. They don’t ‘get’ the new world. The shift from keyboard/stylus to touch interfaces is a new paradigm, not a ‘cultish fad’. It breaks the glass wall between person and device. Smartphones must have two elements: capacitive touch screens; and great apps (ie natural interaction + a simple, highly personalized choice about what my phone should ‘be’).
Apple invented this paradigm; Google copied it; BlackBerry OS6 is copying it and coming out in Q3; Windows Phone ditto in Q4. Which will leave Nokia as the last old-paradigm company standing.
Rurik,
Nokia’s E series phones have 1500mAh batteries that last DAYS in normal usage. I’d agree they need faster CPUs in the touchscreen phones though. E Series business phones tend to be less demanding on a CPU. They’re for grownups not people who play games.
All E Series phones come with Mail for Exchange support built in and some have Lotus Notes support even. No BES server required. No expensive Blackberry account needed. They also have remote wipe/admin. VPN support and built in SIP/VoIP support. They’re quite popular with businesses in Europe. Why they aren’t popular in the US is not because of any disadvantage compared with Blackberry and certainly not simple phones like iPhones and Android.
Nokia makes ‘Old paradigm’ as well as ‘New paradigm’ the same as RIM do. The choice is yours.
Sean — true, but that is apples and oranges. I have a BlackBerry 9700 that lasts for days – but it is not a rich experience like my iPhone. As far as business vs consumer, businesspeople are consumers too. They want one phone that does everything — today in the US they are switching en masse to the iPhone (eg in today’s NY Times, ‘The BlackBerry era may be over’: http://diigo.com/0c05y)
No doubt, managing a bunch of ActiveSync-capable phones individually is cheaper than using a BES — but US IT managers have budget to pay for the added convenience of a single powerful management console and integrated experience.
I would say that Nokia does not offer the new paradigm yet.
First, its ASP per device is around $78, where Apple’s is $650+. Nokia sales in the $400+ capacitive segment are minimal. It’s selling smartphones that are not actually smart.
Second, while Android’s app store may have rough edges, Ovi is a train wreck. Again it comes down to one central question: can Nokia create a virtuous circle of ‘developer support = consumer delight = consumers buying apps = developer support’. This is the sine qua non of the post-phone, battle of the OSes world — and so far I don’t see it.
@Shaun ps apologies for misspelling
JLG
Love the site but is it possible to have threaded comments? It’s hard to follow when someone is responding to a comment from, say, 4 commenters above. (Or am I just doing something wrong?)
What I have heard regarding battery life especially on Androids sounds pretty nasty. Nokias on the other hand stay alive as long as you need to; the point regarding Moore’s law is valid though: Nokia’s issue is not really obsolescence or the OS, but the fact that it just became *easier* for others to create phones. It’s not innovation as much as it is just levelling of the playing field by increased capacity in the hardware.
I am not so sure what the design rationale for the Blackberry technical solution was — it never has been any kind of a factor here in Europe — but Nokia’s phones have always integrated very nicely to a corporate network over a secure VPN (with theoretically any application running then on the phone making use of the networked resources), push email services and all, and with remote management of the device. Corporates really love that. Not sure what more would be required. Anyone I’ve talked to has considered Blackberry a lightweight hack in comparison… it may have something to do with US carriers’ networks or something, I’m not sure.
About running apps for a decade — well, time wasn’t ripe for it for many reasons. First; certainly application development had been more demanding… it was genuine embedded development (remember, on devices that span a decade) which really require you to have a real programmers writing a real product that you’ll then ship to, say, corporate clients onto their corporate phones. This is not about kids turning out crappy games for $10 a pop on the appstore. Of course Nokia also contributed by having a bit of a difficult certification and so on process… but it was a whole different application production/distribution model.
Second, what Apple and Google are doing really requires not only easier application development, but also for a lot of the wireless infrastructure to be in place. Especially the US was slow in coming in a good digital cellphone infrastructure… we might have had the prerequisites for the 3rd party app model in around 2004-5 over here (Finland) — the sort of infra that Nokia had been working towards since late 90s — but it was hard to create the needs that would have then driven mobile data bandwidth growth, which would have created more opportunities… it was a bit of a chicken and egg problem.
So essentially for Apple it was just a matter of exploiting a couple of things coming to maturity at the right time. Nokia could have done it probably too, but they were somewhat asleep at the wheel with the 3rd-party application idea. Not that they weren’t there, but not in the sense of what Apple did.
About the cultish fad — it’s about the capacitiveness. It seems to be an article of faith, and anyone who focuses on that alone in their “smartphone” definition does not have any credibility in my eyes, sorry
Oh yeah, I find it unlikely that Kallasvuo would be chatting with Vanjoki in Palo Alto, it’s more like in their Espoo HQ
But anyway, about the “new paradigm”… I’m going to get a phone for work soonish, and I suspect it will be an Eseries — I can’t imagine actually typing anything on a touchscreen. I like my buttons a lot, thank you very much
@Eero I think you’re being a bit dismissive of Steve Jobs’ success. He overturned the mobile phone industry, broke the carriers’ grip, created a new paradigm with apps + large multitouch screen that every other player (bar none) is now copying, let developers make $1 billion and took almost all the industry’s profits (especially Nokia’s). This chart alone should be enough for OPK to resign: http://diigo.com/0by9f. That would be enough to make a Japanese executive commit hara-kiri out of shame.
Re: capacitive screens, I disagree. My prediction: in 5 years, fewer than 5% of mobile devices will have anything but a capacitive touch screen. It’s not the only hallmark of a smartphone, but it’s a key part of the new paradigm:
OLD: Clunky unnatural interfaces with keys or stylus. NEW: Natural gestures with capacitive screen.
OLD: Handset makers sell to carriers. NEW: They sell to consumers.
OLD: Carriers influence contents of phone screen. NEW: “How do I uninstall that stupid app that came with my phone” [my wife – non-techie]
OLD: Customization not possible for average consumers. NEW: Simple app stores open up a new experience for mass-consumers.
Now that the app revolution started, I literally *can’t* buy a Nokia any more, as none of my apps are available. And it won’t change anytime soon, because Nokia has probably lost the US market forever. The last ecosystem to launch and survive in the US may be Windows Phone 7, and even that is doubtful because it is so late to the game. It may squeak by thanks to $billions from Microsoft – money that Nokia today does not have.
So the door closed in the US. The question is, how many other countries will also become app-societies and close their doors to straggling, late platforms without the critical mass to survive?
Yes, I do appreciate what he’s done, it’s not that. I also fully appreciate your critical-mass arguments regarding application developers — this is perhaps what I am most worried about as a Nokia-fan Finn (and a developer). The new Qt environment is awesome, but may be too late and still too hard for the average script kiddie who gets to code the other phones. But there is also a lot of simple disinformation flying around as is demonstrated even here regarding Symbian’s corporate features, for example (although of course perception is everything in the end).
In *5 years*, your screen prediction may be true (it’s not as if Nokia can’t deliver in that department when it wants to). Or it may be something different altogether. Not sure of the distinction really is all that significant.
One should remember that Nokia is still globally biggest by volume by far, is profitable, and has money in the bank from having been the world leader for so long. So there *is* room to maneuver, financially. As I see it, there are essentially two problems:
1) The developer mindshare issue
2) The additional back-end — non-phone — infrastructure issue where Google is strong
It’s kind of appalling how quickly the ground can shift in this kind of an industry when pieces just fall together right for someone to put them together. But I guess that’s life in business…
And oh yeah, I still feel like the touchscreen fad will fade. Having a proper keyboard or at least a set of keys to operate by touch you learn as a kind of reflex will still be around years from now, I’ll be willing to bet on that.
wow, is nokia had really bad management? that’s too bad..
so much disinformation here.
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