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Nokia's internal presentation after iPhone was launched (2007) [pdf]

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Re: Nokia's internal presentation after iPhone was launched (2007) [pdf]

#331

Post by naming_the_user »

jorvi wrote: post #157
jillesvangurp wrote: post #93

I was there as this played out. Nokia had a lot of good software and software engineers but not the management structure to do anything good with that. Nokia was huge as an organization and parts of that organization recognized the threat early on. The problem was at the board and executive level. These people had a blind spot for software. They thought they were still in the electronics business. Lots of people with…

> The iphone was solidly in charge by then Nit: the iPhone was only "in charge" for a brief year or two, and then Android ate its lunch in terms of marketshare. What is very interesting is that Apple has displayed twice over ( MacBooks and iPhones) that a minority marketshare can capture the vast majority of profits in that market. OEMs like HTC and LG made a few bucks profit off of any phone, sometimes even losing m…

This is pretty much just describing the bimodal nature of most markets.

Extracting $100 in surplus profit from someone who's not on the poverty line is easier than extracting $10 from someone who is.

Re: Nokia's internal presentation after iPhone was launched (2007) [pdf]

#332

Post by jandrese »

cs702 wrote: post #59

2007. The presentation reads like an eerily accurate crystal-ball prediction of what actually happened in subsequent years. Evidently, Nokia executives knew well in advance what the iPhone could do to their company. Evidently, they knew they needed to do "something" to avoid an implosion of their mobile-phone business. Evidently, despite their prescience and best efforts, they were unable to avoid disaster. It's as i…

Classic big company problems.

"If we built a product like this it will cannibalize some of our existing and profitable divisions, and those existing divisions have a lot more clout internally than we do. The CEO worked his way up from those divisions. We can't make this."

Then someone else makes that product and eats your lunch anyway.

Re: Nokia's internal presentation after iPhone was launched (2007) [pdf]

#333

Post by unyttigfjelltol »

ndiddy wrote: post #217
smitty1110 wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked with an ex-Kodak guy, and he related the following story to me from the 80’s or early 90’s. Xerox was kicking their ass, they were completely owning the copier market. But it was a natural fit for Kodak, they knew imaging better than everybody, why couldn’t they get into this market? This guy was on a crack team of engineers a VP assembled to create a competing product. 9 months later, they demo a fully digi…

The problem was that Kodak essentially was a film chemical production company pretending to be an imaging company. The switch to digital meant they could no longer get the fat recurring profits from selling film that they were used to. Kodak's value peaked at $31 billion in 1996 ($58 billion in 2025 dollars) while the total value of the digital camera industry today is around $8 billion ( https://www.researchandmarke…

Digital was disaster so the plan after 1996 was delay and deny. The question is: did it do enough extra business in those transitional years to make up for going bankrupt in 2012? And was it better ultimately for shareholders?

Re: Nokia's internal presentation after iPhone was launched (2007) [pdf]

#334

Post by lotsofpulp »

openrisk wrote: post #200
wbl wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the national champions model is the problem. If Apple failed the US still has Android and potentially many other startups. Europe just doesn't have the risk capital or ecosystem.

Yes, but now it doesn't even have national champions. The last one standing with some pretense at being still with the times is probably ASML. One wonders whether at any point anybody will ask any tough questions about where Europe is heading as far as technology goes.

I would put Novo Nordisk up there too. Not sure how Eli Lilly is doing so much better though, which I presume for both is due to advancing GLP-1s, but I thought Novo was first to market.

Re: Nokia's internal presentation after iPhone was launched (2007) [pdf]

#336

Post by rawgabbit »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #93

I was there as this played out. Nokia had a lot of good software and software engineers but not the management structure to do anything good with that. Nokia was huge as an organization and parts of that organization recognized the threat early on. The problem was at the board and executive level. These people had a blind spot for software. They thought they were still in the electronics business. Lots of people with…

The presentation is evidence itself that Nokia was bureaucratic and unlikely to stay competitive.

The PPT was supposedly about the iPhone but the (well put together) slides for that don't start until page 14. Credit was given to Timo Partanen, along with contributions from Scott Cooper, Gordon Murray-Smith and Sanna Puha.

Pages 3 through 11 were market analysis. Boring and irrelevant. The only message that should have been given is that iPhone will disrupt the market and Nokia desperately needs to create a competitive "cool" product. The presentation said several times the iPhone was "cool" because of its UI and touch interface versus "buttons". But I think they missed the point. The iPhone was a new category i.e. it was more of a computer than a phone with some computing abilities.

The "recommended" actions slide is on page 12 & 13. I assume this was created by Peter Bryer as his name was listed on top of the first page. It lists 10 recommendations along with sub recommendations. For a large bureaucratic company, good luck getting one recommendation executed. Besides, all ten recommendations missed the point. This was the automobile replacing the horse and buggy. Nokia wanted to tweak their way through. They eventually tried to partner with a "software" company in Microsoft; but Microsoft at that time was the geriatric helping the geriatric. I would argue Nokia would have given themselves a better chance of success by creating a "skunk works". Assemble their best engineers and designers into one team and free from interference from all the internal politics. Their goal would be to create a POC that could rival the iPhone's "cool factor". And do it in 6 months.

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