Nokia Saw it Coming

With the collapse of Nokia, it’s easy to imagine that they just missed spotting a trend tidal wave of the future (smartphones for non-corporate users). And to also feel sympathetic since, after all, things are obvious only with hindsight.

Except that isn’t how things happened, as per this Finnish journalist, Lauri Malkavaara. He wrote a letter to Nokia about how Nokia’s ease of use had deteriorated. He pointed out that his first two Nokia’s from 1996 and 2001 were easy to use (“To call, press the green handset symbol, and to hang up, press the red one.”) but the E 51 he got in 2008 was impossibly difficult:
“At first I did not even know how to make calls without consulting the manual, and I still understand very little of it.”

What had happened? The one word answer: iPod. It had changed expectations of usability!
“I ordered my own iPod touch, turned it on, and knew immediately how to use it. I have been using the device on a daily basis for over six months now, without giving any thought to the manuals. The logic of the device opens up right away.”

Having used (and loved) the iPod, here’s what Malkavaara felt about the E 51:
“All kinds of amazing functions are promoted on the display, but since I do not understand what the names mean, my guess is that I will never use them.”
Worse, even for something as frequent as SMS’ing, the E 51 would ask you to select from 4 options (text message, multimedia message, audio message, or e-mail). Every time you tried to send a message! Long story short: the iPod was the new gold standard when it came to ease of use.

You must be thinking: Ok, some guy sent a letter to Nokia. Nobody high up must have read it. Wrong. A high level manager came to Malkavaara’s home and apologized “on behalf of Nokia for producing a bad telephone for you.” He said Nokia already had a top secret project to redo the phone OS going on and that would solve all such problems. Except that the project (Meego) made slow progress and was shelved eventually.

When the iPhone was launched in 2007, top Nokia executives looked at it very closely and even ordered some for themselves to check out. One of them took it home where his 4 year old daughter learned to use it immediately. At bedtime she then came and asked:
“Can I take that magic telephone and put it under my pillow tonight?”
That’s when Nokia knew they were in deep trouble: even kids loved the smartphone. But Nokia just couldn’t do anything to prevent what happened next.

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