Communities Dominate Brands: Why Nokia OS Strategy is Right for Nokia, and shift to Android or Phone 7 would be madness (now)
Communities Dominate Brands: Why Nokia OS Strategy is Right for Nokia, and shift to Android or Phone 7 would be madness (now):
(blog by Tomi T Ahonen, former Nokia executive)
Written just before the Feb 11 announcement. Explaining why Nokia would be crazy to do what they actually did. Ironic but a lot of good reasoning)
"Symbian is not as good as Android or iOS. I am not claiming that. But the gap between them is closing. And here is the critical part that you have to remember, Symbian in Nokia's strategy is not the weapon to fight Android (or iPhone). It is the weapon to fight for the low end phones, migrating Nokia featurephones and cheap dumbphones to low-cost smartphones! That is the clearly stated strategy for many years now. Clearly stated strategy. Nokia is not positioning Symbian against top phones, for that it has MeeGo.
But is Symbian viable for the low cost market? Remember, Nokia has to migrate its customers using non-smartphones to smartphones. Their average price was 43 Euros (about 65 dollars)! How many people bought such a phone with a Nokia brand in 2010? Try 360 million! Yes, one million non-smartphone basic phones were sold every single day of last year, with a Nokia badge. That is more than all smartphones sold by all smartphone makers including Apple and RIM and HTC and Samsung and LG and Motorola and ZTE and LG and Huawei and Sharp and Kyocera and Fujitsu and Lenovo and Acer and Dell and Palm and Alcatel and Panasonic and ...
...and all smartphones made by Nokia itself!
..combined. That is how huge Nokia is. And there is Nokia's challenge. No, their mission is not to try to do a phone better than the iPhone. The real mission for Nokia is to take all those 360 million satisfied Nokia customers, who only paid on average 65 dollars for their Nokia phones - and migrate them to smartphones during this decade.
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"Imagine if, when the Apple Macintosh OS was battling Microsoft's early Windows OS, and when Windows was bigger, suddenly Microsoft would have announced, they quit? The market leader doesn't quit! Those who fall behind, are the ones who quit
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Comments
"Keyproblem No.1: NOKIA bosses in their majority are still hardware-people. But Nokia needs a software strategy - and this was never understood or executed by Ansi Vanjoki and all the other 'big finns'. (Changing the OS deos not help here at all)
The problems can only be solved if Nokia understands the dynamics of software. And this means moving faster!
Posted by: Wolfram Herzog | February 09, 2011 at 02:54 PM
"Efficiency has been a big problem with Symbian development and still is. For some reason this very basic issue hasn't been solved over the years. Basic things like slow starting debugger on emulator or device, documentation which lists only function prototypes without full explanation, installing SDK, tracing, untracable exceptions if one mistake is made with resources, resource compiler that doesn't tell you what you did wrong, USB connnectivity that works or doesn't work, strange panics just to mention few.
When things are done right then Symbian runs fine, but when they are done wrong it will result in endless debugging nightmare.
Fix the basics and make programming for your platform fun and everything else will fall into place.
Posted by: Kalle | February 09, 2011 at 02:32 PM
(blog by Tomi T Ahonen, former Nokia executive)
Written just before the Feb 11 announcement. Explaining why Nokia would be crazy to do what they actually did. Ironic but a lot of good reasoning)
"Symbian is not as good as Android or iOS. I am not claiming that. But the gap between them is closing. And here is the critical part that you have to remember, Symbian in Nokia's strategy is not the weapon to fight Android (or iPhone). It is the weapon to fight for the low end phones, migrating Nokia featurephones and cheap dumbphones to low-cost smartphones! That is the clearly stated strategy for many years now. Clearly stated strategy. Nokia is not positioning Symbian against top phones, for that it has MeeGo.
But is Symbian viable for the low cost market? Remember, Nokia has to migrate its customers using non-smartphones to smartphones. Their average price was 43 Euros (about 65 dollars)! How many people bought such a phone with a Nokia brand in 2010? Try 360 million! Yes, one million non-smartphone basic phones were sold every single day of last year, with a Nokia badge. That is more than all smartphones sold by all smartphone makers including Apple and RIM and HTC and Samsung and LG and Motorola and ZTE and LG and Huawei and Sharp and Kyocera and Fujitsu and Lenovo and Acer and Dell and Palm and Alcatel and Panasonic and ...
...and all smartphones made by Nokia itself!
..combined. That is how huge Nokia is. And there is Nokia's challenge. No, their mission is not to try to do a phone better than the iPhone. The real mission for Nokia is to take all those 360 million satisfied Nokia customers, who only paid on average 65 dollars for their Nokia phones - and migrate them to smartphones during this decade.
___________________________________________________
"Imagine if, when the Apple Macintosh OS was battling Microsoft's early Windows OS, and when Windows was bigger, suddenly Microsoft would have announced, they quit? The market leader doesn't quit! Those who fall behind, are the ones who quit
___________________________________________________
Comments
"Keyproblem No.1: NOKIA bosses in their majority are still hardware-people. But Nokia needs a software strategy - and this was never understood or executed by Ansi Vanjoki and all the other 'big finns'. (Changing the OS deos not help here at all)
The problems can only be solved if Nokia understands the dynamics of software. And this means moving faster!
Posted by: Wolfram Herzog | February 09, 2011 at 02:54 PM
"Efficiency has been a big problem with Symbian development and still is. For some reason this very basic issue hasn't been solved over the years. Basic things like slow starting debugger on emulator or device, documentation which lists only function prototypes without full explanation, installing SDK, tracing, untracable exceptions if one mistake is made with resources, resource compiler that doesn't tell you what you did wrong, USB connnectivity that works or doesn't work, strange panics just to mention few.
When things are done right then Symbian runs fine, but when they are done wrong it will result in endless debugging nightmare.
Fix the basics and make programming for your platform fun and everything else will fall into place.
Posted by: Kalle | February 09, 2011 at 02:32 PM
Comments