Rescuing Nokia. A must read.
 

This is a must read article for all Nokia fans. It highlights the reason behind all the frustrations we continue to suffer. Just read the excerpt below. A bone chiller !


____________________________________

Changing small details wasn’t easy either, and Risku cites an example.

“I have an E71 business phone, and I noticed that when the phone was locked it popped up a dialog that obscured the notifications. I asked, ‘Can you make it 5mm smaller, please?’. They investigated the code in the phone and said ‘We can’t find the piece of code that could shift it up 5mm.’ They said, ‘There’s 20 million lines of code in the phone – it’s impossible.’”



http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/07...nifesto_risku/

Re: Rescuing Nokia. A must read.
 

What? This certainly explains those unusable fashion series candybars.

Put this guy in charge of Nokia Oyj already!
ps: I'm sure he didn't mean to downsize Nokia's product range down to a single digit like Apple's; he just wrote that extreme comparison to illustrate a point. There should be clear selling points and differentiating factors for each product.. eliminate the overlapping similarities.

Re: Rescuing Nokia. A must read.
 

Some people at the top are the biggest failures ever. And that problem you don't just see with Nokia.
Plenty of other companies, like Sony for example.
What on earth was the new CEO thinking to shutdown the entire robotics department just like that?
But also if you look at government and world leaders. All the exact same story.
FAIL FAIL FAIL!

Re: Rescuing Nokia. A must read.
 

Lot there to agree, but he's way too finn-centric and shifting too much blame to Nokia's foreign divisions. Altough I agree to his criticism about the London unit. It should be taken behind the barn and shot. As soon as possible!

Oh and this bit wins the Craziest thing on interweb this week - award: "Board member Esko Aho should get a higher profile and a new role in investor relations." Esko Aho is a former prime minister and current has been, that leeches off from his political clout. He shouldn't be given any serious task at all. Remove him completly or at most let him continue to be the useless guy at the board meetings.

Re: Rescuing Nokia. A must read.
 

Not always the case though. Eric Schmidt CEO of google wrote Unix lex parser for example. Problem with firms like Nokia is that they have execs who have no hands on experience of tech or industrial design. Just look at what Moto CEO Sanjay has acheived in a short while.

Why did Nokia entrust design and marketing to a fake tech/design/marketing/business/fashion city like London. You go to London to learn English and pay high taxes. Cool Britannia is nonsense and the place is full of incompetent posers. Only the financial bit is ok. OPK has been asleep indeed.

Re: Rescuing Nokia. A must read.
 

Sh*t rises to the top as often as cream.

Re: Rescuing Nokia. A must read.
 

That was a good kick where it was needed. I am just wondering if the recipient felt anything ?

Re: Rescuing Nokia. A must read.
 

Risku has valid points but it is pretty obivous he isn't showing all his cards....

Re: Rescuing Nokia. A must read.
 

Not sure what you've been eating....but mine usually sinks to the bottom.

Re: Rescuing Nokia. A must read.
 

wow anyone has the email of this guy ?

i would love to send him a paper on nokia issues and solutions

first problem nokia has

brand dissolution, nokia brand is a mess

if you are a onwer of a symbian product you will understand better this issue, for example

you have

nokia messaging (now is email and IM)

ovi contacts (im)

ovi mail (mail)

instead of

ovi mail ovi contacts (with social networks)

so you have nokia brand ovi brand overlapping soon we will see OVI phone

my take on this, kill ovi brand (not the services) rename everything to NOKIA and be consistent

divide develop teams to functions and keep them connected to the end users (we know what we want and they have free feedback and ideas)

email a developer team

im and social network a developer team

maps a developer team

calendar developer team

and all core apps a phone should have

make a difference in your phone series (i thinks this is being fixed)

N series the ultimate smart phone

the nseries should be top 4 phones per year a camera phone a music phone a good all around and a no compromise phone (all the best features of the other Nseries phones)

C series a well rounded smart phone

dumb down versions of those nseries for example the camera phone if the nseries have a 12mp flash xenon with all bell and whistles the cseries should be max 8mp if the music phone has 64gb internal memory with dedicated sound dsp with bundled bose (nokia branded) ear phones the c series should be a 16gb with some nice ear phones and so on

E series work class smart phone

email office and IM warrior phones you should be able to do everything you do in your office in your phone on the move that means amazing battery time and amazing connectivity and means to other devices to connect via the phone.

X series fashion phones

design over hardware

and the rest of the phones is a whatever letter they want

s40 cheapo phones

the OVI store (by my idea it should be renamed to Nokia Store) for gods sake who was the ****** that thought a web site was ok for the N900 ? it should be a Qt app for all the phones and a .exe for the pc like the istore

the repositories should be added to the Nokia store (or make the nokia store something like the repo)

they need to loose weight and be more agile they are too big and clumsy right now.

they havent found a nice competitor to the BB messenger and istore, nokia attempts are lame at best so with smaller units focusing on core apps they will make better apps



they need innovation and agility right now

Re: Rescuing Nokia. A must read.
 

Don't agree here. There's a really good reason to keep the brands separate. Ovi services could be integrated with interesting products from many different industries, and doing that plus selling phones with one brand would be awkward.

It's yet another WTF why Nokia hasn't been doing this already, of course, but maybe we shouldn't be surprised.

Re: Rescuing Nokia. A must read.
 

Wow, it sounds like an avalanche is headed for Espoo. What a debacle!! That surely explains quite a bit about what has and HAS NOT been going on. Well, I'll just continue that American "arrogance and aggression" by suggesting they call a board meeting to some of those that need to go and just throw a hand grenade and get it over with... Risku needs to be there to help with the clean up. They are f*^ked up from the ground up....

Re: Rescuing Nokia. A must read.
 

Vegetarian diets sink, meat-eating diets float. It would appear that a voracious appetite of eating other peoples' money falls under vegetarian.

Agreed, entirely. I also don't understand his snipes at Americans. Truth be told, "arrogance" is precisely what we're getting out of this Finnish company--so... huh? Aggression would probably help here, though. They need to start crufting out the carcinogenic members of this company. I entirely agree with his idea to remove MUCH of the upper and middle command structure and concentrate on a design and engineering culture. They already have a lot of engineers (mind you, they're not being listened to) but they need to HIRE a lot more designers to work along with them in lieu of the useless and pathetic members of the executive and management tiers. They also need to increase their army of support personnel and empower them with a better ability to assist customers and management needs to help them make things happen for those customers.

But what do I know? I'm just one of those "customer" people. :rolleyes:

Re: Rescuing Nokia. A must read.
 

There's arrogance from all directions here, just over different turfs.

Re: Rescuing Nokia. A must read.
 

That's precisely what I'm getting at. I'm not sure I understood why he even mentions Americans to start with, much less get all nationalistic and paint them arrogance and aggressive. Nokia just needs some smart and creative leadership. If I wanted to fight nationalism with nationalism I would have claimed that it's clear that Finns are aloof and hate their customers, looking at Nokia. That's also clearly a wide brush that you HAVE to know to be untrue.

Re: Rescuing Nokia. A must read.
 

im not sure where the 'arrogance and aggression' quote was pulled, but, it does shed some light on WHY Nokia doesn't care about the USA market... they simply wont be bothered by low-brow Americans... owned!

Re: Rescuing Nokia. A must read.
 

@Nokia: burn motafuka! burn!

Re: Rescuing Nokia. A must read.
 

Sadly, I have to hesitantly agree with your sentiment (although I really don't agree with your choice of words). If Nokia intends to practice anti-Americanism as one of their business motives, then I for one I would hope that they whither away for their nationalistic attitudes. Mind you--these weren't Nokia's words.. but that is the attitude this reporter seemed to pick up on.

Re: Rescuing Nokia. A must read.
 

Gee, Bourdain, I would call that emphasis without content.

Re: Rescuing Nokia. A must read.
 

This OPK dude had been playing golf in his free time http://www.nokia.com/about-nokia/cor...ekka-kallasvuo

Re: Rescuing Nokia. A must read.
 

Yeah, seriously who needs competition and variety. I hopes they debates to the forevers.

Dude, right on, four stars and an up arrow. America is fo-shizzle! I'm up for whatever future Steve Jobs lets me have. Who's with me!

Re: Rescuing Nokia. A must read.
 

The article point out exactly the same cause pulling IBM from industrial giant to a corporation desperately seeking partnerships to survive.

I were in the IBM during 80's. They've good technologies, but few could actually get out of the secured rooms. For one they've visual development tools inhouse while the rest of the world is still using text editors. Later the Visualage initiative collaborate with Microsoft's Visual Basic to build a RAD paradigm. Then we asked, WTF, we had everything we need inhouse, why in the hell we need to collaborate with something with relatively inferior technologies?

The catch was that the top management didn't even know what's in IBM, and believed that other companies were doing better than us. They focused on market segments, and pushing PS2-386 even though 486 are out and became majority, because they thought "statistics show the major market is using 386". PC manufacturers like DELL should really thank them for giving them chances to grow and hit mainstream.

The downfall of IBM is a well known story, but executives in Nokia fail to learn from it.

Re: Rescuing Nokia. A must read.
 

Hmm...

IBM Market cap: $161.82B
Dell Market cap: $26.44B

Haha. I get your point though. It'll be interesting to see how Nokia fares through all of this. There are many companies who would be good examples of Nokia. It's a problem systemic to industry leaders. They get too big too successful and become fat, lazy and arrogant. You say IBM, I say Sun Microsystems, there are many many others. Let's hope Nokia figure out sooner rather than later.

Re: Rescuing Nokia. A must read.
 

I think they've already figure it out when the stock price drop from 40 to 9 within 2 years. So much for concentrating on marketing instead of technologies. Someone sends them some Dilbert comics strips. XD

Re: Rescuing Nokia. A must read.
 

Agreed.

Cut the trolling, Bourdain.

Re: Rescuing Nokia. A must read.
 

I'm not so convinced. To me they're a little bloated right now. S60, S^3, S^4, Maemo, Harmattan, MeeGo all at the same time? A company that has been backed into a corner cuts the fat and focuses. If anything I see them trying to do more, so no I don't think they've figured it out.

Re: Rescuing Nokia. A must read.
 

They simply have too many different models of phones. They spend too much time trying to think of what to cripple in which phone to differentiate from another.

They take 1 step forward and 2 steps back:

• E70 has about 20MB of free RAM (crippled by lack of RAM)
• E71 has about 70MB of free RAM (they seemed to have learnt a lesson)
• E72 has about 43MB of free RAM (WTF!!!???!!!)

• E61 has a nice range of characters that can be entered directly from keyboard
• E62 has an even bigger range (almost uses all the available keys)
• E63 drastically REDUCES the range of characters that can be directly entered from the keyboard (WTF, trying to reduce costs by skimping on paint !!!???!!!)

Re: Rescuing Nokia. A must read.
 

Could this be the beggining of the end of Nokia... i think they have gone the wrong track now for some time and unless they make dramatic changes then for sure they are on the way out.

As for the Yanks.... no comment but agree with the sarcasm here 100%.

Re: Rescuing Nokia. A must read.
 

This nutty dude in the article doesn't like americans, thinks that Nokia hires too many americans, is disgusted that Nokia is looking for american CEO, and you take that as evidence of Nokia's anti-americanism? Wow. Nice logic there.

Re: Rescuing Nokia. A must read.
 

You're probably right. I'm attributing that quote's attitude to Nokia when, really, it's from Juhani Risku and his opinions alone. On looking back over it, I don't see anything pointing out that anti-Americanism is coming from Nokia itself.

Re: Rescuing Nokia. A must read.
 

Nokia had the 66XX series phones and that time those devices were just a mere dream in the USA market. Nokia kept advancing and until Nokia N95 8GB I was really happy with their inventions! In my opinion Nokia made the biggest mistake "holding an iphone" in their hands. Because they somehow tought they had to produce a device to fight the iphone.
I do not want to get into the details which phone beats what! But the first iphone was 10 years behind Nokia symbian phones. 6680 (produced 2005) had BT transfer and front camera.. multitasking etc..etc.....
iphone (2007) didn't have anything that even worth looking(touch interface is not something interesting for me)
so Nokia somehow!?!? thought they had to produce a device to be some variant and alternative to iphone!
this was the BIGGEST mistake of the NOKIA!
because they had a very steady incline and ideas.. They were only advancing, sometimes HUGE advances in tech.. sometimes small but they were advancing in the way which they standed!
With the panic of iphone, nokia started to develop V5 and that time they have lost all my belief and support!
don't get me wrong I still use Nokia and if nokia finishes I will simply stop using cellphones but I will most likely NEVER purchase an apple device. Because I dislike apple.
Nokia intruduced touchscreen phones years ago, I have personally bought and used them, but I really never cared about that touch interface. I am not saying it is useless.. I just think it is not so important.
The most important thing is the RAM! CPU!
anyhow they have somehow come to today!
I, for so long felt very bad.. My favorite company! The inventors of the MOBILE WORLD for me was really about to vanish!
Today I wish they suffer from the mistakes they made.
If I was in any power of the Nokia! I would FIRE every single person who helped in the production of the N97. That device is a JOKE!
I think it will take good 10 years for Nokia to get back on it's feet! "IF" it will ever get back!

Re: Rescuing Nokia. A must read.
 

The big change in the industry is that Apple was able to figure out how to make a compelling device that isn't about checkboxes per se, at least not just in the device. Yes, features are important but it is not as important as usability and a strong third-party ecosystem. I'm not an Apple historian, but when the iPhone released it was for posers who wanted to be cool. When the App Store blew up and third-parties flocked to build aps for the iPhone it became more than something just cool to have. If you could count an app as another checkbox, how many more does Apple have versus Google or even Nokia.

The MOST? Maturity in any industry means that people move away from specs. Do people really care what CPU is in their netbook? No because most just want to do word documents, watch a few videos and surf the web. The PC market evolved / matured to the point where its about being productive and useful rather than whether or not you have the right CPU. The same thing is happening to smartphones.

A joke? See even you see it and you don't want to give Apple credit for making a great device. The N97 has more features than most iPhones but it sucks because its not about checkboxes.

Nokia doesn't have 10 years to get it right. If they can lean out their portfolio by 1/3 I think they will do ok. I hope they see that they can still maintain healthy numbers without the deluge of different models and eventually reduce their current portfolio by 1/2 and even then they will still make more models of phones than just about anyone else.

Re: Rescuing Nokia. A must read.
 

“I have an E71 business phone, and I noticed that when the phone was locked it popped up a dialog that obscured the notifications. I asked, ‘Can you make it 5mm smaller, please?’. They investigated the code in the phone and said ‘We can’t find the piece of code that could shift it up 5mm.’ They said, ‘There’s 20 million lines of code in the phone – it’s impossible.’”

To me this quote is a perfect example of why they're in shambles. Sounds like they are even lacking basic systems to control their software products.
Let's just hope that Meego brings some hope back. I'm sure Intel wouldn't put up with such sloppy programming that you couldn't even find some of your own code.

Re: Rescuing Nokia. A must read.
 

Yes, Symbian is pretty awful. Aren't you glad Nokia is moving away from it?

Re: Rescuing Nokia. A must read.
 

TBH every project sooner or later grows to the point where there are parts covered with cobweb, parts written by dudes who are now retirees, worked on by 20 people with 20 different goals, and simply put, hard to manage. Seriously, no silver bullet there (the Linux kernel suffers from this too). The difference between good and bad projects is how quick they get to the unmanageable state and whether they know when it's really time to innovate (and how). Symbian (especially if you count the Psion/EPOC part) is by far the oldest of the current lot and has had thus the most time to accumulate cruft (and boy it did). But all this is old news, (even ;) ) Nokia figured it out when they did the whole Symbian foundation reform thingie a little while back.

Re: Rescuing Nokia. A must read.
 

Actually if you look at their S^3 and S^4 investment I think they're doubling down on Symbian rather than moving away. I agree with you though. I see no benefit to having two smartphone OSes. MeeGo for all smartphones and S40/S60 for everything else. The N8 is nice but I think it would be better if it was MeeGo.

Re: Rescuing Nokia. A must read.
 

Sounds like Nokia is experiencing the same problem as other larger companies are experiencing from time to time. At a certain size/age(s), the leading positions eventually gets filled up by persons that are good at maneuvering and climbing within corporate structures, mistakenly taken for good leadership and initiative. Nokia is rotting from the inside in other word, filled up by bureaucrats and dilettants essentially. This cannot be fixed without a change in the top management.

What he meant by no Americans and no foreigners has nothing to do with nationalism. Nokia is a Finish company, and the culture is Finish. They need someone that understands this culture and does things the Finish way. Foreign leaders will always try to bring their culture with them, and this leads to tons of unnecessary tension and wasted energy and no results.

Re: Rescuing Nokia. A must read.
 

Had that been the attitude in the article, it would have come across as reasonable and less nationalistic, but that wasn't quite the way he put it.

Re: Rescuing Nokia. A must read.
 

I see you haven't learned a lot from the last thread.... You should really take a good look at who you're "siding" with on some of this stuff. A lot can be said by the type of people you hang out with (and thank/agree with).

Being critical or even a little negative is totally fine. But there are lines between being critical and just being an ***, or calling for violence. When you're willing to cross those lines, for no real tangible reason other then to satisfy your own sense of self esteem, you become one of them... just like garyc.

Nobody grows up saying "I'm going to be a tarded jack hole on the internet one day!" But it happens. Don't be one of them... (I'm talking to more that just Prada and Danramos here.)

Have a nice weekend. :)

Re: Rescuing Nokia. A must read.
 

WHOA! Dammit, man! I actually DID say that growing up! ;) heh

BUT! To make it clear, agreeing with sentiments isn't the same as agreeing with their tact or level of civility. Additionally, I cleared up my position on Nokia itself. I was wrong to attribute the nationalistic attitude to them, so I retract my statement of agreement with Prada on that one (assuming Prada is still saying that).