Outside Innovation

How a Finnish Journalist Tried to Save Nokia

Here’s a great story about how Lauri Malkavaara, a journalist for the Helsinki Sanomat newspaper, tried to save his country’s mobile phone company. You can read Lauri’s entire article here. I’ll paraphrase and quote a few excerpts. [The emphasis is mine—highlighting the lovely way he describes the phone’s usability issues.]

On August 18, 2008, Lauri wrote a letter to Nokia providing his feedback about the design of Nokia E51 phone he had just been given to use by his employer.

Dear Nokia:

“… .Last week my second mobile phone broke and my employer bought me the third mobile phone that I have ever had in my life. I have wondered about it for a week now. At first I did not even know how to call with it without the manual, and I still do not understand very much of it.

The problem is that half a year ago a friend of mine at work showed me a device manufactured by Apple called the iPod Touch. I fell in love instantly… I ordered my own iPod touch, turned it on, and knew immediately how to use it. I have used the device now on a daily basis for over six months, and I have not even thought about any manuals…. It is no wonder that it is a huge success all over the world.

My new Nokia telephone model is called the E 51. Unfortunately the phone has not been designed so that just anybody could learn to use it easily…..”

What Are the Chances for Nokia + Microsoft’s “3rd Ecosystem” Bet?

How’s that “burning platform dive” working out for you, Stephen Elop?

After Nokia’s CEO made his controversial burning platform speech and dove into the arms of Microsoft on February 11, 2011, Nokia’s stock price dropped precipitously and is still falling, its developer and customer community rebelled, and 1,000 Nokia employees staged a walkout.

Nokia does not seem to be doing a very good job of creating a buzz around the benefits of supporting what Elop calls, “the third ecosystem,” by which he means having a Microsoft/Nokia mobile phone/application ecosystem to compete with the Google/Android ecosystem and the Apple/iPhone ecosystem.

Granted, change is hard; cultural change is very hard, and you often have to cannibalize your current offerings in order to evolve to a next generation. But Elop’s handling of this planned transition will go down in management history as one of the worst SNAFUs ever.

Nokia’s oh-so-public trashing of its existing software platforms, and, by extension, all those employees and developers who have invested in it, was badly done. When you need to make a transition to a new platform, you should do so by making it seductive and a “no brainer” for customers, developers, and partners to transition, not by telling them they are stupid!

You (our readers) were quick to pick up on this gaffe…. Among your comments, I found Aussie, Peter Horne, to have the best analysis:

"Nokia is a large and powerful Finnish company, influenced by founder stakes and is a huge employer, which means that"

"1) The company won't leave Finland"

"2) It will make local decisions (see 1)"

"3) This guy [Elop] will have to live amongst the people he is dangerously close to insulting."

"It is not unusual for x-pat U.S. execs to talk to their new companies as if they are U.S. employees, only to regret the fact that they didn't take some time to work out the Real Politik. This guy looks like an idiot to me..."

~ Peter Horne, Patty’s Pioneer

Microsoft’s Unpopular Coup

What smells the most to me is the fact that Microsoft is clearly the master puppeteer. Microsoft didn’t acquire Nokia, but they might as well have. Microsoft is buying Nokia with billions of dollars of investments in R&D because Microsoft needs to establish a beachhead against Google’s and Apple’s ecosystems. I don’t believe that this approach will work. You can’t “buy” an ecosystem. You have to grow it, organically. If you build it, they (customers and developers) won’t necessarily come, even with bribes.

Nokia's Burning Platform: Which Ecosystem will be Best for Nokia's Customers?

On February 8, Endgadget published a memo that was sent from Nokia’s CEO, Stephen Elop to all of Nokia’s employees. In this “Burning Platform” memo, Elop sets the stage for the announcement he’ll be making on February 11th, 2011, about Nokia’s shift in strategy. I believe that Nokia will jump into the arms of Microsoft (Elop’s most recent former employer) and that this was probably in the wind when he was recruited from Microsoft’s Office division to become Nokia’s president and CEO in September 2010.

Microsoft badly needs a strong mobile device partner to make Windows Phone 7 viable. Since October 2010, Windows Phone 7 has been available on phones from Dell, HTC, LG, and Samsung from 60 carriers in 30 countries. But all of these phone providers also support Google’s Android OS. It may be that Nokia will espouse the Microsoft OS and eschew Google’s Android. Nokia may well walk away from its own software technology to become a Microsoft-only phone supplier. In order to do something this radical, Elop has to convince his Nokia employees to throw away their own intellectual property and to follow his lead into Microsoft’s arms. Hence his already famous “Burning Platform” memo.

What interests me about this move by Nokia is not just the likely Microsoft/Nokia alliance, but the assumption that Elop makes that, in order to be successful in mobile phones, you have to be part of a winning ecosystem.

IT Musical Chairs

High tech musical chairs seem more and more irrelevant to me. So Intel is buying McAfee in order to provide firmware security between our mobile devices and the data that sits in the data centers within the clouds we access using our mobile devices. Intel is aligning with both Nokia and Google Android to gain a foothold in the smartphone market. HP and Dell are squabbling over who will pay more for 3Par (a data storage company), while both firms teeter on the brink of irrelevancy. (Google doesn't buy servers from Dell or HP, they build their own.) Nobody really cares what Microsoft does anymore. But every time Google or Apple sneezes, we all notice. In the information technology field, Google and Apple are now the center of the universe. Everything they do matters. Every other company is either aligned with one or both of them or competing with one or both of them. Those who are aligned (Intel+Google) will benefit, at least temporarily. They may get cannibalized over time. Those who are competing (Microsoft vs. Google, Microsoft vs. Apple, Oracle vs. Google, Adobe vs. Apple, etc.) are doomed. We've seen this cycle before. Once upon a time (maybe before you were born), IBM was the center of the IT universe. Later, it was Microsoft. Then Google. Now Apple. Who’s next?

Nokia’s Design by Community Phone

Scott Jordan sent me a link to Nokia’s “Design a Concept Phone by Community” site. I’ve been following the traffic and the dialog for a couple of weeks. What Nokia is doing is offering a series of interactive design polls about different aspects of a new concept mobile phone. Here’s this week’s:

Each week you get to “vote” by moving sliders on a different aspect of the phone design:

• Display and User Interface

• Size and shape

• Materials

• Operating System

• Connectivity

• Camera

• Enhancements