My experience with Nokia is: great hardware and absolutely awful software. How to rescue Nokia? Continue making great hardware and switch to Android on all phones, before everyone else does.
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Rescuing Nokia? A former exec has a radical plan
31–40 of 55 posts
Re: Rescuing Nokia? A former exec has a radical plan
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly. I've been looking at the new phones coming out and I think that a Nokia Android phone would kick everything else, including the iPhone4, out of the water.
I don't know if they'd ever be as beautiful as an iPhone, but on the other hand, they'd likely be able to make phone calls even if you did things like hold them in your hand. And, joking aside, I have a suspicion that Nokia does more in terms of design and testing to ensure that dropping the phone isn't going to wreck it. Probably more so on the lower end phones that are likely to be owned by teenagers, but my wife a…
I love the durability of Nokia phones. They're tools rather than some kind of precious object.
Re: Rescuing Nokia? A former exec has a radical plan
#33My experience with Nokia is: great hardware and absolutely awful software. How to rescue Nokia? Continue making great hardware and switch to Android on all phones, before everyone else does.
I assume that recent nokia's phones are great mainly because they cannot run any other mobile OS than Symbian EKA2 (main reason being that EKA2 is hard-realtime microkernel with GSM/UMTS stack in userspace, while any other OS expects anything related to radio interface or telco protocols running on second separate CPU).
And I assume that this is major reason, why Nokia can pump out reasonable smartphones with size and battery life of dumb feature phone with price certainly bellow other smartphones. (Well I have E90, which certainly is not small or was not cheap, but battery life is unsurpassed by anything, except 10 year old high-end Nokia phones).
Re: Rescuing Nokia? A former exec has a radical plan
#34I (and also a lot of people) think they ought to ship Android phones, How bad could be for them that option? my limited vision says it is an excellent choice.
Shipping Android isn't an option for Nokia. They will be late to the party to the tune of two years. It's not a politics thing - they have a huge market and mindshare in smartphones. Actively commoditizing smartphones on the Android platform would be suicide.
If you like Macs you don't get a new computer, you get a new Mac. If you like Windows/Linux, you just get a new computer. It might be a Dell, a HP or a ThinkPad, you might have a preference, but in the end the specs matter much more than the brand.
If Nokia starts shipping Androids, they'll likely be the ThinkPads of smartphones. Rock-solid, reliable, great hardware, all boxes ticked, something of a following, but if you're in a pinch, there's an HTC that does the same for $100 less.
The only option for Nokia is figuring out how they can pivot their current smartphone market leadership into a niche that can compete with Android, the iPhone and BlackBerry.
I don't have the recipe, but it's going to require some very clear and bold leadership, that's for sure. Also, shipping three or four competing platforms isn't part of the solution, either (Symbian S60, Symbian 3rd gen, Maemo and MeeGo).
Re: Rescuing Nokia? A former exec has a radical plan
#35From the article. "Essentially, Nokia has forgotten how to bring innovative products to market. This is despite a rich R&D base, which has pioneered many of the innovations competitors now feature. Instead, a risk-averse bureaucracy has grown up that stifles innovation – it makes progress slow or non-existent." An old and familiar story. "his diagnosis may be familiar, but the proposals quite radical. ... a bloodbath…
This seems to be a good heuristic , find out the ratio of the doers versus middle-managers , the higher this number is the better it is.
One other company that exhibits this nimbleness ala Apple despite its size is Goldman Sachs. From personal experience , among other things , GS gets this ratio right where it counts.
Re: Rescuing Nokia? A former exec has a radical plan
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
Shipping Android phones would be probably a smart move for Nokia but I don't think the company wants to be bound to Google that much. Instead of insisting on Symbian, they should have worked on developing a proper Linux-based OS. Maybe is not relevant, but Linus Torvalds is Finnish and the country, even if rather small, has the brain power to do that. Maybe now is too late and probably the Android move would be the s…
Nokia has shipped mobile Linux devices(770, N800, N810) long before no one even imagined Android. With touchscreens and all.
device, yes.
I want a cellphone that's also a computer. I don't need a small computer, I don't care that it has a touch screen.
If they'd launched the 770 with a cellphone+3G modem (or GPRS at least, don't remember when it was launched), Android might not have existed today. They really dropped the ball there.
Re: Rescuing Nokia? A former exec has a radical plan
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know if they'd ever be as beautiful as an iPhone, but on the other hand, they'd likely be able to make phone calls even if you did things like hold them in your hand. And, joking aside, I have a suspicion that Nokia does more in terms of design and testing to ensure that dropping the phone isn't going to wreck it. Probably more so on the lower end phones that are likely to be owned by teenagers, but my wife a…
I love the durability of Nokia phones. They're tools rather than some kind of precious object.
Their low-end consumer phones, maybe. In my experience their smartphones have been as poorly-built as everybody else's. My Nokia smartphones were the only phones I've owned that didn't still look good after two years, with discoloured plastic and loose parts.
Re: Rescuing Nokia? A former exec has a radical plan
#38From the article. "Essentially, Nokia has forgotten how to bring innovative products to market. This is despite a rich R&D base, which has pioneered many of the innovations competitors now feature. Instead, a risk-averse bureaucracy has grown up that stifles innovation – it makes progress slow or non-existent." An old and familiar story. "his diagnosis may be familiar, but the proposals quite radical. ... a bloodbath…
This seems to be a good heuristic , find out the ratio of the doers versus middle-managers , the higher this number is the better it is. One other company that exhibits this nimbleness ala Apple despite its size is Goldman Sachs. From personal experience , among other things , GS gets this ratio right where it counts.
How about various militaries?
Re: Rescuing Nokia? A former exec has a radical plan
#39My experience with Nokia is: great hardware and absolutely awful software. How to rescue Nokia? Continue making great hardware and switch to Android on all phones, before everyone else does.
>My experience with Nokia is: great hardware and absolutely awful software.
I could say the same of Motorola. However, Android hasn't been a saviour for them. The Droid X has been criticised for a bad UI skin (originally called, perhaps somewhat ironically, Blur), and pre-installed bloatware that can't be removed.
Re: Rescuing Nokia? A former exec has a radical plan
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
I love the durability of Nokia phones. They're tools rather than some kind of precious object.
Their low-end consumer phones, maybe. In my experience their smartphones have been as poorly-built as everybody else's. My Nokia smartphones were the only phones I've owned that didn't still look good after two years, with discoloured plastic and loose parts.
I've been working at a large Finnish company for a year or so, and there's a lot of people with creaky old E90's. Discoloured and floppy, but they still work great.
I think it is part of the deal with moving-chassis phones (hinges and slides) - it's very hard to make them durable and still light.