smime

Interesting question posed by Michael Platzer, who I admire for being one of the sharpest minds I’ve ever met and envy for now working as data analyst for Nokia (damn, that must be interesting, challenging and fun, but afterall there are so many interesting, challenging and fun things to do on earth).

After I read the question yesterday, I had to come up with my answers, which are different from Michael’s take:

1. Accept that you can only loose and act accordingly. I think Nokia has the same issue as all big players in a market, after a certain point you can only loose, because others will be more agile, more flexible and bolder, because there is nothing to loose for them. Once companies accept that fact and act accordingly, things get easier again.
2. Get back on track and try to (once again) find the dominant design for the future mobile device (or OS). Nokia got big because it defined the way mobile phones looked, felt and what featureset they should have. Nokia defined the first generation of the mobile phone, although they didn’t invent it, all others mimicked its exterior and interaction design. Now the dominant design of this generation is the iPhone. All other phones start to look like an iPhone, so it seems Nokia is not defining the next step, but rather following the path. That’s bad, for some years all users thought they’d rather stick with Nokia because they know how the phone works, that’s gone.
3. I agree that Nokia needs to be more agile as an organisation. However I doubt that this is something that you can enact. Organisations are like people, they grow and mature, they sometimes rethink and refocus their goals and aims, but they have a memory. Thus I guess this won’t really work.
4. Remember your core competency and use it. Every company has a body of skills that creates its competitive advantage in a broader sense, on a longer perspective. Nokia has a great history to adapt and identify future technology areas. I’d use that. Why not think about individual space travel, green technology or payment services.
5. No Services. Nokia has a bad history of doing own services. I’d probably not even integrate Third Party services (Google, etc.), openness will be the key.