Viswanathan K's Thoughts

When the smartphone arrived, why did Nokia fade away? Why could it not, unlike say Samsung, shift from feature phones to smartphones? The answer is obviously complex and involves many reasons, so I’ll just focus on a few points from Jayadevan PK’s book on Xiaomi .   Nokia, he says, had two choices – switch to Android, or try and create its own OS for smartphones. To be fair, at that point, Android hadn’t succeeded, so this was not an obvious choice to make. In addition, since Nokia had its own feature phone OS named Symbian (and engineers who worked on it), there would have been push from within the company to either convert Symbian or to create a new OS of their own to compete with iOS and Android.   As Nokia’s feature phone sales collapsed, they got bought over by Microsoft. The new bosses were hoping their own smartphone OS, Windows Phone, would succeed. And they wanted to use Nokia phones as the vehicle for that OS. That decision by its new owners sunk Nokia for go...

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...

Take these examples of companies that dreamed up ideas, technologies and even prototypes but then didn’t make products of them: -          Did you know that Nokia came up with a phone with a color touchscreen set above a single button? 7 years before the iPhone ? But they never started making those phones. And now the same Nokia is being driven closer and closer to bankruptcy by the very same smartphone that they didn’t productize. Is that ironical or what? -          Nokia also came up with a tablet computer with a touchscreen in the late 90’s. Again, they didn’t make the product finally. Apple came up with the same class of products (iPad’s) years later and still dominates that market. -          Microsoft had a prototype e-reader ready way back in 1998. Bill Gates shot it down. A decade later, Amazon made the Kindle. -        ...

With all the hype around smart phones (iPhones and Blackberry’s and Android based phones), it’s easy to miss the fact that the world's most popular phone, by many miles, is the humble Nokia 1100! It has no speakerphone, no camera, no radio. It monochrome (did you even know they still make such phones?). So what does it do? This pic tells the answer: And yet, it outsells every other phone in the world. Because it sells in the populous regions of South Asia and Africa. Foreign Policy magazine said , “the Nokia 1100 will remain the telecommunications version of the AK-47 -- humanity's most rugged, efficient calling machine”. Nice analogy that! It reminded me of Nicolas Cage’s dialog in the movie, Lord of War, on AK-47’s: "Of all the weapons in the vast Soviet arsenal, nothing was more profitable than Avtomat Kalashnikova model of 1947. More commonly known as the AK-47, or Kalashnikov. It's the world's most popular assault rifle. A weapon all fighters love. An elegant...

Facebook was in the news because Goldman Sachs’ investment in it valued the company at $50 billion. That’s $50 billion for a company that makes $2 billion a year in revenues ( not profit). So why pay so much for it? One of my friends said people are willing to pay so much because they expect (hope?) Facebook will figure out a way to generate money via advertising. Or they’ll find a completely new way of making money directly or indirectly from their 500 million members. After all, who can predict the ways of the “brave new world”, my friend asked. And that’s capitalism: creating new ways to make money. Capitalism, of course, can also destroy existing ways of making money. Like when Google started offering free navigation services on its Android OS for cell phones in late 2009, Nokia had to follow suit and stop charging for its Ovi Maps (Who’d pay for Nokia’s navigation service if they could get it free from Google?). And with both Google and Nokia making navigation directions free...